Heidi Alexander has been appointed the new transport secretary after Louise Haigh stepped down.

The Swindon South MP had been serving as a justice minister until her promotion today, and worked as Sadiq Khan’s deputy transport mayor between 2018-2021.

Ms Haigh resigned after Sky News revealed she pleaded guilty to an offence related to incorrectly telling police that a work mobile phone was stolen in 2013.

In a letter to the prime minister, she described the incident as a “mistake” but said that “whatever the facts of the matter, this issue will inevitably be a distraction from delivering on the work of this government”.

Ms Haigh claims she was “mugged on a night out” and believed her phone had been stolen, but discovered “some time later” this was not the case.

She called the incident a “genuine mistake from which I did not make any gain”.

The Tories have said it raises questions about what exactly Sir Keir knew when he appointed her to his shadow cabinet in opposition.

Responding to her resignation letter, the prime minister thanked Ms Haigh for “all you have done to deliver this government’s ambitious transport agenda” and said: “I know you still have a huge contribution to make in the future.”

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Kemi Badenoch will be “defined” by the first “clanger” she makes as Tory leader, Baroness Davidson has said.

The Tory peer said Ms Badenoch, who replaced Rishi Sunak earlier this month, had to be “humble and work bloody hard” in her role following the Conservatives’ worst-ever general election performance.

Speaking to Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Baroness Davidson criticised the Tory leader for choosing to give a speech at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) on the impact of Labour’s decision to increase employers’ national insurance contributions in the budget.

👉 Click here to listen to Electoral Dysfunction on your podcast app 👈

During the speech, Ms Badenoch refused to say whether she would reverse the national insurance hike – despite calling it a “tax on jobs”.

Baroness Davidson told Rigby: “If I was in charge of the UK Tory party right now, if I wanted to do a business speech, I wouldn’t have done it at the CBI.

“I would have done it at the Federation of Small Businesses – the people that are most affected by this national insurance change.

“I would have been damn sure what my policy was going to be and what it was that I was going to be able to tell them.”

The Tory peer, who led the Scottish Conservatives from 2011 to 2019, said the job of an Opposition leader was to “go out and hustle” for votes.

She added: “It’s to speak to people… it’s to apologise for the stuff we got wrong, it’s to show people that we’ve changed, and it’s to start putting together slowly, bit by bit, a policy platform that can lead us into the next election in five years’ time.”

Baroness Davidson said there had been “so many open goals” for Ms Badenoch to take against the prime minister, including over his decision to scrap winter fuel payments for the majority of pensioners.

“Why is she not going off and speaking to pensioners?” Baroness Davidson said.

“We’ve got great stories to tell [on the winter fuel allowance]. Now, as we’re coming into this cold snap, she could have been doing something about that.”

She added: “She can’t be high-handed about this and she can’t be lazy. She has to be humble and she has to work bloody hard!”

Asked whether she thought Ms Badenoch was “lazy”, Baroness Davidson said: “I don’t know what her personal tempo of operations is and how she runs her office, she might be doing tonnes of things that we’re not seeing, but there’s a problem in that. We’re not seeing them.

“There is a massive klaxon going off in my head here because if Labour have worked out that she’s not defining herself, it doesn’t take an awful lot of steps to decide, ‘Well, we can define her ourselves’.

“And it will not be in a way that is helpful to the Conservative Party. They’ll wait for the first clanger and the first clanger is what will define her.”