Only two years ago, smarting from her expulsion from Sir Keir Starmer’s government, it looked as if Louise Haigh’s political career was over. Now she’s so central to Andy Burnham’s administration she’s the most powerful woman in British politics.
“The whole story of Andy Burnham’s rise has been women either angry with Keir or furious at the boys’ club around him,” a Labour MP said. “Talk about ‘don’t get mad, get even.”
Sacked by Starmer, Haigh, 40, is now so powerful she helped to choose and interview the candidates for Cabinet positions and even wielded her influence over the pick for Chancellor of the Exchequer, usually the second most influential member of government.
She and ally Anneliese Midgley, the new Chief Whip, who both have strong links to Labour’s union backers, persuaded Burnham that Ed Miliband’s net zero agenda was at risk of costing jobs. MPs had lobbied the pair to block Miliband, worried his environmental zeal could cost votes in Labour’s traditional heartlands, despite his popularity with the party’s grassroots.
Like Burnham, and unlike Miliband, Haigh is a northerner and instinctively suspicious of the London political classes. Alongside Midgely and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, she’s been dubbed one of Burnham’s “northern queens.” During the Makerfield by-election, she took pitches from visiting Cabinet ministers keen to be kept on under the new administration.
Second only to the Prime Minister
Now installed as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Haigh runs the Cabinet Office. As the first female First Secretary of State since Barbara Castle, she’s the most senior minister after the prime minister himself. “She brings a bit of Sheffield steel,” one person working with Haigh said.
Starmer was the latest in a line of prime ministers to complain Whitehall levers of power do not work for the principal. Changes to the Cabinet Office mean Haigh will have a greater say over decision-making and implementing Burnham’s agenda, as Hannah Keenan, associate director at the Institute for Government explained.
“No 10 has been chronically underpowered in a hyper-centralised system for a very long time – compulsively drawn into day-to-day detail and crisis management. Alongside an overly large Cabinet Office that has lost its focus as more functions were added, the centre of government has simply not been able to set strategic direction for the whole of government – and into that vacuum came the Treasury, setting cross-government direction by default. Burnham is bringing new powers into No10 North and creating a new, more focused Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet,” Keenan said.
Burnham spent Friday in Manchester at No 10 North to show his commitment to devolution. In London, meanwhile, observers see Burnham’s appointment of advisers with economic expertise as an early sign he is trying to create a counterweight to the Treasury.
No 10 announced three budget measures within his first week, and Burnham has refused to commit to Chancellor John Healey’s demands for much higher defence spending. Angela Rayner, re-installed as Housing Secretary, has nonetheless been frozen out of Burnham’s inner circle.
Fights with Starmer’s boys’ club
In 2024 Haigh, who worked for the Unite union before entering Parliament, was forced to resign as Starmer’s transport secretary after revelations she’d been convicted for fraud over a decade ago. Her departure capped months of fighting with No 10.
She infuriated some in Starmer’s administration when, just five weeks into the new government, she struck a generous, inflation-busting pay deal with the train drivers’ union, ASLEF. Unlike earlier offers made under the previous government, the settlement did not require changes to terms and conditions or working practices as a condition of the pay award.
Critics claimed it put the government on a collision course with other unions, including those in the health and education sectors, which could point to the settlement as evidence that ministers were less committed to public sector pay restraint than they professed. One former Starmer aide said the decision had left many in No. 10 “fuming.” No 10 later publicly reprimanded her for remarks about boycotting P&O Ferries for their fire and re-hire practices.
Relationship break-down with No 10
The relationship between Haigh and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s former chief of staff, began to break down. Haigh’s allies have since claimed that McSweeney played a key role in the speed and manner of her departure as Transport Secretary in November 2024, when she was effectively sacked after it emerged that she had a 2014 conviction for fraud by false representation relating to a wrongly reported stolen work mobile phone.
She insisted Starmer had known about the spent offence when he appointed her to his shadow cabinet. Although she formally resigned, multiple reports indicated that Downing Street had lost confidence in her and made clear that she should step down after further details of the case came to light. According to government sources, Haigh was warned that if she did not step down there would be “day two, three, four, five stories ready to go”.
A Downing Street source said at the time Starmer personally requested additional information was never released to save embarrassment, “but there is definitely more to this story than the public knows about.”
Last month Haigh addressed this claim. “Both Morgan [McSweeney] and [Starmer] kept saying ‘well, additional information has emerged’, but at no point would any of them tell me what that additional information was,” she told the BBC. “To pretend that I hadn’t told him and to brief so consistently and so viciously for quite a number of weeks after that was a deliberate attempt to knock my character down.”
One of Haigh’s principal talking points on the backbenches was that she was the victim of a briefing campaign from male advisers in Starmer’s Downing Street. When Midgely was talking to Labour MPs during the Makerfield campaign, she made a point of saying that the “boys’ club” would have no place in Burnham’s Downing Street culture.
Welfare rebel and economic view
After she retreated to the backbenches, Haigh played a key role in orchestrating the Labour rebellion against proposed welfare cuts last year. She revived the Tribune group, a caucus dating back to the 1960s that has emerged as a home for the “soft left” wing of the party that has fuelled Burnham’s rise to power.
In May Haigh recommending a looser fiscal policy by the government to fund investments in public services. With the realities of governing moving into view, Burnham has instead made clear he will stick to cautious fiscal rules.
Haigh, who studied politics at Nottingham University and law at Birkbeck, became the Sheffield Heeley MP in 2015 at the age of just 27. She shared a house in London with a group of Labour MPs, including Stephanie Peacock, whom she has described on social media as her best friend alongside Ellie Reeves and Vicky Foxcroft.
Party flat
The arrangement was a flat share common for younger MPs early in their parliamentary careers. According to Labour insiders, it was the female equivalent of a bachelor pad and was often the venue for parties. “There was a lot of drinking,” one MP recalls.
One former Cabinet minister remembers one particularly raucous night when she asleep on the balcony and woke there the following morning. “It was like a student hall of residence,” another MP said.
Even now, it is understood that the tabloids are digging into her private life, once as colourful as her hair dye.
Admirers and detractors
Among her admirers, she is revered. One MP said: “I don’t know anyone as clever as Louise. She is months ahead of most people. She is the brains behind Burnham. Believe me.”
Another MP added: “Lou is a very skilful operator. Sharp elbows. Brain the size of several planets. And very political. More political than any politician I know. She can read situations very early. She’s been planning for this and that for months before they found Andy a seat.”
Her detractors counter that early indications betray a management style more top-down than Burnham’s supposedly inclusive approach. A spokeswoman for Haigh declined to comment.
While sources close to Burnham believe the Cabinet picks will make good on his priorities, those who have been excluded, including key Starmerites, are looking for someone to blame.
“If you set yourself up as the power broker, don’t be surprised if people you don’t pick turn against you,” warned one MP who remained unpromoted.
“I could find you fifty people in the Labour Party who would be rude about any number of people on the front bench,” said a Labour MP, who was elected in 2024. “But there are lots of my intake who like Lou. She made a good first impression with the nationalisation of railways. People underestimate her because she’s so young and because of her bright hair, but she’s really intelligent.”
Once a vivid scarlet or pink, her hair is now a toned-down auburn befitting the most powerful woman in the country.
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