Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain suffered the first resignation from his cabinet on Friday when the transport secretary, Louise Haigh, quit hours after it emerged that she had been convicted of a fraud offense involving a phone a decade ago.
The departure is a blow to Mr. Starmer, who has been buffeted by a series of setbacks since Labour won the election in July, but the speed with which Ms. Haigh resigned suggests Downing Street is hoping to minimize the political fallout.
As transport secretary, Ms. Haigh had overseen one of Labour’s flagship policies of bringing Britain’s troubled private rail network back into public ownership, through legislation which recently completed its passage through Parliament.
Her resignation was triggered by reports from Sky News and The Times of London on Thursday night that revealed she had pleaded guilty to an offense in 2013. At the time she was 24 and working for Aviva, an insurance firm, when she was mugged in London.
In her letter of resignation Ms. Haigh said “the experience was terrifying,” and said, “in the immediate aftermath, I reported the incident to the police. I gave the police a list of my possessions that I believed had been stolen, including my work phone.”
She added: “Some time later, I discovered that the handset in question was still in my house. I should have immediately informed my employer and not doing so straight away was a mistake.”
In a separate statement given to Sky News before her resignation, Ms. Haigh explained that, after her employer gave her a new phone, she discovered the missing handset was still in her home, switched it on and attracted police attention, leading to her being called in for questioning.
Ms. Haigh said that, on the advice of her lawyer, she pleaded guilty when the matter came before a magistrates’ court in 2014 and received a discharge — the “lowest possible outcome.”
Six months later she was elected to Parliament for the first time. Ms. Haigh told Mr. Starmer — a former chief prosecutor — about the case before she joined his top political team in opposition in 2020, according to British media reports. The case was not widely known by voters, however.
In her resignation letter to Mr. Starmer, Ms. Haigh, seen as being on the left of the Labour Party, said that news about the case would “inevitably be a distraction from delivering on the work of this government.”
She added: “I remain totally committed to our political project, but I now believe it will be best served by my supporting you from outside Government.” Downing Street moved swiftly to replace Ms. Haigh with a centrist lawmaker, Heidi Alexander, who had been a minister in the justice ministry.
During his time as leader of the Labour Party, Mr. Starmer has gained a reputation for ruthlessness after purging his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left lawmaker who was found to have failed to act over antisemitism in the party. While Mr. Starmer has steered Labour to the political center-ground, Ms. Haigh, who had supported Mr. Corbyn’s leadership bid in 2015, was seen as one of the surviving standard-bearers of the left.
Allies suggested that the cause of her departure — a minor conviction more than a decade ago — set a low bar for other ministers to resign in the future. They also praised Ms. Haigh, who was the youngest member of the cabinet, as an energetic and effective transport secretary.
But some in Downing Street may not be disappointed to see her step aside. Ms. Haigh was the first cabinet minister to be publicly rebuked by Mr. Starmer after she described the P&O Ferries company as a “rogue operator.”
That sparked a dispute with the firm’s parent operation DP World which threatened to boycott a government investment conference before Mr. Starmer contradicted his minister and said Ms. Haigh’s comments were “not the view of the government.”
On Friday, in response to Ms. Haigh’s departure, Mr. Starmer wrote to her saying: “I know you still have a huge contribution to make in the future.”
But the brevity of his three-sentence letter suggested that the prime minister was unwilling to invest much of his political support in trying to keep her.
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