In the second installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we peel back the mask to reveal the real Morgan McSweeney – and how he came to end up in Downing Street. This is the second part of Chapter One.

The 2017 election result was the backdrop to a radical transformation of Labour Together. According to Anushka Asthana, ITV’s deputy political editor whose 2024 book Taken As Red traced Starmer’s rise to power, McSweeney took up employment at Labour Together the very day after the 2017 general election results came in. What is certain is that the following month, on July 10, McSweeney was appointed Labour Together’s company secretary, leaving the LGA.

McSweeney tightens his grip on Labour Together

According to Labour Together legend, 2017 was the year its eight “brave” MPs formed the organisation to lead Labour back to electability through “secret planning”. As the above account shows, this is not true. Labour Together was created in 2015 out of a very different impulse – to hold the party together as the right wing revolted against a Corbyn leadership. During Labour Together’s first years, the Labour Party’s right wing had gone into overdrive to undo Corbyn’s election, feeding endless attack lines to the media and using the pretext of the UK’s vote to exit the European Union in 2016 to launch the so-called ‘chicken coup’ – a leadership challenge to Corbyn that was roundly defeated by a Labour membership that rallied behind its embattled leader.

But as with most legends, there is fact amidst the fancy: The organisation did fundamentally change character in 2017. It was then that McSweeney came on board and started working to undermine the Labour left.

John Cruddas: now critical of Starmer’s authoritarian leadership

I interviewed Cruddas for this book in 2023. His disappointment at the direction Labour had taken at the hands of Starmer and McSweeney was palpable. Cruddas’ long-time friend, Neal Lawson, had been suspended from the party on contentious charges (his story is discussed in more detail later). Lawson hailed from Labour’s so-called ‘soft left’. Cruddas was highly critical of the authoritarian style that Labour had adopted under Starmer’s leadership.

During the interview, I presented Cruddas with quotes from Labour Together figures retrospectively claiming credit for “defeating the Hard Left” and playing a “key role” in Starmer’s leadership campaign. Cruddas seemed genuinely flummoxed. He speculated that this was a rewriting of history to cast Labour Together as more central to Starmer’s leadership than it really was and thereby cement the group’s influence in government.

I then asked Cruddas whether he had ever heard of an entity called the Center for Countering Digital Hate. CCDH, as shown in considerable detail later, was created by the Labour Together Project without any public disclosure. CCDH played an arguably ugly and certainly undisclosed role in the Labour Party ‘antisemitism crisis’ that would engulf the party under Corbyn’s leadership. Cruddas, again, looked flummoxed. He had never heard of it, or of the people that Labour Together worked with to create CCDH.

“What, do you think Morgan and others were creating secret campaigns or projects or something?” he asked, seemingly betraying his own ignorance of the projects that McSweeney and Reed, via Labour Together, had launched and run for years.

Bucolic getaways, private dinners, and pieties concealing its ugly underbelly

The extent of Cruddas’ ignorance appears to have been matched by Jonathan Rutherford, a veteran Labour figure who was invited to various Labour Together meetings and getaways. In November 2023, the Sunday Times ran a front-page story about Labour Together, based in part on documents I gave to the paper. The story looked at the way Labour Together had transformed politics “under the cover of darkness and in breach of the law”, a reference to Labour Together’s unlawful failure to declare its donations – discussed below.

The article prompted a bemused response from Rutherford, who appears to have been involved in Labour Together’s more respectable early endeavours. Rutherford wrote an article in the New Statesman denying that there was anything secret or nefarious about the group. By then, a brief blurb for this book had been published, and, on the basis of a scant three-hundred word summary, Rutherford declared that it leaned toward the “conspiratorial”.

Rutherford then went into colourful detail about all the wonderful things Labour Together did behind the scenes to unite the party, like organising rural retreats for MPs and hosting them for private dinners à la Winston Churchill’s The Other Club. Rutherford insisted Labour Together had “developed bridge-building for a common-good politics”. It all sounded positively bucolic – and a world away from the disturbing projects that McSweeney and Reed actually launched via Labour Together, such as CCDH.

Labour Together: a project of ‘renewal’ not rivalry?

Assuming that Rutherford, like Cruddas, was speaking in good faith (and there is no reason to believe otherwise), both suffer from striking gaps in knowledge about what Labour Together was being used for in the period between 2017 and 2020 – and precisely what sort of character they were dealing with in Morgan McSweeney.

To be fair to both Rutherford and Cruddas, they were not the only people who the Labour Together Project would lull or misdirect with soothing pieties about unity. In April 2019, McSweeney arranged a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn; Cruddas also attended.

By then, McSweeney was already intervening covertly in the party’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ that was undermining Corbyn’s public reputation. McSweeney used the meeting to assure Corbyn that Labour Together was a project of ‘renewal’, not rivalry – even as McSweeney was actively plotting to destroy Corbyn and his politics, which McSweeney “despised”.

The real McSweeney

Multiple insiders have described McSweeney as charming, polite, and serious, and there is no doubt he was exceptionally skilled at convincing the very people whose politics he was actually conspiring against that he was a reasonable man who had their best interests at heart.

One of these people was Gráinne Maguire, an Irish comedian and political commentator. In 2018, Maguire co-hosted a podcast series, Changing Politics, which put out twenty episodes before being shuttered in December 2018. Maguire confirmed to me that the podcast was largely McSweeney’s brainchild and was generously funded by Labour Together, which paid for her time.

Maguire said that McSweeney also played a central role in scripting the content of different episode segments. Labour Together’s role in funding the podcast, and McSweeney’s role in writing it, were not publicly known at the time, making the podcast one of a number of undisclosed projects McSweeney had a hand in directing after joining Labour Together.

‘Progress type’ in sheep’s clothing

Maguire had voted twice for Corbyn as Labour leader and openly identified with the party’s left. By the time I caught up with her in 2024, Maguire had been so put off by Labour’s direction under the Starmer Project that she voted Green in the July general election. Like many, she was upset by the party’s approach to Gaza and trans rights, and by its decision to retain the two-child benefit cap (discussed in more detail later).

Maguire was clearly taken with McSweeney, their shared Irishness underpinning an instant rapport. “He seemed like such a pure boy”, she recalled, “with his little bright cheeks”. After a long time in the party, Maguire had become finely attuned to ‘Progress types’, a reference to the Blairite group that was implacably opposed to Corbynism. She detected no hint that McSweeney was aligned with this faction or that he “despised” Corbyn and Corbynism.

In fact, she found him “so fantastic, so intelligent, so articulate”, She recalls thinking that “if only somebody like Morgan was running the country”, everything would be alright. Little did she know that, even as McSweeney was penning scripts about trans rights and other right-on causes, he was simultaneously incubating plans to drive her worldview out of the party for good.

McSweeney: Mandelson’s golden boy

McSweeney joined Labour in the mid-1990s as a receptionist and then a member of the party’s media operations. During the 2001 election he was given the task of feeding data into Peter Mandelson’s famed Excalibur computer that stored information to be used by the party’s rebuttal unit. But according to a New Statesman profile by Rachel Wearmouth, McSweeney’s first real dive into Labour politics came when he worked alongside Steve Reed, then leader of Lambeth council. Under Reed, McSweeney:

led a revolt against the far-left factions for which the authority had become notorious.

Following a period in Dagenham – where retrospective hagiography has him single-handedly routing the far-right British National Party (BNP) – McSweeney ran Liz Kendall’s disastrous 2015 campaign for Labour Party leader. Kendall ran as a Blairite and received just 4.5% of the votes against Corbyn’s landslide. McSweeney then returned to the LGA, where he would stay until leaving to join Labour Together in 2017. Kendall’s career would undergo a renaissance after McSweeney had guided Starmer to victory.

For an organisation supposedly committed to internal harmony through cross-party unity, McSweeney was plainly an odd choice. Nick Forbes, who had been one of Labour Together’s first public supporters, explained in 2021 that McSweeney:

doesn’t have room for compromise with the hard left. He thinks that they need to be eradicated from the party because they are so dangerous.

That doesn’t sound very harmonious. McSweeney is a long-time protégé of Peter Mandelson, the architect of New Labour who, in February 2017, publicly bragged that he was “working every day” to bring down Corbyn’s elected leadership. That doesn’t sound very unifying. Mandelson has been quoted saying of McSweeney:

I don’t know who and how and when he was invented, but whoever it was . . . they will find their place in heaven.

SWOT analysis: plans afoot to destroy Corbyn and all he represents

Asthana puts it bluntly: McSweeney and his close ally Reed “despised” Corbyn and the ‘hard-left’ politics he represented. Pogrund and Maguire similarly relate that, for McSweeney:

Corbyn’s politics were not just wrong. They were evil.

A man of such uncompromising views plainly could have no interest in bringing the party’s factions together.

Indeed, almost as soon as McSweeney became the company secretary of Labour Together and its employee, he set his sights on destroying Corbyn and the popular movement he had inspired. These plans were laid out in a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis authored by McSweeney that set out the lay of the land for the Labour Together Project in the post-2017-general-election environment. McSweeney distributed the analysis to Labour Together insiders at a meeting in Steve Reed’s office on June 20, 2017 – less than two weeks after the Labour Party had achieved its best national vote share since 2001.

The document argued that Labour Together had to undertake a project of ‘renewal’ to remake the Labour Party as representative of the working class and remove it from Corbynite hands. McSweeney would use that same word, ‘renewal’, in his fabled meeting with Corbyn two years later, but this document shows what he really meant by the word – the permanent defeat of Corbyn and his politics, even as Corbynism had nearly doubled the party’s membership and substantially increased its share of the popular vote.

The document noted that Corbyn was unassailable as party leader in the wake of the impressive 2017 election result, which had secured the left’s ascendancy throughout the party.

McSweeney gets his first bitter taste of defeat in Streatham

McSweeney would experience the bitter reality of the left’s growing influence in Streatham, the constituency of Chuka Umunna, where McSweeney was a right-wing fixture in the CLP. At this local level, McSweeney worked closely with Matt Pound, who in turn was close to Luke Akehurst. Pound was the ‘national organiser’ for Labour First from January 2017 to January 2020.

Whereas Labour Together under McSweeney engaged in covert efforts to sabotage the Corbyn leadership, Labour First was base camp for the Labour right’s overt fightback. Pound would subsequently join the Labour bureaucracy under Starmer; McSweeney, Pound, and Akehurst would all play important roles in the selection of Labour’s parliamentary candidates for the July 2024 general election, a process which (as noted) was heavily criticised for excluding left-wing candidates on controversial grounds.

Streatham’s CLP was the site of fierce factional confrontation following a surge of left-wing members who joined (or began to participate) after Corbyn’s election. The contest came to a head in February 2019, when the CLP voted by the slimmest margin to adopt an all-member-meeting model that was seen as a way of short-circuiting the right’s grip on the CLP.

‘Blue murder’: McSweeney’s mask slips

The fight played out on the pages of LabourList, the party’s de facto in-house journal, with Pound making an impassioned plea for all constituencies to reject the model. One left-winger active in the community recalls that, until that point, McSweeney had cut a modest figure, with Pound considered more personally combative.

But when the Labour right lost the vote in Streatham, McSweeney was seen losing his temper for the first time: he shouted “blue murder” about the voting process, according to one person who attended on the night. Just under three weeks after the left had won its desired changes to the structure of the CLP, Umunna would leave the Labour Party to join the short-lived breakaway party Change UK.

The CLP’s ascendant left would select the left-wing Bell Ribeiro-Addy to replace him as their local MP candidate. Ribeiro-Addy would be elected to parliament in December 2019 and join the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs.

McSweeney’s plan to ‘eradicate’ the ‘evil’ left-wing

Back in Reed’s office, McSweeney explained that the Labour Together Project had two missions: first, it had to prepare for when Corbyn eventually stepped down, identifying and developing a candidate who could swoop in to take Corbyn’s place. This role would eventually be played by Keir Starmer. While there was no need to immediately pick Corbyn’s successor, McSweeney explained that Labour Together would have to transform itself into a vehicle for a leadership bid at the appropriate time. If they succeeded, the rewards would be immense: with a new hand-picked leader in place, the Labour Together Project could capture the party for the right – and, per the testimonies quoted above, “eradicate” those “evil” left-wing tendencies that McSweeney “despised”.

Second, Labour Together had to “ensure” that Corbyn “lost badly”, according to Maguire and Pogrund. Only Corbyn’s resounding defeat in a general election would remove him from the scene and trigger a new leadership contest. There is no doubt that the Labour Together Project viewed electoral success for the Labour Party under Corbyn as anathema. McSweeney’s SWOT analysis listed “a Labour government” in the category of “threats”. As Asthana notes, this made:

explicit that [McSweeney’s] concern was not whether Corbyn could win, but that if he were to become Prime Minister it would prevent the renewal they were focused on.

A Labour government under Corbyn: a ‘threat’ to the Labour right

McSweeney and his allies would burn down the party to inherit the ashes.

Indeed, Labour Together was bent on engineering this ‘renewal’ even though it meant giving the Tories another five years to oversee widening inequality and biting austerity as they drove through a hard Brexit. It is one of the striking ironies of the Labour Together Project that it would select Starmer to replace Corbyn in part because it could trade on his popular image as the party’s ‘Mr. Remainer’ – even as the Labour Together Project had worked for years to ensure that the party “lost badly” to a Tory government that promised to deliver Brexit on the most uncompromising terms.

McSweeney was clear in his briefing that the conspiracy to destroy Corbynism would have to be conducted in utmost secrecy. Indeed, McSweeney’s SWOT analysis identified the discovery of the true work of the Labour Together Project as one of the greatest threats it faced.

But Labour Together couldn’t disappear altogether. Instead, the project set out to mislead all but a small coterie of insiders about what it was really doing. It would do so by curating its public image as a well-meaning, cross-factional think-tank convening convivial dialogues to help the party navigate and transcend its factional divides. McSweeney dubbed this protective manoeuvre ‘Operation Red Shield’.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

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