Reports that McSweeney’s successor Josh Simons will head Burnham’s No 10 policy unit suggest this is part of a wider ruling-class project to reassemble as much of the Mandelson-McSweeney project as possible and ensure it remains the dominating influence in government.
Simons headed Labour Together when it hired private investigators to smear and intimidate journalists who had helped expose its financial misconduct, notably Holden but including the Morning Star’s Andrew Murray.
It would be the height of folly for Burnham to give Simons a political role, whether or not this was the gentlemen’s agreement that saw Simons resign his Makerfield seat to let Burnham run.
It would reinforce the “jobs for the boys” impression of government by clique and confirm that the system looks after its own, no matter how outrageous their behaviour.
It would show that the disgraced think tank is still in charge …
dizzy: Looks like we have no change apart from the front man. I am disappointed in those that abandoned their stated intentions and contributed to achieving this … It wasn’t without warning, was it?
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer visits STARK, a defense tech company on June 5, 2026 in Swindon, England. Photo by Alastair Grant – WPA Pool / Getty Images.
Story by Paul Holden
… Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government is not really a Labour government; it came to power on the back of a secret project to wrest control of the Labour Party back from an ascendant left wing. This secret project was resourced by illegally undeclared money from wealthy donors, funneled through a seemingly anodyne think tank called Labour Together. It involved covertly seeding promiscuous claims of antisemitism against political opponents, attempting to silence independent media that threatened to expose its project, and—ultimately—developing the dishonest leadership pitch that allowed Keir Starmer to trick a left-wing membership to elect him leader.
Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary responsible for the ban on Piker and Uygur, was one of a ‘brave band’ of eight MPs that guided the Labour Together project during the leadership of Starmer’s left-wing predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.
The MP who has most loudly demanded Piker and Uygur’s banning is David Taylor. Elected in 2024 as part of the Labour’s landslide, Taylor was closely vetted and approved by a Labour Party bureaucracy reporting directly to Labour Together’s long-time former managing director. And the single largest donor to Taylor’s election campaign was Labour Together.
Piker and Uygur were not banned by the Labour Party—they were banned by the Labour Together party. The primary architect of the Labour Together project is Morgan McSweeney, who was, until recently, Starmer’s chief of staff and widely understood as the real force running the government. McSweeney resigned in February after it was revealed he had pushed Peter Mandelsohn as the UK’s ambassador to the U.S., despite knowing of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
I know McSweeney’s capacity for destroying free speech—and especially criticism of Israel—first-hand. I have been investigating the Labour Together Project since 2021, setting out my findings in my book, “The Fraud.” As a result, I was one of multiple journalists targeted by Labour Together. I was reported by Labour Together to the UK’s cybersecurity agency, in an apparent attempt to catalyze criminal investigations into me and my colleagues.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
dizzy: Josh Simons was the MP for Makerfield who gave it up so that Andy Burnham could contest it. Makerfield was considered a safe [ed: Labour] seat and awarded to Simmons as payback for his work as director, following Morgan McSweeney, of the Labour Together group. Labour Together – since rebranded as ThinkLabour – employed dishonest and evil tactics to have Keir Starmer installed as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. Having been handed the seat of Makersfield, Andy Burnham is able to contest the leadership of the Labour Party. The cynical might regard it as a convenient stitch-up [ed: stitched-up, manipulated part of a larger plan]. I expect no meaningful change.
Revealed: APCO legal letter warned Simons to cease making “misleading statements” about PR firm’s “incredibly useful” dossier on journalists investigating Labour Together.
By Peter Geoghegan and Khadija Sharife
Josh Simons has had a good couple of weeks. The former Cabinet Office minister – forced to resign over his role in hiring a PR firm to investigate journalists critical of Labour Together – is now being praised for standing aside as Makerfield MP to clear the path for Andy Burnham.
Simons is reportedly “across everything” in Burnham’s campaign and is hotly tipped for a top role in any future administration led by the Greater Manchester Mayor. There’s even talk of a seat in the House of Lords.
But not everyone is so enamoured with Simons.
Democracy for Sale can report that days after Simons resigned from the Cabinet Office – following revelations in this newsletter – he received a legal letter on behalf of the PR firm he had paid more than £30,000 to investigate journalists reporting on Labour Together’s undeclared political donations.
In the lawyer’s letter, reported here for the first time and reproduced below, APCO Worldwide privately accused Simons of making “misleading statements” about his role in the scandal and of changing his story in ways that were “wrong in numerous important respects” – and even of suggesting APCO could do more work for Labour Together.
…
APCO did not just dispute Simons’ February 11 statement. His version of events, it said, had “evolved” in the two weeks before his resignation – in ways that were “inconsistent with the facts”.
In his resignation letter to Keir Starmer on February 28, Simons said he “did not know” that the Sunday Times’s Harry Yorke and Henry Dyer of the Guardian had been targeted by APCO, and that once he saw the “reprehensible material” about Pogrund “I took immediate action and removed it.”
APCO flatly rejected this. “No such indication was given to APCO. You did not raise a complaint or objection to the work product delivered. On the contrary, you described it as ‘incredibly useful’ and stated a desire to continue to work with APCO. Your statement ‘What happened subsequently was wrong’ in your resignation letter is inconsistent with your statements to APCO and actions at the time.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer during a Small Business Protections Bill meeting at number 10 Downing Street, London, May 19, 2026
ONE of the most disgraceful episodes in the sordid history of the right-wing Labour Together faction was its hiring of professional snoopers to spy on and smear journalists looking into its misdeeds.
Their main target was Paul Holden, author of The Fraud, an immensely detailed exposé of the dishonesty, unscrupulous factionalism and outright illegality which attended Keir Starmer’s rise to power in the Labour Party and the country.
His own privacy and that of his family was rudely violated and absurd allegations about them passed off as fact. APCO, the blundering contractor hired to do this dirty work, extended their scope to also smear Gabriel Pogrund, a Sunday Times reporter who wrote up some of Holden’s findings, and Andrew Feinstein, a professional colleague of Holden who also, not irrelevantly, ran a powerful campaign to unseat Starmer in his Camden constituency in the 2024 election.
Still worse, this report was then submitted to the security services to try to provoke a probe into Russian-inspired hacking, an allegation for which there was not the slightest evidence.
Indeed, Labour Together probably did not believe the claim itself, since the reference to GCHQ was purely part of a media strategy to divert attention from their perhaps conscious failure to declare £730,000 in donations despite repeated official reminders to do so, the subject of Holden’s reporting.
dizzy: This article (read the rest or it) identifies Josh Simons as Labour Together’s director and now the MP abandoning the Makerfield constituency to allow Andy Burnham to challenge Keir Starmer. It all reeks of being sewn-up, deals made, politicians bought for promotion to high office. The central tenet of the in-control Labour Together, McSweeny, Josh Simons, Peter Mandelson, Keir Starmer – and now quite probably Andy Burnham – cabal is that they’re committed Zionists. Epstein was too.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Labour Together logo
Explosive revelations suggest that Labour Together, the think tank closely associated with former Downing Street Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, now has an ex-IDF soldier in its leadership. The details were uncovered by parliamentary candidate and campaigner Jody McIntyre, who pointed to earlier reporting describing Labour peer Jonathan Kestenbaum as a former Israeli soldier.
Labour Together remains one of the most politically sensitive organisations in the Starmer orbit: the Guardian has described it as closely linked to McSweeney and central to reshaping Labour after the Corbyn period.
McIntyre, who has made a series of exclusive revelations about Labour and its pro-Israel networks, pointed to a 2010 Jewish Chronicle article describing Kestenbaum-nominated to the House of Lords by the Labour Party leadership in 2010- as “an ex-IDF soldier” and a holder of the Israeli army’s “outstanding soldier award”.
In November 2010, a single paragraph in the Jewish Chronicle described Jonathan Kestenbaum as “an ex-IDF soldier [and] holder of the Israel army’s ‘outstanding soldier award’”.
The same Jewish Chronicle piece is still available online, but according to McIntyre this history is absent from much of Kestenbaum’s recent public profile. “What, I wonder, will they make of the arrival in their midst of an ex-IDF soldier, a holder of the Israel army’s “outstanding soldier award”? said the article commenting on Kestenbaum’s appointment to the House of Lords.
McIntyre also drew attention to Kestenbaum’s links to Bnei Akiva, a religious Zionist youth movement whose UK branch says it promotes “a religious Zionist worldview” and seeks to play an active role in the development of the state of Israel.
The revelations fit a broader pattern about the Starmer project’s links to pro-Israel networks. In September last year, McIntyre’s investigation into Morgan McSweeney, reporting that the prime minister’s former chief of staff had, in his youth, lived on Sarid, a Zionist settlement built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Ikhneifis.
That same report said Labour Together secretly accepted more than £730,000 (around $930,000) in undeclared donations between 2017 and 2020, and linked part of that funding to businessman Trevor Chinn, a longtime backer of Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel.
Labour under Keir Starmer has faced questions over support from donors linked to apartheid-era South Africa and pro-Israel lobbying circles. A 2023 report described Labour’s then new megadonor, Gary Lubner, as a pro-Israel businessman whose family company had profited from South African apartheid. Lubner denied the allegations, but the findings added to concerns about the political and financial networks surrounding Starmer’s leadership.
Labour also faced controversy in 2021 over its recruitment of Assaf Kaplan, a former Israeli military intelligence officer from Unit 8200, into a sensitive “social listening” role. Unit 8200 is Israel’s signals intelligence division, often compared to the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ.
Unit 8200 has long been dogged by allegations over its surveillance of Palestinians. In 2014, 43 reserve soldiers from the unit publicly accused it of collecting private information on Palestinians not for security purposes, but to facilitate political persecution, coercion and recruitment of informants.
Lawyers challenging Kaplan’s appointment argued that Labour had placed someone linked to such a unit in a role involving political monitoring inside a major British party.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
