Andy Burnham’s chief lieutenant has revealed that he was plotting for a year to take over from Sir Keir Starmer.
The revelation by former transport secretary Louise Haigh in an interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson came as Labour MPs lined up in parliament to nominate Mr Burnham for the Labour leadership.
With no other candidates expected to be nominated following the announcement by former defence minister Al Carns that he will not run, Mr Burnham is due to be unveiled as the new Labour leader on 17 July and replace Sir Keir as PM on 20 July.
But in her no-holds-barred interview on the Political Thinking podcast, Ms Haigh also revealed the “sexist” culture in the Starmer government, which saw leading women like herself targeted with dreadful briefings.
Ms Haigh, who was forced to resign over a past conviction involving a mobile phone, echoed the complaints of “a boys’ club” in the heart of Downing Street previously made by education secretary Bridget Phillipson and culture secretary Lisa Nandy.
As Mr Burnham went to nominate himself to be the next Labour leader, hoping for a “third time lucky” attempt after his failures to win in 2010 and 2015, a succession of other Labour MPs posted their nomination forms for him on X.
But Ms Haigh admitted that he had been plotting for at least a year to replace Sir Keir while he was mayor of Greater Manchester.
She said: “He has been thinking about this and certainly planning for this, for this moment, for at least the last year.”
But reflecting on the relief many MPs felt at the end of Sir Keir’s time in charge of the party she focussed on the sexism she claimed existed in a series of bombshell revelations.
Ms 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 former deputy PM Angela Rayner and 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 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.
Told that his former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney had denied there was a “boys’ club” inside No 10, she said that Ms Philipson and Ms Nandy “have both been, as have I obviously, victims of incredibly sexist and unpleasant briefing in the press. Angela [Rayner] has.”
“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.
The way Sir Keir’s first chief of staff Sue Gray “was treated was absolutely disgraceful”, she added.
Mr McSweeney denied the accusations when he was on the same podcast last week.
But 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.”
