'Burnham’s power broker': Why is Louise Haigh back at the heart of government?

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:10Her career appeared finished less than two years ago. Now, Louise Haigh is Britain's most powerful woman, and this is why.

0:21How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

1:01Less than two years ago, Louise Hay was forced out of Keir Starmer's government after details of a decade-old fraud conviction resurfaced. But as Starmer's authority began to collapse, Hay wasn't sitting around waiting for political rehabilitation. Instead, she was planning his replacement. Are you ready? Have you got a campaign ready to go? Yes. One month later, the balance of power has flipped. Andy Burnham is in number 10. Louise Hay is his first Secretary of State, effectively as Deputy Prime Minister, and she's been credited with helping to purge the Starmer loyalists from this new government.

1:35But Redloo is more complicated than the nickname suggests. A left-wing economic radical who helped choose the safer John Healy as Chancellor, a formidable workaholic and apparently a legendary party host, she's admired by allies and opponents alike. I think we're still kind of settling into realising how powerful Louise Hay is. She does seem to like that power behind the throne role. Rosa Prince is a political columnist for Bloomberg. Rosa, there is an awful lot to talk about in terms of backstory, you know, her rise in politics. But actually, let's just start with the headline here, The Return.

2:14You've been around Westminster for a while. How big a return to frontline politics is there? Yeah, do you know, I think it kind of took us all by surprise. I think in the run up to Andy Burnham becoming Prime Minister, there was a lot of talk about West Streeting and Angela Rayner. But when you step back after that monumental cabinet reshuffle on Monday, the star really to emerge has been Lou Hay. And I think it was only at that point that it became apparent quite how influential she is on Andy Burnham and on what his future government will be. But yeah, as you say, Less than two years ago, she seemed completely down and out.

2:49She'd had to quit Keir Starmer's government reluctantly and was in disgrace, really. So, yeah, a real kind of whiplash returned to the front line at the very peak of government now. Let's then talk about the upbringing, the events, the places that may well have shaped her and turned her into the politician that she is. And I suppose we have to start with Sheffield, don't we? Yeah, absolutely. Like a lot of people around Andy Burnham, she is a northerner. She comes from Sheffield. Her grandfather and her uncle were both trade unionists and she comes from a reasonably left-wing family. She's not one of these dynasties that you sometimes get in the Labour Party, but she certainly was interested in politics.

3:27Then her parents divorced and the story is that she was unhappy at school, she was being bullied and her mother took the decision to send her to quite an elite private school, fee-paying school, a local school. Now she's embarrassed about that at the moment because she's a lefty. That doesn't look good, but she clearly thrived there, did very well. And she says that she then joined the Labour Party at the age of 15 under the influence of what she described as a very radically left-wing economics teacher. She seems pretty tied to the North, not just by dint of coming from Sheffield and the accent and all the rest of it.

4:03But when she went off to university, didn't initially she start off down here in London. Yeah. So she studied politics and economics and she landed a great university, the London School of Economics, one of the most prestigious in the world, but she didn't like it. She did not like the student scene. I guess in London, you know, it's a bit more disparate. I went to university in the North. It has those really strong student communities. I think she obviously felt that she wanted that from her university experience. So after one year, she transferred and she spent the rest of her time at uni at Nottingham University.

4:34Well, as a graduate of Sheffield University, I can tell you it's certainly a good place to go. There are other little kind of, I wouldn't say contradictions, but things in her past that kind of just give you an idea that she might be a little bit more complicated than she first appears. She also served as a special constable in Brixton, which suggests perhaps being slightly more socially conservative than you might have thought. Yeah, I was really struck by that. A lot of people know Brixton. It's a traditionally, historically, a black neighbourhood. Lots of kind of tensions often between the community and the police.

5:05A really unusual choice for a left-wing politician. She believes in the police. She believes in law and order and taking that stance. So I found that an absolutely fascinating detail to her CV. I mean, anyone who is trying to pigeonhole her as your standard boilerplate kind of Labour metropolitan lefty, they're going to be wider the market, aren't they? Yeah, they are. I was looking at a question and answer session that she did. And I think at one point it came out that she was a vegetarian and they asked where she went on holiday. And she said, oh, Cuba, that's my favourite destination. It's sort of the perfect socialist answer.

5:38But then you get to meet her and Lu Hay is great fun. You know, she likes to drink. She likes a party. If you're out on a night out with her, she's brilliant company. And she's quite expansive. You know, she talks to all factions of the party. So at these legendary soirees she would throw, there'd be your left-wingers and your right-wingers. She's quite inclusive in that front. I think she prizes loyalty, perhaps, more than a sort of doctrinal purity that some on the left like to heed to. How do you square that circle, though? On the one hand, you've got this charismatic bon vivant, party host, all the rest of it.

6:13But then there is also this other aspect of her character, fiercely intellectual and a driven workaholic as well. She is an impressive politician. Look, that's why she's gone so far. I read one comment from a conservative who'd, she had shadowed him for a time. And he had been in Parliament for a long time. And he said that she was by far the most impressive of all the Labour MPs he'd come up against. And remember, she's young. She came to Parliament when she was only 27. She was only 36 when she became a cabinet minister, the youngest ever cabinet minister. When she did have to leave government, she didn't waste her time.

6:47She went and she headed the Tribune group. She wrote some really influential pamphlets. She's done a lot of thinking about what Andy Burnham should do. So she's not just a brute force in government. She's also somebody who's a deep thinker. The fact that she is admired across party divides, I mean, in this day and age is quite something. To what do you attribute that right? I think that politics is a meritocracy. I think people saw that in her. They wanted her around. She joined the front bench under Jeremy Corbyn. She's stuck there with Keir Starmer and he took her into government. And now she's gone in with Andy Burnham.

7:22Now, she actually has been an ally of Burnham for a long time. She first encountered him when he ran for the Labour leadership in 2015. And there's a lovely story, which is that her mum went to a Hustings event and everyone could ask questions. She stuck her hand up and Burnham said yes. And she said, I'm Louise Hay's mother. What job will you give her if you get elected. And now we know what job he would give her because he's finally leader and she's now first secretary. So I think she's probably a happy woman. I think a lot of people might not know much about her beyond that kind of almost caricature that I think appeared in the media of her as Red Lou.

8:00What does that tell you about her personality, about her ability as a politician? She is probably on the left of centre, that kind of soft left branch of the Labour Party, but she's not the most left wing or the most radical. A lot of it, this might sound a bit trivial. I think a lot of it's to do with her hair. She's naturally a redhead, but she kind of leant into it with this flaming red hair. And apparently the whip's office, when she first became a member of the cabinet said, well, why don't you tone it down? You'll make yourself less of a target. And she was absolutely opposed to that. She would not change her look.

8:33But I have noticed that, I don't know what you think, but I think it's not quite as scarlet as it was a couple of months ago. I think she actually has. I think she has learned the lesson of that and probably feels, you know what, I don't need to attract that kind of attention. I'd rather be known for my politics than my hair. Yeah, she seems to have had a little bit of an image change, a slight softening. Yeah, so to Andy Burnham though, let's not forget. But I think if ever you're going to be doing a profile of a politician, you have to examine the rise, but you also have to examine the fall.

9:03And this goes to the conviction around a Blackberry. Walk us through exactly what had happened, how serious this was, and how an event from years past intersected with politics. Yeah, well, funny enough, there's actually not too much dispute about what happened. So Louise Hayes, she was a young woman, she's still in her early 20s, and she was working for the insurance company Aviva back in her hometown of Sheffield. And she was on a night out and she was mugged. Her handbag was taken. She thought that a work BlackBerry was in her bag at the time and she reported the loss to Aviva. A little later, she found the BlackBerry.

9:41It hadn't been stolen. It was in a drawer at home and she did not report to Aviva that she had found it. Now she says, oh, I thought by then they'd have decommissioned it and it wasn't a big deal. It didn't make any difference to me. they took a more serious approach and it was reported to the police. She said it may have been, she wasn't sure, but it may have been just that when she got a new device, she was using it to call people and that triggered a police alert. So there's a little bit of confusion about that, but for whatever reason, the police were involved and she was prosecuted. Now she ended up having a pretty low punishment for that.

10:17She had a discharge. She was fined, they call it a victim search, I believe,£15, just about the lowest penalty you can get. But it was a conviction. So this is when accounts begin to differ. When she joined Keir Starmer's team, she says that she told him all about it. And she says that he was actually quite sympathetic and says, I'm so sorry. You'll remember he was actually used to run the prosecution service. And according to her, he said, this should never have happened. They shouldn't have gone ahead with the prosecution. roll forward a couple of years and Labour have now won. Louise Hay is the transport secretary in Keir Starmer's cabinet and the Times newspaper unveiled this fact about the past conviction.

11:00She says at that point that Keir Starmer and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, really hung her out to dry. They said, oh, new information has come to light. They didn't realise. She said she was never told what that new information was and that nothing had changed since she first appraised the then Labour leader of what had gone on. And so she stood down, but she made clear that she was very much made to do that. And it's obvious that she feels incredibly bruised by the whole series of events. And some might say the current reshuffle and all the Starmites who have since gone are her sweet revenge.

11:38Let's talk about that path back to the front line of politics. Once she was out of government, how quickly did she start deliberately trying to plot her route back? I think it's clear that she was very ambitious and she wasn't going to just sit back and settle into life on the backbenches. She reformed that Tribune group, becoming the leader of it. And she also became a major thorn in Keir Starmer's side. She was one of the leading rebels in the welfare reform rebellion, which you'll remember was one of, there were lots of reasons why Keir Starmer ended up losing his premiership. I would argue that welfare rebellion was maybe the beginning of the end.

12:13It was very bad for him and Rachel Reeves because it meant they couldn't really get any of their economic policy through. So she was a major force behind that. And she also began talking to her old pal, Andy Burnham. It was clear that Andy Burnham fancied a return to parliament. She decided that she would nail her colours to his mast. She was going to be at his side. And I think over the last winter, they set about getting him back into Parliament because obviously he needed to be in Parliament to be able to challenge Keir Starmer. So they'd begun talking about how that could happen. Would an MP stand down in his favour?

12:48Would there be a by-election? And as we now know, that's exactly what happened. And in May, he won a by-election and came back to Parliament and she was instrumental in running that by-election campaign for him in Makerfield. Wasn't she initially opposed to him standing in Makerfield? Reform obviously had huge amounts of support there, which, you know, with Louise's help, you know, Burnham did manage to overcome. Yeah, I think she was nervous about that one. I mean, if you looked at it on paper, it had been a safe Labour seat for years before, but reform did very well in the local elections. They're clearly doing well in those kind of red wall seats, working class northern constituencies.

13:26And she was worried what would happen if he stood there and lost. That would be the end, probably of any ambition he had to be prime minister. But Burnham overruled him. And I think his argument that, look, if I can't win here against reform, I can't win anywhere. And the even more elevated argument of, and if I can win, then that proves to my fellow Labour MPs that I'm the guy to take on Farage nationally, that it should be not me, not Keir Starmer. That was pretty persuasive. So I think quite quickly after he made that decision, she came on board with it. So Burnham gets elected, becomes the next leader of the Labour Party, becomes prime minister.

14:01And of course, she's going to have a role within that government. What exactly is it? Because I keep hearing that she is the most powerful woman in government at the moment. Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are two parts to the job. One is this very grand title of first secretary of state. So previous holders of that title include Rab Butler, William Hague, Michael Heseltine. It's not used all the time. Sometimes we have a deputy prime minister. this time around, we're having a first secretary and she'll do the ceremonial stuff. She'll be at the King's Garden parties. She will stand in for Andy Burnham at Prime Minister's Question Time, I should think, although that's not been confirmed, but there's a kind of honorific aspect to that.

14:40Then she's also running the cabinet office. Now, this is the department in government that kind of joins up all the other ministries. She's responsible for driving through policy and making sure that the departments are talking to each other, making sure something that is as amorphous, I suppose you could say, as homelessness, for example, which is what Andy Burnham said was his first project. He wants to eliminate rough sleeping. So that might need several departments. You might need the health department in that. You might need the communities department. You might need, for example, the MOD, the Department of Defence, if you're dealing with a lot of veterans who find themselves homeless.

15:17So someone like a minister in the cabinet office will be responsible for driving all that stuff through and being in charge of the civil servants who are the professionals in charge of tasking all that.

15:34How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

16:12Let's talk then about the purge that very definitely took place of the closest Starmer allies. I was expecting there to be a pretty big changing of the guard, but not on the wholesale basis that took place. MPs were ahead of Andy Burnham becoming prime minister, queuing up to meet him in his office. I hear rumours that there were quite a few people who were queuing up outside her office as well. Yeah, I heard those same rumours. And also that people, when they were going to Makerfield, a lot of MPs went to Makerfield to campaign and they'd make sure that they got some face time with Louise Hayes.

16:41So they knew, she knew that they were on the board with the Burnham train. I think that Andy Burnham had been out of Westminster for 17 years. He did not know a lot of Labour MPs. There were members of the Cabinet that he didn't know. So he was really relying on those people who had been there, including most particularly Louise Hay. So she would have been instrumental in helping him draw up his government. The one appointment that we particularly hear that she was very involved in was advising him not to pick his friend Ed Miliband to be the Chancellor. Yeah, now I think politically all three of them have the same outlook.

17:19I think that they wanted Ed Miliband to be the Chancellor. It sort of made sense to them. But in the run up to Burnham actually becoming Prime Minister, there was a lot of chatter. The financial markets wouldn't be happy with Ed Miliband. He was seen as too left wing. He was seen as too aligned to the next zero agenda. And Lou Hay, who seems to be a pragmatist, a realist, as much as she is an ideologue, said to her advice to Burnham was, it's too risky. We can't do this. We can't risk having the first week or so of your premiership just being completely overshadowed by this controversial choice.

17:53And that was that. That was Miliband out of the Treasury and into the Foreign Office. Yeah. Look, clearly she is an effective political operator. But I'm just wondering whether she will be more effective as that kind of formidable figure behind the leader, behind the prime minister, or are we now at a point where we should start regarding her as a future Labour leader herself? I think we're still kind of settling into realising how powerful Louise Hay is. My sense of having sort of, you know, dug into her past and listened to a lot of interviews and read a lot of interviews she's done. She does seem to like that power behind the throne role.

18:28I think it's probably as important to her to get things done and to drive policy forward as it is the kind of personal self-aggrandisement. And don't forget, she would have found that experience of losing her job, being in the headlines, being accused of being a fraudster, that kind of language would have been very uncomfortable, very bruising. And my guess would be that she wouldn't want to have that down the line. But who knows? Also, people can change. She still is. It was her birthday yesterday. She turned, I believe, 38 yesterday. So she's still very young. So who knows? I'm sure she wouldn't maybe rule it out forever.

19:03My instinct is that we will not see her as a future prime minister. Rosa, thanks very much indeed Great to have you on the podcast Thank you And that's your lot for today Indeed for a very busy week on This Is Why If you want to scroll back You'll find plenty more politics Also another one of our episodes With Professor Michael Clarke This time focusing on Ukraine And Vladimir Zelensky Apparently firing both his Defence Minister And Head of the Armed Forces Within days of each other Why at sky.uk for your feedback And for your suggestions for future topics We're back the other side of the weekend Until then, take care.

20:05hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.