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LONDON — Heidi Alexander has been appointed U.K. transport secretary following the shock resignation of Louise Haigh Friday.
The MP for Swindon South returned to the House of Commons at the general election in July, having previously represented the constituency of Lewisham East between 2010 and 2018.
She was named as senior minister in the Justice Department in new Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s first government lineup before being appointed to the Cabinet following Haigh’s fall from grace.
The 37-year-old Haigh had been the youngest member of the Cabinet before becoming the first to quit. It emerged late Thursday she had accepted criminal responsibility for a phone she wrongly reported stolen during a mugging in 2013, two years prior to her election to parliament.
Starmer was informed about her conviction for misleading police prior to Haigh’s appointment to his first shadow Cabinet when he became leader in 2020, but it had not been made public before being reported by Sky News. She quit hours later on Friday morning.
In her resignation letter, Haigh wrote that while reporting the phone as missing had been a “genuine mistake” and she had pleaded guilty on the advice of her lawyer, which she now regretted, she did not want to become a “distraction” from the work of the new government elected in July.
She continued: “I am sorry to leave under these circumstances, but I take pride in what we have done.”
Alexander arrives in her new role at a key moment for the transport brief, with the government in the process of nationalizing Britain’s railways.
