How a convicted fraudster became Andy Burnham’s right-hand woman

Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary, was delivering a speech at Leeds City Hall on the day it became clear that someone was trying to snuff out her career. A story about her criminal record had been leaked to two news outlets. She resigned the morning after the news broke, on November 29, 2024, after just four months in the job.

If you remember the MP for Sheffield Heeley at all, it’s likely because of what emerged in the weeks that followed: Haigh had pleaded guilty to fraud by misrepresentation in 2014, a fact of which she informed Sir Keir Starmer before her appointment to the Cabinet, but that had been kept from the public. Her version of the story is that she reported her work phone as stolen after she was mugged on a night out in 2013, only to later find it in her drawer. When she switched the phone on, an alert was sent to her employer, Aviva, which referred the case to the police.

Court documents made public at the start of 2025 reveal that she admitted to having lied about the loss of her BlackBerry so that her employer would replace it with a swish iPhone. Her confidantes have said that she is mortified by the incident and greatly regrets it. “But the reality is that normal people don’t get done for fraud and will find it hard to forget,” one admits. “You can’t have someone with that sort of record as chancellor, say, because people don’t get over this kind of thing.”

How, then, has Haigh, 38, ended up as the chief adviser to PM-in-waiting Andy Burnham? Having masterminded his successful by-election campaign, she is now conducting interviews for Cabinet jobs from his temporary new London headquarters – the borrowed office of MP Christian Wakeford, who defected to Labour from the Tories in 2022.

Burnham insisted in an email sent to his MPs last week that all Cabinet appointments will be “made on merit”, and, despite her conviction, Haigh certainly seems to be in line for a plum job herself. “Whatever formal role she gets in the new government, she’ll really be Andy’s right-hand woman,” speculates one friend of hers on the backbenches.

Haigh, or “Lou”, as most people in Westminster call her, was Labour’s youngest MP when she was elected in 2015, and she is still the youngest woman ever to have been appointed to a Cabinet position, at 36. In government, she was recognisable for her striking pink-red hair, which she is said to have dyed as often as once a week as a way of relieving stress. But photos from Haigh’s early days as an MP show her with big square glasses and a shy smile, which make her look rather more bookish than the “tenacious” heavyweight her friend Olivia Blake, the MP for the neighbouring constituency of Sheffield Hallam, describes her as today.

She has, though, always been confident, says Blake, who met Haigh campaigning on doorsteps in the run-up to the 2015 election and says she immediately came across as “passionate, hardworking and ambitious for change”. She was also, from the outset, “an amazing campaigner”, adds Blake. As for the hairdo, those who know her say it’s not to be taken as her having a lack of seriousness or steel. Rather, it reflects the fact that Haigh “knows that she breaks the old image of what an MP should be”, Blake says.

When Haigh is in Sheffield, she lives in the leafy area of Norfolk Park with Lucky, her five-year-old golden lurcher-whippet cross. Her partner is the Northern Irish MP Colum Eastwood, the former leader of the SDLP, whom she met while she was shadow Northern Ireland secretary, during Keir Starmer’s time as opposition leader. She was also in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet, first as a shadow digital minister, and then as shadow policing minister. Nick Hurd, then the Tory policing minister opposite Haigh, describes her as “by far and away the best shadow minister I have dealt with in eight years”.

“She was a competent and collegiate shadow minister,” says a former Corbyn aide, who describes Haigh’s actual politics as being “not particularly on the Left but Left-of-centre”. This account is disputed by a Conservative MP who has had close dealings with her and describes Haigh as “conspicuously to the Left of other Labour politicians” and “more of a full Left-wing socialist”.

Those who know Haigh best insist that her views are rather more complicated. “She’s a weird anomaly in that she’s quite Left-wing on most things, but then on some things, like law and order, she’s as tough as a person can be,” says one ally. “You could never guess what she was thinking, but you always knew that she was honest about where she stood on a given issue. It’s a very unifying thing that she can move on both sides of the camp.”

It’s the fashion for Labour high-fliers to emphasise their working-class credentials, but Haigh has avoided making a point of her own humble roots – perhaps because, like her politics, her early life is full of contradictions. Haigh’s uncle and grandfather were both involved in trade unions, and as a young woman, she worked as a waitress at Rafters, a small restaurant in Sheffield. But she attended the private Sheffield Girls’ school as a sixth former. “There were family issues,” Haigh said in an interview with Schools Week in 2015. Her mother, with whom she lived after her parents separated, “had to take me out of school”. Asked in an interview for the school’s blog about her most memorable moments as a pupil, she replied: “Any of the several times I was hauled in to see the headteacher.”

Haigh’s grades were good enough to get her into the London School of Economics, but she dropped out and finished her degree in politics at Nottingham University, after “absolutely hating” student life in the capital. On graduating, she took a job in the office of Graham Allen, then the MP for Nottingham North, after which she went on to work for party stalwart Jon Trickett and then for Lisa Nandy, who had just joined the education select committee. She also volunteered as a special constable in Brixton and as a shop steward for Unite, before she left Parliament to work for Aviva in public policy. There she met Sam White, the insurance giant’s public policy director, who would later become a familiar face as Starmer’s chief of staff.

Haigh has stated more than once that she never planned to be an MP (given her time again, she’d be an engineer, she once claimed). In the version of the story Haigh initially told, to Schools Week in 2015, she pushed hard to be selected for Sheffield Heeley when Meg Munn, the incumbent Labour MP, announced that she was stepping down. Haigh fought off competition from a councillor from Camden with no local ties.

That zeal to win the Labour candidacy, though, seems somewhat at odds with the version she subsequently told the Yorkshire Post, in which she had to be “persuaded to throw my hat in the ring”. Haigh was just 27 when she was elected, with a majority of 12,954.

When she moved back to London as a politician, Haigh lived in a flatshare with other young female MPs, one contemporary of theirs recalls: Ellie Reeves (the younger sister of Chancellor Rachel Reeves), Stephanie Peacock – whom she’s described on social media as her best friend – and Vicky Foxcroft, with whom she now chairs the centre-Left Tribune group of MPs. The trio are said to have frequently held house parties for their colleagues and Haigh’s birthday parties, in particular, became a fixture of the Westminster social calendar, attended by figures ranging from MP Jess Phillips to Jon Lansman, the founder of Momentum, the Labour Party’s hard-Left wing.

Haigh, a lifelong Barnsley FC supporter, was also in the women’s football team in Parliament – which made headlines for having an after-hours kickabout in the chamber. The team were reprimanded by then-speaker John Bercow, whose chair Haigh sat in to pose for photos. When the SNP’s Hannah Bardell refused to apologise for the fiasco, it was Haigh and her housemate Peacock who wrote the speaker an apology note.

These days, Haigh is more likely to be found in the company of Chancellor Rachel Reeves, whom she regularly sees for drinks, it has been reported. She is a rare politician about whom “I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word or that they don’t like her,” says one Labour backbencher. “Almost everyone has met her, at least in passing. And she’s a laugh. The bar for people being funny and pleasant is quite low in Westminster, but Lou is dry and witty. She’s fun to sit with in the tea room.”

One Conservative describes her as “probably the most tribalistic and least collaborative Labour MP” they had ever dealt with. Unlike other senior Labour figures, Haigh appears unable to accept that MPs from opposing parties have “different views” yet can still “respect each other”, the Tory says.

When Haigh’s fraud conviction came to light, it did more to undermine Starmer than to damage her own standing with her Labour peers, it seems. Whoever leaked the details of her fraud conviction to the press did so a few weeks after she was rebuked by the Prime Minister for encouraging people to boycott P&O Ferries over the company’s treatment of its staff, which led the firm to pull out of the Government’s flagship investment summit.

Haigh chose to resign from her Cabinet job, but only after a terse conversation with Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s then chief of staff, who appeared to have told her to go. “She is stand-out clever, and that’s what irritated McSweeney,” says one ally. “As I understand it, Lou would often speak in Cabinet and prove whatever McSweeney’s advice was to be wrong.”

Haigh wrote in her resignation letter to Starmer that she remained “totally committed to our political project”, but that “I now believe it will be best served by my supporting you from outside Government”. Within Labour, “most of the PLP took her side and saw what happened as excessive, given that she had been honest with Keir about her conviction”, her backbencher ally says. “I think that for Starmer, how he handled Lou was a huge mistake.”

Behind the scenes, it seems, Haigh was already looking for a way back into the Cabinet, and not necessarily under Starmer. Last week, Haigh admitted to the BBC’s Nick Robinson that Burnham had been “planning for this moment” with her and other colleagues “for at least the last year” – so within months of her pledging continued loyalty to Starmer as she left Government. Her departure “was very upsetting for her”, says one friend. She went away to Ireland with Eastwood, her partner, it has been reported, to get some space from it all and, seemingly, to consider her next moves. “I wouldn’t call it revenge, because that’s not the kind of person Lou is,” says a friend. “She’s not Machiavellian, but she’s not going to be s--- on and let it go. She’s too good for that.”

Haigh first met Burnham a decade ago, shortly before he became mayor of Manchester. They spent time together in their official roles once she became transport secretary, seemingly to discuss bus networks, and in 2025 she took Burnham’s place at a podcast festival after he pulled out due to illness.

Although Haigh and Burnham’s politics might not seem dissimilar, one MP close to both figures was “surprised” to see them in cahoots as “I didn’t know that they were close friends – I’ve never heard Lou say that she thinks he’s brilliant and wants to throw her weight behind him.”

Tellingly, Haigh was the MP who breached the dam after May’s disastrous elections, warning that Starmer would have to quit in the absence of “significant and urgent change”, and she was at the centre of Burnham’s Makerfield by-election campaign. “They operate very well as a pair and they’re very similar in that they’re both real people, who are relatable and also positive to be around,” says a source close to the campaign. “Lou in particular was good at having the hard conversations, about immigration and the NHS, for instance, on the doorstep.” No one, he says, brought up her fraud conviction.

Of course, being friendly and convincing isn’t enough to reach the top of the food chain. “Lou is a hundred per cent a political operator,” says a friend. “She is very ambitious without it coming across that she’s ambitious, or that her moves are calculated, though they are. She is pragmatic enough to do the right things to get the job and talented enough that anyone would want to raise her up, so it just comes across as skill.”

Burnham, who has been out of Westminster politics for nearly a decade, will need the help of someone embedded in the parliamentary Labour Party to turn around his party’s fortunes – and Haigh has needed the help of someone outside it to turn around her own. “Lou struck me as being very, very clever and very politically thoughtful, which are usually skills that come with bucket-loads of arrogance and entitlement, but which she showed none of,” says Baroness Harman, the former interim Labour leader. “I’m a big admirer of her, and I think it’s all to Andy’s credit that he’s recognised these qualities about her and that she’s right at his side.”

Since her forced departure from frontline politics almost two years ago, Haigh has clearly thought about the new image she wants to show to the country. Her pink hair has become a tame auburn, close to the natural colour with which she first arrived in Parliament, and she has adopted the “Labour bob” sported by many of the women on the front bench. Her Labour colleagues in Westminster have clearly never doubted her trustworthiness. But whether the rest of the country can overlook her past is yet to be seen.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]