Louise Haigh’s swift resignation prompts numerous questions
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Politics, with a big majority government, will be much quieter, some said.
Not a bit of it.
Here we are on a Friday, traditionally the sleepiest of Westminster’s weekdays, and MPs confront a potentially generational defining vote on assisted dying while the government confronts its first cabinet resignation.
The first cabinet resignation is a moment for any government and a rite of passage for any prime minister.
There is the first enforced shuffle of personnel at the top table for a start, a headache for Downing Street as they scour the subs bench for replacements, knowing that an appointment of an existing minister itself creates another vacancy.
Louise Haigh was already the first cabinet minister that Sir Keir Starmer publicly rebuked, over remarks about P&O Ferries last month.
Now we have the ritual exchange of letters and the ritual blizzard of further questions.
First, those letters and in particular the prime minister’s letter to Haigh, which is blunt in its brevity.
Prime ministers often manage to wax lyrical at considerable length in a letter marking a departure, however tortuous or headline-making the whole saga has been.
In this instance, news of the resignation came within 12 hours of the story first breaking, and yet the prime minister’s words appear perfunctory.
The general mood in the Labour Party and in government is one of slight bafflement.
Many were still getting their head around the revelations – which first appeared on Sky News and in The Times on Thursday evening — when they woke up this morning to the news that Haigh was gone.
Plenty believe the sequence of events described in Haigh’s account was too minor to necessitate her departure, in the absence of any further revelations, though some believe she made the right political decision to go quickly rather than allow the issue to drag on for days.
One senior Labour figure described it as a “good resignation” which may allow her to come back at a later date with a clean slate.
We are also told that Haigh had told Sir Keir about the specifics of this case when he first appointed her to the shadow cabinet.
But The Times claims this row relates to more than one mobile phone being stolen or going missing.
Haigh’s team have not denied this, but have not been drawn on it either.
‘Lawbreakers can’t be lawmakers’
At the very least, this would have been the subject of even more intense further questions if she was still in the cabinet this morning rather than being on the backbenches.
The prime minister’s awareness of at least some of this saga has itself been seized upon by the Conservatives, who claim it raises questions about his judgement in appointing someone with a criminal conviction.
This would be awkward in any instance, but is particularly so given Sir Keir as leader of the opposition during the Partygate rows insisted lawbreakers can’t be lawmakers.
But he then appointed one to his cabinet, albeit someone with a conviction from before they were an MP.
We are told the Conservatives got wind of this story during the general election campaign and hoped to be able to reveal it, but their tip-off referred to a different magistrates court from the one Haigh appeared at, so they could not prove it via court records.
Next for No10 comes finding a successor for Haigh.
While she spoke in her resignation letter of “our political project,” she and the prime minister were not always politically simpatico.
She was seen as one of the few remaining left-wing ministers in his cabinet.
In the years before the election she was frequently tipped – wrongly – for dismissal at shadow cabinet reshuffles.
A successor is likely to be announced today.
The prime minister’s decision on who he calls up first is being watched very closely for a guide to who has impressed him during Labour’s short stint in office so far.
There is a bigger picture too for Sir Keir Starmer.
He is desperate to move on from a sticky perception by many of a bumpy start for his government.
And now this.
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