BORIS JOHNSON: Starmer picked a fraudster for his Cabinet as a result of he’s fraudster-in-chief. And he is aware of, in his coronary heart, that the entire authorities is a fraud

We are very kindly and forgiving sort of people, so I expect there were some readers who looked at defenestrated Transport Secretary Louise Haigh and felt the faintest stirrings of sympathy.

Ah, they said, as they beheld her hair dyed as unnaturally and exuberantly red as a strawberry Haribo.

She seemed so young, so foolish, so human. She was a victim, a decade ago, of the same consumerist lust that afflicts virtually every young person in the country. Like everyone else, she wanted to get an upgrade for her smartphone.

She wanted the same snazzy device as her friends: not just the same profusion of apps, the same Nasa-like computing power, but the same prestige that goes with having the latest gizmo on the market.

So one day she came up with a ruse that seemed painless, victimless and virtually cost-free. She could get her own company to accelerate her mobile phone upgrade – and all she had to do was tell a little fib, a white lie, the kind of untruth that people tell their insurance companies the whole time (and she should know; she worked for the insurance giant Aviva).

It was a story that sounded true, and indeed it could so easily have been true, because that kind of thing happens every day; and so I can imagine that there are at least some readers who may feel that she did not deserve to be sacked, yesterday, with such ignominy.

There may be people in this great and generous-hearted nation who look at Louise Haigh and feel the teensiest bat-squeak of compassion, for a woman who was succeeding in a harsh environment where it is not always easy for young women to succeed.

Perhaps, they think, we should all just accept that she made a silly mistake, in her 20s, and that her conviction is ‘spent’; and that the world should therefore avert its eyes from her embarrassment, while Louise is allowed to develop her Cabinet career, case closed, move along, nothing to see here.

The evidence is overwhelming that Louise Haigh obtained goods by deception, writes BORIS JOHNSON

Is that what you feel, by any chance? Did you allow yourself to succumb to the feeblest flash of fellow-feeling for the felonious Haigh?

If you did, then all I can say is that you are far too full of the milk of human kindness. Save it for the cat. Suppress that sympathy. Fight it back, and give way to righteous rage as you look with cold, clear eyes at what she was actually doing, and what it says about Starmer’s regime.

She was working in the insurance industry, a business already so plagued by mendacious claims that everyone is forced to pay more for their premiums than they should. The evidence before us is overwhelming that she obtained goods by deception – a spanking new mobile phone – by falsely claiming that her existing phone had been stolen.

In fact she seems to have employed a similar dodge on several occasions, and Aviva got so fed up with her claims about lost or stolen smartphones that they launched the initial investigation. An allegedly stolen phone was located, at her home, and it was obvious to all that she had lied to the police.

Why else would she have pleaded guilty? Why else would she have accepted a criminal conviction, just when she was on the verge of standing for Parliament?

Let me put this bluntly. Louise Haigh is not some victim of a tragic and impoverished childhood – it turns out she was privately educated. She does not suffer from some mental disturbance, some hormonal or psychotic kleptomania. She is just a casual everyday fraudster, a swindler – and Starmer knew it all along.

He knew she was a convicted criminal, and yet he put her in charge of the British Transport Police. He knew she was financially dodgy, and yet he put her in charge of the entire £30 billion transport budget. How could he have done it? The answer is obvious. Starmer picked a fraudster for his Cabinet because he is the fraudster-in-chief. And he knows, in his heart, that the whole government is a fraud.

They have lied to the electorate and to the public, just as Louise Haigh lied to Aviva and to the police. They went to the British people last July and told them – hand on heart – that they would not put up taxes on working people. As it turned out, they had their fingers crossed, because they have clobbered every business in the country – and everyone working for those businesses – with the unexpected hike in national insurance.

Starmer knew she was a convicted criminal, yet put her in charge of the British Transport Police

In a fit of almost superhuman incompetence, they have thereby helped to push up inflation, with the result that interest rates will have to stay higher for longer, punishing business, deterring investment and cancelling the prospect of growth.

They attempted to justify this tax raid by falsely claiming that there was a black hole in the nation’s finances – when the fiscal position had been made worse by Labour’s own reckless spending commitments, not least the 15 per cent pay rise for train drivers agreed, bonelessly, by Louise Haigh.

They said they would stand up for Britain abroad – and yet they have been more or less rudderless on Ukraine, and their signature foreign policy decision has been to give away the Chagos Islands; a move that was driven by nothing but Lefty spite and hatred of Britain’s colonial past, and that seems now to be splendidly unravelling as the incoming Trump administration wakes up to the damage Labour is doing to Western interests.

They said that they would honour the decision of the people to leave the EU. And yet Starmer made an absurd speech this week in which he seemed to blame Brexit for high immigration numbers, when in fact it is Brexit and only Brexit that enables this country to decide who comes here, and when Labour has idiotically and expensively cancelled the Rwanda plan, which was already deterring the cross-Channel criminal gangs.

This Labour government is so bad, in fact, that they have created a new migration crisis of a kind we have not seen since my childhood. Investors and wealth creators are actually physically fleeing the country – while the illegals continue to pour in.

As for Starmer, he portrayed himself as a pharisaical* opponent of sleaze and corruption; and yet he still wears suits and spectacles provided by a millionaire, Waheed Alli, who was then given a pass to come and go in Downing Street as he pleased.

Why did Starmer pretend to be pure? The answer is he was trying to pull the wool over our eyes, like Louise Haigh trying to deceive the police. That’s why he winked at her crimes.

And now, stop press, I hear as I conclude this column that Labour has voted through new and ill-thought-out measures to turn the NHS into a sort of death-on-demand service: measures that will oppress elderly people, divide families, agonise doctors, enrich lawyers and absorb a huge quantity of the time and resources of health-care professionals, when they should be bringing down waiting lists.

The only good piece of news is that under the redoubtable Kemi, the Tories are now ahead of Starmer in the polls – for the first time since I was PM.