There were some in Labour who never expected Louise Haigh to enter Keir Starmer’s cabinet. Both allies and sceptics questioned whether the soft-left 37-year-old – who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership – would make it to the top table. That she did – becoming the youngest-ever female cabinet minister – was a reflection of the esteem in which Starmer held her. Haigh was deemed to have mastered her transport brief in opposition and so made the transition to government.
But this morning she became the first cabinet minister to resign from Starmer’s six-month-old administration. The trigger was a Sky News story which revealed that Haigh was convicted of fraud by misrepresentation in 2015 after wrongly reporting that her work mobile phone was stolen in 2013.
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