FOR Labour’s left-wing critics, Louise Haigh’s departure from Government was an ideological move by the party’s right.
The ex-transport secretary, who resigned early on Friday, was viewed as one of the token “soft-left” figures in Keir Starmer’s Cabinet.
Of that sect now remains only Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.
There are suggestions that Haigh’s resignation – over an obscure offence reportedly involving her accidentally committing a very minor act of fraud, on a technicality – is politically motivated.
That theory gains purchase in the wake of a report in The Guardian which said that Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney called Haigh on Thursday night to tell her it was time to go.
To his critics, often the very people he ruthlessly purged from the Labour Party, McSweeney is the man really running No 10, with Starmer his puppet.
The Irishman, who is married to Hamilton MP Imogen Walker, masterminded Labour’s election strategy this year.
It saw them alienate many left-wing voters in the interests of pursuing marginal numbers of soft Tory voters in a campaign which decimated the Conservatives.
On the facts, as they’ve been presented thus far, Haigh’s offences seem insufficient to trigger her resignation.
In her telling, she mistakenly reported as missing a work phone after she was mugged in 2014. She pleaded guilty to fraud by misrepresentation after an investigation by her former employer Aviva.
There are suggestions that she failed to give the full details to the Government, which would mean she’d have breached trust – but Haigh’s people insist she’d been upfront about it.
Failing any further relations, it is clear to those hostile to Starmer that her ouster was a political move.
Haigh was behind one of the most identifiably “left-wing” missions of the Labour government - to renationalise railway companies.
She’d also previously had a bust-up with the PM after her outspoken criticism of P&O Ferries after the firm sacked hundreds of workers without warning in 2022.
Labour will inevitably face questions about exactly why she quit.
But the revelation of McSweeney’s involvement raises a more fundamental question: Who’s really running No 10?
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