In the fourth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we look at Keir Starmer’s bid to be leader of the Labour Party – and how Morgan McSweeney engineered it. This is the fourth part of Chapter One.
On December 6 2017, an unidentified Commission staffer wrote to McSweeney. They informed him that Labour Together was correctly registered as a members association and that Labour Together was therefore required to continue to declare donations.
“As the Board of Labour Together is made up of Labour Party members, it is considered to be a Members Association”, the Electoral Commission confirmed. The response went into considerable detail about what donations members associations were supposed to report and provided guidance on what forms to fill in and where to download them. It reminded McSweeney that donations had to be made within thirty days of receipt.
Potentially serious legal consequences of McSweeney correspondence
Further correspondence in February 2018 shows McSweeney engaging with an Electoral Commission official about how to report donations; the Commission pointed out that he had filled in a form incorrectly when reporting a single donation.
This correspondence has potentially serious legal consequences. When the Electoral Commission began its investigation into Labour Together in 2020, Labour Together was asked to provide the Commission with any and all information relevant to the matter. Party emails show that McSweeney receive the correspondence in which this request was made clear. They also show that McSweeney was being consulted about Labour Together’s response to the Electoral Commission in February 2021, as the Electoral Commission investigation was ongoing, even though he had already stepped down from Labour Together as a director. McSweeney was pencilled in to meet Labour Together’s lawyers to discuss the issue the following month, apparently ahead of sending a response to queries raised by the Electoral Commission.
Emails show that McSweeney was told that it was possible that the Electoral Commission had failed, during its investigation, to identify the existence of his call to the Commission in November 2017. If it is true that the Commission was unaware of the call, it is something the Commission is going to have to work extremely hard to explain and justify.
Electoral Commission has questions to answer too
Email correspondence shows that the idea was floated with McSweeney that no mention should be made of his call to the Commission. Emails also show that Labour Together’s initial correspondence with the Commission made no mention of McSweeney’s call, or the clear and explicit directions that the Commission gave to McSweeney of the need to report donations and how to do so.
Email correspondence also shows that McSweeney was sent copies of the Electoral Commission’s correspondence with Labour Together up until March 2021, as well as Labour Together’s response to the Commission, quoted above, all of which neglected to mention McSweeney’s call and asserted that the failure to report was due to an “administrative oversight”.
One important caveat: the available documentation concerning how the Commission and Labour Together addressed this issue does not go beyond March 2021. It is possible that Labour Together decided, at some later point, to acknowledge McSweeney’s call. The Commission has failed to answer whether this is so – all the more reason why it is so imperative that the Commission release the investigative report it drafted in preparation for levying its fine.
On the available evidence, there is an urgent need to establish precisely what Labour Together told the Commission.
McSweeney lies to Labour MPs’ faces
More alarmingly still, there is evidence that, in my opinion, raises serious questions as to whether McSweeney may have deliberately chosen not to report donations to the Electoral Commission: first, we have the correspondence between the Electoral Commission and McSweeney. This indisputably establishes that McSweeney had put it to the Commission that Labour Together did not have to report donations as it did “not campaign” and that the Commission repeatedly informed McSweeney that Labour Together was indeed required to report donations, and how to do so.
Second, as noted above, the Sunday Times reported in November 2023 on McSweeney and his failure to report donations. The article was prompted by my decision to give certain documents to Times reporter Gabriel Pogrund. The paper spoke to a well-placed MP who had attended a Labour Together meeting in parliament in 2019. This source claimed that the issue of reporting donations was raised in that meeting, and that McSweeney was directly asked in front of the assembled MPs whether Labour Together was properly reporting its donations to the Electoral Commission. McSweeney, according to the source, affirmed that Labour Together was reporting its donations properly. In reality, Labour Together failed to report even a single donation as required by law throughout the entirety of 2019.
Misinforming the public
As McSweeney was reportedly misinforming MPs, Labour Together was simultaneously misinforming the public. From at least April 2019, Labour Together’s website claimed that:
we are funded by donations small and large from activists, trade unions and members who recognise our network needs to exist.
It then directed readers to the Electoral Commission’s donation register, providing a hyperlink to the Electoral Commission’s searchable database with the phrase ‘Labour Together’ pre-filled in. Of course, anybody clicking that link in April 2019 would not have seen the majority of the donations Labour Together had received in 2018 and 2019, because McSweeney had not reported them.
Labour Together would repeat this claim, and again direct people to the Electoral Commission’s register, in an article published by LabourList in February 2020, when McSweeney was still neglecting to report donations while acting as the campaign chief for Starmer’s Labour leadership bid.
Shabana Mahmood laying cover in LabourList
The February 2020 article, written on behalf of Labour Together and incorrectly telling the public that Labour Together was reporting its donations, was penned by Shabana Mahmood, who would later be appointed the lord high chancellor and secretary of state for justice. As discussed later, this was not the only inaccurate or incomplete claim Mahmood made in that article, which, taken together, must raise questions about her suitability for her current role as the safekeeper of the UK’s legal system.
The FOI documents, the MP’s testimony, and the Labour Together website all indicate that the organisation in general and McSweeney himself were repeatedly informed of the legal requirement to report donations and were simultaneously testifying that this was taking place – when it was not. Is it really credible that, in light of these repeated reminders and public statements, Labour Together just absent-mindedly forgot to disclose more than half a million pounds in politically sensitive donations?
A third relevant piece of evidence is what we now know about what McSweeney was actually doing. As the following chapters will show, while Labour Together was failing to report donations it also helped set up an astroturf campaign that fuelled the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’. It did so without any public disclosure – and, it appears, without informing Jon Cruddas MP, its own erstwhile director. It also worked to place damaging stories in the media about the same issue – again, without any public disclosure. At the same time, McSweeney was purposefully misleading all but a small group of insiders about what Labour Together was really doing, curating a façade of cross-factional bonhomie that would deflect close or critical scrutiny.
A propensity to misdirect, obscure, and plot in secret
We also now know that McSweeney was upfront about the biggest threat to his secret projects: discovery. As noted above, his 2017 SWOT analysis had warned that, if anybody found out what he and his allies were really doing, the initiative would fall apart. In my opinion, the SWOT analysis provides compelling evidence of motive: a need to avoid scrutiny and fly under the radar, so as to free the Labour Together Project’s hands to pursue its secret mission to destroy the Corbyn movement.
The Labour Together Project under McSweeney’s direction was arguably defined by this propensity to misdirect, obscure, plot in secret, and – as in the case of its February 2020 LabourList article – mislead the public about its work and activities.
As we’ve seen, Labour Together now brags about having strategised to destroy Corbynism whereas, at the time, it had adopted a public posture of studied neutrality and pretended to seek unity. Similarly, it now celebrates its part in Keir Starmer’s election as party leader, a role it explicitly denied playing at the time. Indeed, its secret projects, as McSweeney set out in the SWOT analysis, were entirely contingent on misleading people.
Substantive new evidence – enough for another probe
In these circumstances, would it be so surprising that Morgan McSweeney, who was incubating secret campaigns and misdirecting the public about his objectives, would take the exact same approach to his funding?
There is another crucial aspect to this: when the Electoral Commission conducted its investigation into Labour Together in 2020 and 2021, there was no hint that Labour Together was anything other than the anodyne, well-meaning think-tank it was claiming to be in public. The true nature of McSweeney’s projects being run via Labour Together have only very recently come to light.
This constitutes substantive new evidence that altogether recasts Labour Together’s failure to report donations; evidence indicating that McSweeney and his allies were comfortable with using deception to achieve their political objectives. This is one reason why I believe the Electoral Commission must not only release its investigative reports but also reopen its probe. The integrity of British democracy and the rule of law require it.
Starmer’s leadership bid
One way that Labour Together helped Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign was with access to polling. By the time McSweeney hooked up with Starmer in mid-2019 to incubate his candidacy, Labour Together had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on intensively polling the party membership. Polling was a declarable benefit under parliamentary reporting rules at the time. Starmer, if he did receive this sort of benefit above a certain value, would have been required to report it in his parliamentary spending declarations.
As of the end of 2023, not a single donation or benefit-in-kind flowing between Starmer and Labour Together appeared on the Electoral Commission’s donation register or in Starmer’s parliamentary declaration of interests.
Perhaps this is true. Perhaps Labour Together’s support was merely of the moral, or financially negligible, variety.
Perhaps it was spending its undeclared pot of funding on matters wholly unrelated to the very campaign that McSweeney was running while simultaneously sitting on the board of Labour Together, and even as Labour Together was helping Starmer win the leadership election – per its own subsequent online boasting.
McSweeney running Starmer’s campaign while breaking the law
Regardless, questions must arise about how McSweeney has been able to retain his roles in the Labour Party and as chief of staff to the prime minister. It is now incontrovertible that McSweeney caused Labour Together to break electoral law by failing to report donations over a long period of time. Then there is the matter of Labour Together breaking the law by failing to report donations valued at £147,500 during the period of Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign – while the organisation was secretly backing Starmer’s campaign (as it subsequently admitted) and while McSweeney still figured as its company secretary.
Three donations were made to Labour Together in January 2020, while a fourth was made in February (see Table 1). Labour Together failed to report the donations within the mandated thirty-day period, and still had not reported them by the time McSweeney resigned as Labour Together’s company secretary on April 4, 2020. In fact, Labour Together only reported these four donations in December 2020. Between January and April 2020, McSweeney served as the campaign chief for Starmer’s Labour leadership bid.
To reiterate: McSweeney was the company secretary of Labour Together while he was running Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign. During this period, Labour Together was breaking the law by failing to report donations; it was also secretly backing Starmer’s campaign while telling the public it was not supporting any particular candidate. During this period, Steve Reed and Lisa Nandy were also serving as directors of Labour Together; both were later appointed shadow ministers and then cabinet ministers under Starmer’s leadership. This means that two of Starmer’s future cabinet appointments, as well as his future chief of staff, served as the directors of a company that was breaking electoral law while secretly backing his Labour leadership campaign.
What a mess.
Original sin
McSweeney’s failure to report donations as required by law was the original sin of the Labour Together Project. Everything the project did between mid-2017 and at least April 2020 must be understood as having been done with a pot of money that Labour Together was failing to report to the authorities and the public in violation of the law – with compelling (albeit not conclusive) evidence suggesting that he might plausibly have done this on purpose.
In order to grasp precisely what the Labour Together Project was up to, and how problematic its interventions were, one has to understand, at least in broad outline, the nature and content of the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’ that raged for years under Corbyn’s party leadership. That controversy contributed to Labour’s 2019 electoral drubbing and, arguably, haunted and constrained how Starmer’s party navigated the ‘plausible’ genocide Israel went on to inflict in Gaza.
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
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