In the third 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 third part of Chapter One.

From the outset, then, the Labour Together Project acted with premeditated misdirection and deceit.

In years of investigating McSweeney and Labour Together, I’ve only ever found one clip of McSweeney talking to camera: a recording of his introductory remarks to a small gathering hosted by Labour Together on July 15, 2019. It is chilling to re-watch the presentation knowing, as we now do, what McSweeney was up to behind closed doors.

McSweeney’s duplicitous speech: the soul of the Labour Party

McSweeney stands in a natty suit in front of a big-screen TV broadcasting the subject of the event: ‘How can we build a 21st Century Labour Party?’ He is positioned behind three speakers spanning the breadth of political opinion in the party: Nathan Yeowell, director of the Blairite think-tank Progress, is ironically seated on McSweeney’s left. To McSweeney’s right is Laura Parker, a former Corbyn aide and director of the left-wing campaign group Momentum, which had been established following Corbyn’s shock leadership victory in 2015. Sandwiched between them is Neal Lawson, the director of Compass. Compass is devoted to the Sisyphean task of getting progressive left-wing and liberal forces to work together.

As will be seen later, both Parker and Lawson would eventually fall foul of the political project being incubated by McSweeney, having being lured into giving it their tacit and sometimes explicit support. Both came to denounce the authoritarian and factional project that McSweeney would incubate. Both were played like a fiddle.

To be fair, McSweeney was utterly convincing. “The Labour Party has always been a party that has brought traditions together: our Labour unionist tradition, our radical socialist tradition, our reforming and social democrat tradition”, McSweeney told the meeting in his soft Irish lilt:

But too often and for too long these traditions are in a state of angry estrangement. Too often [and] for too long the focus has been on our differences, and that can come at a cost. The party is divided, and unity requires reconciliation. The best place to start this journey is by revisiting our founding principles. Labour was built on the principle of justice. We stand for decency in how we treat one another, and fairness in how we share out the advantages and burdens in society. The moral heart of justice is equality: each person is of equal worth. We must embed into our systems and actions this principle that all members are equal . . .

Sometimes some people seem to make it their mission to try and kill off the traditions that are not theirs. But you can’t do that, because these traditions are always with us. They’re like our souls. When those three souls stand together is when our party comes to life.

By this time, McSweeney’s secret plot to “kill off” the party’s Corbynite “soul” was well-advanced. But to put it into action, McSweeney needed cash.

The unreported money that made it possible

McSweeney’s work with Labour Together, so important for Starmer’s rise, was made possible by hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations. The public was totally unaware of this because McSweeney failed to report these donations as required by law. Serious questions need to be asked about whether McSweeney may have failed to report the donations on purpose – in my opinion, there is evidence that strongly suggests that possibility.

The Electoral Commission is a statutory body that regulates elections in the UK. It is of fundamental importance to UK democracy as it provides vital information about who funds politicians, parties, and related organisations like think-tanks. Its remit includes regulating and monitoring political donations. Individuals and organisations that fall under the ambit of the Commission are supposed to report any donation made or received over £7,500. Details of the donation are made public via the Electoral Commission’s register, which is searchable. It is not difficult to report donations or search the Commission’s public register.

One consequence of McSweeney’s failure to report donations as required by law was that the donations were not contemporaneously published. This meant the public had no way of knowing that Labour Together was receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds, or who it was receiving the money from. This will have helped the organisation to fly under the radar as it pursued its “secret planning” and “strateg[ising]” to defeat the “Hard Left”. If the donations had been made public, questions would certainly have been asked about why Labour Together, with its limited public presence, was receiving such huge pots of cash, and what it was doing with it.

Cash pours in for Labour Together at a telling time

Prior to McSweeney’s arrival Labour Together was modestly funded. Between October 2015 and June 2017 it received £121,000 in donations, all from Martin Taylor. Taylor, a hedge fund manager with interests in private healthcare, would become a major funder of Starmer’s Labour Party. Taylor’s financial records reveal an affinity with anti-Corbyn causes, including a £180,000 donation to an outfit called Labour Tomorrow that was reportedly being used to “fund campaigners against Jeremy Corbyn” during the 2016 Labour leadership contest. Taylor’s 2015 and 2016 donations to Labour Together were properly reported.

After the 2017 general election, which suggested that Corbynism could be electorally viable, Taylor and Chinn poured resources into Labour Together. Between June 2017 and September 2020, Labour Together received £862,492 in cash and non-cash donations. Taylor donated £585,992 in cash and non-cash donations; Chinn donated £175,500 in cash. The vast bulk of these donations – £849,429 – was made between June 21, 2017, and March 18, 2020: two weeks before the vote in which Starmer was elected as Labour Party leader.

At a telling time: McSweeney behind the scenes

This date range is revealing. It spans the time between Labour’s unexpectedly good showing at the June 2017 general election, the devastating results of the 2019 general election, and Starmer’s Spring 2020 Labour leadership campaign. It thus covered the exact period when McSweeney secretly worked first to undermine Corbyn and then to secure the Starmer succession.

Additional, smaller donations to Labour Together were made by Baron Clive Hollick (£10,000), a co-founder of the Institute for Public Policy Research; Simon Tuttle (£10,000), a private equity executive and director of the anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate; Baron Paul Myners (£25,000), a ‘City grandee’ and former Labour minister under Gordon Brown; Richard Greer (£10,000), reported to be an investment banker; and Sean Wadsworth (£10,000), the founder of the Nigel Frank recruitment company and a donor to Owen Smith’s leadership campaign. Smith had unsuccessfully challenged Corbyn for the leadership in 2016 in the so-called ‘chicken coup’, after revolting MPs triggered a contest.

‘Failing’ to report three-quarters of a million in donations

Labour Together failed at the time to report fully £739,429 of the cash and non-cash donations it received between June 2017 and September 2020 to the Electoral Commission, as required by law. Of this amount, £143,992 consisted of three non-cash donations made by Taylor. The remainder (£595,000) were cash donations made by Chinn, Taylor, Myners, Tuttle, Greer, and Wadsworth. Electoral law requires that all donations must be reported within thirty days of receipt. There is no evidence that the donors were aware their gifts were not being properly reported.

In September 2021 the Electoral Commission fined Labour Together £14,250 for these failures, after Labour Together’s new company secretary (who replaced McSweeney) reported the matter to the Commission. The fine was levied following an investigation by the Commission. The implication of this finding is profound: the Commission found that Labour Together had incontrovertibly broken the law. That is now beyond dispute. What remains to be settled, I believe, is why.

An ‘administrative oversight’?

Labour Together has claimed that it was all a big mistake – that it broke electoral law for two years by accident. Hannah O’Rourke, a long-time employee of Labour Together and company secretary at the time of the self-report, told the media following the outcome of the Commission’s investigation that the failure to report had been “entirely unintentional” and an “administrative oversight”. She further claimed that Labour Together had contacted the Electoral Commission “as soon as we became aware of the error”.

Documents show that this was also the story that Labour Together told the Electoral Commission directly. Labour Together explained to the Commission that:

put simply, a number of donations should have been reported but were not: it appears, as a result of human error and administrative oversight.

It further explained that:

enquiries have been made with those involved at the material time and frankly it was assumed that donations were being properly reported.

Most importantly, correspondence reiterated that:

there was absolutely no intention to make a false declaration, nor to fail to report.

McSweeney’s donation cock-ups: intentional?

The Electoral Commission has refused to disclose the full basis on which it reached its decision to levy only a very modest fine on Labour Together, or any details of the investigation it conducted. It has refused at least three Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for copies of its investigative report. It has claimed – wrongly, in this author’s view – that disclosure of its investigative report in this instance would dissuade others from self-reporting wrongdoing. The Commission has maintained this position despite publishing detailed investigative reports on other matters, like its investigation into Momentum in 2019 and Vote Leave/BeLeave/Veterans for Britain/Darren Grimes in 2018.

However, having looked at the documents from the Labour Party, the more limited number of documents released to me by the Electoral Commission based on FOI requests, and new details about what the Labour Together Project was doing behind the scenes, I don’t find Labour Together’s version convincing. Or, more precisely, it is my opinion that the totality of evidence about the Labour Together Project, not least its capacity and appetite for misdirection and subterfuge, when read alongside the FOI requests and Labour Party files, could just as plausibly give rise to the suspicion that McSweeney’s failure to report donations was intentional.

Call logs to the Electoral Commission: the receipts

We turn to the FOI disclosures first. In late December 2023, the Commission finally released documents to me showing that it had explicitly told McSweeney that Labour Together needed to report its donations.

The FOI disclosures included records of a call between McSweeney and an unidentified person at the Commission dated November 14, 2017. The call was logged in the Commission’s contact system and appears to have been initiated by McSweeney. At the time of the call, Labour Together had received three donations that it had yet to report, including one donation of £10,000 from Chinn and two donations totalling £38,000 from Taylor. McSweeney had by this time already set in motion his secret plan to destroy Corbynism.

Under the heading ‘detail’, the call log records that:

Labour Together have not been reporting donations to us, Mr McSweeney was under the impression that Labour Together did not have to report because they do not campaign. However, Labour Together is a registered MA [members association] on our system. Mr McSweeney says that they are not a members association and this is where the confusion started.

The unidentified Commission advisor told McSweeney:

to report the donations to us with a cover letter saying why they had not been reported sooner and said that if the details in the system were wrong, we can review it.

A members association is an “organisation that is not a political party, but is wholly, or mainly, made up of members of a political party”, the Commission would later tell McSweeney. Members associations are required by law to report to the Electoral Commission donations they make and receive above £7,500.38.

Did ‘not campaign’, except that’s exactly what Labour Together did

McSweeney’s claim that Labour Together “did not campaign” is striking. By the time of this call in November 2017, McSweeney had already told Labour Together insiders that it should prepare to incubate a future leadership bid once its undisclosed political projects had contributed to the defeat of Corbynism.

McSweeney’s plan also involved fostering an ecosystem of influencers and publications to rival pro-Corbyn alternative media in order to achieve his political aims. Indeed, McSweeney would literally script a podcast called Changing Politics! Furthermore, this podcast engaged directly in political campaigning, without any public acknowledgment that it was funded by Labour Together and part-written by McSweeney.

“So excited for @changingpolipod”, Hannah O’Rourke, an employee of Labour Together, tweeted one day before the first episode was released in late June 2018. “[It is] the first all female presented [sic] political podcast that connects politics to actually campaigning”, she enthused.

Labour Together extolling the virtues of the Labour Party

The first episode of the podcast focused on Seni’s Law: a laudable piece of legislation to improve the treatment of people with mental health issues. Seni’s Law was submitted as a Private Members’ Bill by none other than Steve Reed, McSweeney’s long-time ally and collaborator on the Labour Together Project, as well as the shadow minister for civil society. Reed was given five minutes of the tight thirty-minute runtime of the first episode to sell the bill. The episode closed with a call for members of the public to contact their MPs to push for them to attend the next reading of Reed’s bill the following week and vote it through the Commons.

The podcast’s Twitter feed also extolled Seni’s Law and prominently featured Steve Reed. “Steve’s the MP for Croydon North who is pushing Seni’s Law through Parliament”, the Changing Politics Twitter account explained, sharing Reed’s own endorsement for the show. “Follow him for updates”. The podcast’s Facebook account was also used to set up a Facebook group called ‘Changing Politics Campaign for Seni’s Law’. In February 2019, the podcast’s Twitter account shared a video produced by Labour Together that extolled the historic virtues of the Labour Party.

Political podcast scripted by none other than… McSweeney

This was an extraordinary situation, regardless of the virtue of Seni’s Law. Just over seven months after McSweeney had told the Electoral Commission that Labour Together “did not campaign”, the organisation was using its undeclared donations to pay for and launch a podcast, scripted in part by McSweeney himself, that was explicitly “campaign[ing]” for a bill introduced and backed by Steve Reed, a shadow cabinet minister and McSweeney’s fellow Labour Together director – all without any public disclosure of these connections.

The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to purchase directly from www.orbooks.com from Monday 13 October. E-books will be instantly available to buy. Hard-copies bought via OR Books will be delivered directly from its warehouses and arrive shortly.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

From Canary via this RSS feed