Hearts & Minds: When you’re in a hole, don’t dig

Transport Secretary Louise Haigh has a fraud conviction. It’s emerged she made a false report to police that her mobile phone had been stolen in a mugging. What should you do in such circumstances, how do you handle the PR fallout?

What you don’t do is what Haigh did, which was to forget that digging only makes the hole deeper.

Yes, she had been convicted. It was a mistake, which she deeply regretted and she told her boss, Sir Keir Starmer, when he appointed her to his Shadow Cabinet in 2020. That ought to have been in it.

Haigh, though, went further. She discovered later the phone had not been taken. ‘The original work device being switched on triggered police attention and I was asked to come in for questioning.’

Hmmm. Even if true, it raises doubts which you want to avoid. By going there, you’re inviting people to hold a mirror up to themselves: would they forget they had claimed it had gone when it hadn’t?

Then Haigh said: ‘My solicitor advised me not to comment… and I regret following that advice.’ Whoa. Now we have an image of the Transport Secretary sitting across the table and keeping schtum, a scene familiar from those police videos of investigations. It is not a smart look. Not least because Haigh is herself a former special constable and was shadow police minister.

And blaming your solicitor? It gets worse. ‘Under the advice of my solicitor I pleaded guilty – despite the fact this was a genuine mistake from which I did make any financial gain.’ Again, not her fault but the solicitor’s. It’s buck passing and it will rebound.

The background is coloured in by an inquisitive media and it does not assist her cause. She subsequently lost her job at Aviva, after an internal investigation; there were claims she had reported her phones had been stolen or missing on repeated occasions; she said the phone was stolen because Haigh wanted an upgrade.

Haigh received a discharge. By pleading guilty, she avoided the risk of a trial and receiving a longer sentence. Haigh was a parliamentary candidate at the time and under the rules, people can’t stand if they have been sentenced to three months or more in jail.

That was yesterday. This morning, she quit. It was hardly a surprise - as Transport Secretary she had just committed a reputational car crash.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.