Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary who resigned in disgrace after pleading guilty to fraud, is now Andy Burnham’s chief adviser – conducting interviews for Cabinet jobs from a borrowed office as the PM-in-waiting faces mounting pressure over Britain’s housing crisis.
Haigh, 38, resigned on 29 November 2024 after just four months in the job, after a story about her criminal record was leaked. She had pleaded guilty to fraud by misrepresentation in 2014 after reporting her work phone as stolen following a mugging, only to later find it in her drawer. Court documents made public at the start of 2025 revealed she admitted lying so her employer would replace her BlackBerry with an iPhone. “You can’t have someone with that sort of record as chancellor, say, because people don’t get over this kind of thing,” one confidante said.
“Louise Haigh, who resigned as transport secretary over fraud, is now Andy Burnham's chief adviser as housing crisis deepens.”
Yet Haigh has now masterminded Burnham’s successful by-election campaign and is installed as his right-hand woman in temporary London headquarters – the office of MP Christian Wakeford, who defected to Labour in 2022. Burnham insisted in an email to MPs last week that all Cabinet appointments will be “made on merit”. A friend on the backbenches speculated: “Whatever formal role she gets in the new government, she’ll really be Andy’s right-hand woman.”
Haigh, the youngest woman ever appointed to a Cabinet position, is known for her striking pink-red hair, which she dyed as often as once a week as a way of relieving stress. But her return to the centre of power comes as the country faces what commentators are calling a housing crisis on a scale not seen since the 19th century.
According to the New Statesman, the median average price of a British home in 2025 was 7.6 times the median annual earnings of a full-time employee – a ratio that last prevailed when cholera was widespread and property ownership was the preserve of the gentry. In the 20th century, that ratio was consistently around four times earnings. The most common living arrangement for a young man in 2026 is now with his parents. The article asks: will Burnham dare to contemplate a wealth tax to fix it?