A key ally of Andy Burnham has accused Keir Starmer’s government of “sexist” briefings against a swathe of senior female Labour MPs.
Louise Haigh, who has been central to the PM-in-waiting’s march to No 10, hit out at attacks from a “cabal of men” against Sir Keir’s former deputy Angela Rayner, as well as cabinet ministers Bridget Phillipson and Lisa Nandy.
She told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: “The idea that there wasn’t a cabal of men that were deliberately mistreating women around the government is just fanciful.”
The extraordinary intervention comes days before Mr Burnham is set to become PM – something she said he had been planning for for a year.
The former transport secretary also revealed that Sir Keir has not spoken to her since she was forced to resign from his cabinet, as she accused his administration of trying to “knock my character down” after she left.
As Sir Keir tries to secure his “legacy” as PM during his last few days in office, Ms Haigh pulled no punches in her attack on how she says his administration treated some of its most high-profile women.
Told that his former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney had denied there was a “boys’ club” inside No 10, she said that the education secretary Ms Philipson and the culture secretary Ms Nandy “have both been, as have I obviously, victims of incredibly sexist and unpleasant briefing in the press. Angela (Rayner) has.”
The way Sir Keir’s first chief of staff Sue Gray “was treated was absolutely disgraceful”, she added.
“You only had to open the papers most days to read the vicious briefing that was happening, the horrible way they would talk about our colleagues to journalists,” she said.
It is not the first time that the Starmer government has been accused of sexism.
In February, Ms Nandy hit out at what she said were Labour briefings “dripping with misogyny”.
Ms Haigh said that Mr Burnham was already trying to shift away from the so-called ‘boys’ club’ culture that multiple female MPs have complained of in Sir Keir’s No 10 operation.
The Sheffield Heeley MP quit as transport secretary in 2024 after it emerged she had pleaded guilty to a criminal offence related to incorrectly telling police that a work mobile phone was stolen in 2013.
She told the podcast that Downing Street had initially signed off a statement saying she had previously disclosed the matter to Sir Keir. But then Mr McSweeney rang and asked her to resign.
“I had to really push even for a conversation with Keir, he didn’t want to have that conversation with him himself, and both Morgan and he kept saying, ‘Well, additional information has emerged’, but at no point would any of them tell me what that additional information was.
“And afterwards they repeated that. And it was painful because they could have said, ‘Look, these headlines are awful, and it’s not going to be nice for you to ride them out’.
“And it wasn’t. And to be honest, I would have agreed, and I would have gone on that basis because I didn’t particularly want to ride them out. It was embarrassing, and it wasn’t pleasant to go through.
“But 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.”
She said she had told Sir Keir about the fraud offence while Labour was still in opposition and that he had promoted her several times after that.
But she has not had a “single personal conversation” with him since she left the cabinet, she added.
“I’ve had to sack people in my political career, and you don’t have to do it in a way that it’s frankly so hurtful.”
She also revealed Mr Burnham has been planning what he would do as prime minister for at least a year.
“He has been thinking about this and certainly planning for this, for this moment, for at least the last year,” she said.
