In the first installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we take you on a journey through the inception of Morgan McSweeney’s organisation Labour Together.

Labour fought the December 2019 general election with a base split by Brexit and a party divided against itself. It went down to a heavy defeat. After Jeremy Corbyn resigned the helm, Keir Starmer wasted no time in putting his own name forward for the role of new party leader. Starmer’s leadership campaign was a slick affair, launched and defined by a well-produced video that touted his leftist credentials and values. One campaign insider described how, from the outset, it was streets ahead of any contenders in terms of messaging, organisation, infrastructure, and funding.

Starmer could launch his candidacy so quickly thanks to years of preparation largely outside the public eye. This work was done by a political project operating through an organisation called Labour Together. The project had likely started preparing for a leadership contest before Starmer was even aware of its existence. Labour Together provided access to funders. It would also supply Starmer’s key officials including his Svengali, Morgan McSweeney, and many of his future shadow cabinet and cabinet ministers.

Labour Together: laying the groundwork for Starmer’s leadership

Starmer’s left-wing Labour leadership pitch was based on polling undertaken by McSweeney and Labour Together throughout 2019. This equipped Starmer’s campaign with an in-depth understanding of party members’ views. Indeed, as Times reporters Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire have written, Starmer effectively ‘subcontracted’ his leadership campaign to Labour Together.

McSweeney, a Labour Together director both before and during Starmer’s leadership bid, was the head of Starmer’s leadership campaign. He was later appointed Starmer’s chief of staff in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office (commonly referred to as LOTO). After Starmer formed a government in July 2024, McSweeney became arguably the most powerful unelected official in the UK as Starmer’s chief of staff in Number 10. Before his stint at Labour Together, McSweeney had worked with David Evans, who was appointed general secretary of the Labour Party less than two months after Starmer’s election as party leader.

From its formation in 2015, Labour Together had presented itself as a unifying body that sought to heal Labour’s internal divisions. It even claimed, in February 2020, that it had no horse in the Labour leadership race. Between 2016 and 2018, its website claimed that Labour Together sought to:

provide a space for members and representatives across the party to discuss and debate the future of the Labour Party.

It also promised that:

our aim is to be broadly inclusive, and to involve people right across the movement. Jeremy Corbyn has rightly challenged the Labour Party to re-think the way it does politics.

This complimentary nod to Corbyn was striking in light of what Labour Together now acknowledges it was actually doing behind the scenes.

A ‘brave band’ of MPs… now in government

In 2023, Labour Together would tell a very different story. On the social media platform Twitter (since rebranded as X), it claimed that a “brave band” of eight MPs had “[b]uilt” Labour Together in 2017 in order to make Labour “electable again”. These MPs provided the spine of Starmer’s shadow cabinet, and then his cabinet: Rachel Reeves (now chancellor), Steve Reed (secretary of state for environment, food, and rural affairs), Shabana Mahmood (lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice), Wes Streeting (secretary of state for health and social care), Bridget Phillipson (secretary of state for education), Lisa Nandy (secretary of state for culture, media, and sport), and Jim McMahon (minister of state in the department for levelling up, housing, and communities). Only Jon Cruddas, the eighth MP, has not subsequently served in Starmer’s shadow cabinet or government.

Editor’s note: since the book went to print, Starmer has instigated a reshuffle. Now, Steve Reed is secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, Shabana Mahmood is home secretary, and Jim McMahon was axed from his cabinet role. Additionally, Bridget Phillipson is currently running as candidate for Labour Party deputy leader.

Labour Together’s retrospective claim to have been established in 2017 was curious on at least two counts. First, as discussed above, the group in fact formed in 2015. Second, it would have been most odd to found an organisation to make Labour “electable again” in 2017 – the year that Labour achieved the party’s highest vote share in any election since the Blair heyday of 2001.

The ‘secret’ campaign to ‘seize’ the Labour Party from the left

It was in 2017, however, that Labour Together became the vehicle through which McSweeney would run a “secret” campaign to “seize” the Labour Party back from its ascendant left wing. One of Labour Together’s central figures, the MP for Streatham and Croydon North Steve Reed, later bragged that:

[i]n 2017 Labour Together developed a strategy for defeating the Hard Left and reconnecting Labour with the voters it had abandoned. In 2020, it played a key role in Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, and Keir has since transformed our party.

The Starmer Project is thus, in every sense that matters, a product and continuation of the Labour Together Project that preceded, guided, and enabled it.

As a result, the Starmer Project is both illuminated and condemned by Labour Together’s history of financial murkiness, undisclosed influence campaigns, and attacks on citizen media, as well as its role in inflaming Labour’s manipulated ‘antisemitism crisis’. Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party – and the government he went on to form – is the fruit of Labour Together’s poisoned tree.

Labour Together: conspiring behind closed doors

Labour Together was formed in the shadow of Jeremy Corbyn. Its corporate precursor, Common Good Labour, was registered with Companies House on June 9, 2015, only six days after Corbyn announced his intention to run for the party leadership. Its sole director was John Clarke, who would later turn up as a director of Blue Labour. Blue Labour advocated a mixture of redistributive economic policy and social conservatism.

Party emails show that many of the people who would go on to form Common Good Labour (later Labour Together) had collaborated closely for years beforehand. They included Jonathan Rutherford, Jon Cruddas, Steve Reed, and Morgan McSweeney, the last drafted into discussions about localism and local government because of his role in the Local Government Association (LGA). In late 2014 and prior to Labour’s embarrassing electoral defeat in 2015, this group engaged in constant correspondence about creating a project to centre Labour strategy based on a ‘values model’.

Enter Labour right stalwart: Steve Reed

The same emails reveal that the key movers behind the creation of Common Good Labour were Sir Trevor Chinn and Jon Cruddas. Cruddas, an MP well-liked across the party’s factions, was also broadly sympathetic to the Blue Labour tendency.

One email from early July 2015 shows that Chinn had initially wanted the Blairite MP Chuka Umunna to head the organisation. Umunna was at one point the leading light of sweet-talking Labour centrists and considered potential leadership material, before he immolated his political career by abandoning Labour for the ill-fated breakaway party Change UK in 2019. Umunna rejected the overture and Steve Reed or Tristram Hunt (the idiosyncratic MP for Stoke Central between 2010 and 2017) were mooted instead; Reed would become a director a few months later.

Reed, who would serve on Corbyn’s front bench as shadow minister under various portfolios between September 2015 and April 2020, would emerge as one of the key figures alongside McSweeney in the Labour Together Project, and in its undisclosed schemes that, amongst other things, stoked Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’.

Major pro-Israel donor Trevor Chinn on the scene

Chinn, who would become a major donor to both Labour Together and Keir Starmer, is a wealthy entrepreneur with a long history of funding figures on the Labour right. Chinn made donations to Tony Blair (while MP), Ruth Smeeth, Tom Watson, Rachel Reeves, Ian Austin, and Wes Streeting – all of whom would express hostility to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. He has long been associated with Labour Friends of Israel and has an extended history of involvement in pro-Israel causes. For twenty years between 1973 and 1993 he chaired the Joint Israel Appeal (now United Jewish Appeal), which raised funds for cultural and educational endeavours in Israel.

In June 2016, a year after Common Good Labour was formed, Chinn was re-elected the vice chair of the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), which engages in advocacy for Israel (among other things). As of November 2023, Chinn was a member of the executive committee of the Britain Israel Communication and Research Centre (BICOM), a pro-Israel lobby group. BICOM’s sister project, We Believe in Israel, was run by Luke Akehurst prior to Akehurst’s election to parliament in 2024. Akehurst is the Labour right’s most effective campaigner and a dedicated warrior against the left. The JLC was fiercely critical of Corbyn when he was leader of the Labour Party.

Chinn’s award for ‘extraordinary contributions’ to Israel amid a genocide

In November 2024, Chinn was awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honour. The award recognises individuals:

who have made an extraordinary contribution to the State of Israel or to humanity through their talents, their service, or in any other way.

The award was the gift of President Isaac Herzog, who, in January 2024, had been cited by the International Court of Justice as making statements that plausibly violated the Genocide Convention. Herzog rejected the ICJ’s judgment as a ‘blood libel’ that had ‘twisted’ his words. By the time Chinn was awarded the medal, Israel’s plausibly genocidal assault on Gaza had killed at least 43,000 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children and 7,200 women.

Not ‘anti-Jeremy’ assurances: a mendacious deception

Labour Together’s first foray into public life made little impact. Cruddas announced in the Observer in October 2015 that Labour Together aimed to:

bring together all sections of our party to discuss and debate the future of our party

He promised that Labour Together would “learn the lessons of defeat so that we can win again” and acknowledged that Corbyn had:

rightly challenged the party to rethink the way it does politics.

Cruddas confirmed that his colleagues in Labour Together included Steve Reed, Lisa Nandy, and Baroness Judith Blake. Emails show that Corbyn’s team in LOTO was concerned about Labour Together but was mollified when Nandy explained that the group was not ‘anti-Jeremy’. Perhaps this was true at the time; McSweeney had not yet joined Labour Together or united forces with Reed. Nevertheless, the assurance that Labour Together was not ‘anti-Jeremy’ stands out in retrospect as a moment of poignant historical irony.

In March 2016, John Clarke, the original sole director of Labour Together, resigned. He was replaced by Chinn, Reed, Nandy, and Cruddas. They remained directors of Labour Together until a clear-out and reshape of the organisation in 2023.

Labour Together’s launch…for the second time

The October 2015 launch was so forgettable that Labour Together felt comfortable unveiling itself a second time. That re-launch was announced in the Guardian in May 2016 with quotes from Lisa Nandy. The Guardian’s coverage made no mention that Labour Together had already debuted the previous year. The new launch was boosted by articles from Jon Cruddas and Sharon Taylor. Taylor was head of Stevenage Borough Council and deputy leader of the LGA Labour Group – then led by Morgan McSweeney. Nandy, Reed, and Taylor were described as Labour Together’s vice chairs. Another supporter was Nick Forbes, the Labour leader of Newcastle City Council between 2011 and 2022 – a matter of relevance later in our story.

Labour Together’s second outing made almost as little public impact as its first. The group hosted a function at Labour’s annual conference in September 2016 and established a £40,000 fund for projects advancing localism. It also co-hosted a one-day conference in November 2016 with the Fabian Society. Speakers included Nandy, Reeves, Taylor, and Tom Kibasi, the last of whom was a director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left-leaning think-tank and charity. Kibasi would go on to play a key part in linking Starmer’s leadership campaign to the Labour left – a role for which he would later express his remorse.

And then: silence. Labour Together effectively disappeared from public view. Although it claims to have done extensive work behind the scenes in setting up meetings and campaign groups, whatever happened unfolded outside the public eye. Neither of the organisation’s Facebook or Twitter accounts posted between November 3, 2016 – the day of the conference – and February 17, 2019.

McSweeney prepares to take control

The 2017 general election was a shot across the bow for the Labour right. Shattering expectations, Corbyn’s party won thirty seats more than in 2015 and, for only the third time since 1974, achieved 40% of the national vote. Within the Labour Party, the 2017 election left the Corbynite faction at its most powerful since Corbyn had been elected leader in 2015, while the right-wing faction that McSweeney represented was at its nadir.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

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