Louise Haigh is back in government. The former transport secretary resigned in November 2024 following news reports that she had a conviction for an offence of fraud by misrepresentation, which she committed in 2013. The conviction was the result of Haigh pleading guilty to having lied about the loss of her company Blackberry so that her employer would replace it with an iPhone. She had reported a ‘terrifying’ mugging in London to police, claiming that her work mobile had been stolen.
Her sentence was a ‘conditional discharge’ – essentially, she was set free with the promise to not do it again. Such a conviction did not bar her from standing for parliament, although it does not appear that she disclosed it during the 2015 election campaign which saw her elected as an MP. She did, apparently, tell Keir Starmer before he appointed her to his shadow cabinet. In any event, Haigh’s sentence is long since spent (meaning she is not required under law to disclose it in most situations). Despite pleading guilty at the time, she now says of the fraud that ‘this was a genuine mistake’.
All the same, Haigh resigned and then spent almost two years on the backbenches. During this time she played a key role in the Labour rebellion against welfare cuts, signed up to Team Burnham this spring, and oversaw his by-election campaign in Makerfield.
