Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (right) and then British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson during a welcome reception at the ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC, February 27, 2025
LABOUR MP Ian Byrne got to the heart of the Mandelson crisis in the Commons on Wednesday. Namely, he made the point that it is in fact a Mandelson-McSweeney-Labour Together scandal and the measures taken by the government in the wake of the New Labour grandee’s disgrace only scratch the surface of what is needed.
Byrne told MPs that the row over Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to Washington in December 2024 “was not just a catastrophic error of judgment that has caused profound damage to this government’s reputation.
“It was the result of a clique at the top of the party, as we have seen with the Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together scandal, which I and colleagues … have called on the Prime Minister and the general secretary of the Labour Party to launch an independent investigation into.”
Socialist Campaign Group secretary Richard Burgon underlined the point, asking how Mandelson was even considered for the Washington job.
“It is because it suited the interests of a tiny faction in the Labour Party, funded by big business, which wanted Mandelson at the heart of things in order to shift a Labour government away from the agenda that a real Labour government should have.
“That is why Mandelson was popular with these people … and that is why, despite his despicable character, despite his greed and his avarice, he was put in that position.”
Downing Street chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, in Downing Street, central London, ahead of the visit today of President Zelensky, October 10, 2024
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McSweeney deceitfully claimed that Labour Together was about uniting factions in the party. In reality, it ran a concealed campaign to undermine leader Jeremy Corbyn and force him out of office.
It operated on the understanding that the party membership would never willingly embrace a rightwinger as leader and that the restoration of Labour to what it regarded as its only fit and proper stewards would have to proceed through lies.
Keir Starmer was the instrument of this project, used by McSweeney to pose as a continuer of Corbyn’s policy agenda, but in reality someone prepared to discard all the policies on which he won the leadership and hand the management of the party over to the hardest right-wing faction.
In running this deceit, Labour Together under McSweeney “forgot” to declare nearly three-quarters of a million pounds in donations to the Electoral Commission. It was found guilty of 20 breaches of electoral law.
It was unwilling to submit its funding by multimillionaires to scrutiny while it was secretly backing Starmer’s leadership bid, all the time denying that it was doing so.
All this and much more was revealed in the book The Fraud, by investigative journalist Paul Holden. Labour Together was anxious to divert attention from its law-breaking, since that would undermine McSweeney, by then virtually running Starmer’s Labour.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves – the very poorest and most vulnerable.Keir Starmer refuses to be outcnuted by Nigel Farage’s chasing the racist bigot vote.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.
Downing Street chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, in Downing Street, central London, ahead of the visit today of President Zelensky, October 10, 2024
A BLAIRITE think tank reportedly paid at least £30,000 for private investigations into journalists who exposed its failure to declare £740,000 said to have supported Sir Keir Starmer’s rise to power.
Labour Together was run by the PM’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney when it did not register the donations between 2017 and 2020.
Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons took the helm when Mr McSweeney left Labour Together in 2020 and joined Sir Keir’s team.
Under Mr Simons’s leadership in 2023, Labour Together hired APCO Worldwide to investigate journalists from the Guardian, the Sunday Times and other outlets and to identify their sources of stories about its funding, according to Democracy for Sale.
The late filings led to a £14,250 fine by the Electoral Commission in September 2021.
One of the APCO’s reports for Labour Together was reportedly an investigation into the London-based investigative outlet run by the South African journalists Paul Holden and Andrew Feinstein, Shadow World Investigations.
Mr Feinstein said: “Labour Together, led by Starmer’s Chief of Staff, tried to dig dirt on me, my colleague Paul Holden and our organisation.
“It was already known I was likely to stand in the election against Starmer. Their contempt for British democracy must lead to their removal from office and investigation by law enforcement.”
Ahmed then moved to work with Angela Eagle MP, who would soon challenge Corbyn for leadership of the Labour Party. During this period, Ahmed amplified an allegation that angry Corbynites had smashed Eagle’s window with a brick after she announced her leadership challenge. This incident had been dubbed ‘Brickgate’ in the media. In the midst of the resulting furore, Ahmed released a press statement on behalf of Eagle’s office that included numerous questionable claims for which he was later chastised by independent media. Ahmed’s statement, for example, alleged that a planned event at a Luton hotel where Eagle was slated to appear had been cancelled because the venue received threats.
Alas, the hotel quickly pooh-poohed the story. ‘Brickgate’, an entirely ludicrous affair, would nevertheless bolster the media narrative that left-wing members of the Labour Party who supported Corbyn were intolerant reprobates. It was a narrative that Ahmed and McSweeney would continue to foster, covertly, when they started working together in 2018.
Dogged investigations by independent bloggers and media outlets revealed that Eagle’s office window had not been smashed (it was instead a window on the ground floor in a shared office stairwell); the police had no evidence this incident was linked to Eagle; and there was no evidence the window had been broken by a brick. It eventually emerged that there wasn’t even a brick on the scene – just a stray piece of masonry on the road, which may or may not have played a role in the damage. Nobody knew, in fact, what had broken the window, or who had done it, or why – yet the incident still somehow retains its force as a shorthand for the alleged thuggishness of Corbynism.
Unsubstantiated accusations of homophobia
Brickgate was part of a broader attempt to defend Eagle’s position against the real prospect that her mostly leftwing constituency would organise and vote to deselect her. It coincided with an allegation made by Eagle’s supporters, and then by Eagle herself, that, at a critical meeting where left-wingers won control of the local Constituency Labour Party (CLP), members had engaged in rampant homophobia, including limping their wrists at a young gay man. The claim was never properly substantiated. It was also fiercely disputed by people who, unlike Eagle, were physically present at the meeting.
Emma Runswick, the self-identified ‘queer’ daughter of the CLP meeting’s chair Kathy Runswick, wrote in the New Statesman of how unimaginable it would be that her loving, accepting mother would ever tolerate such gross and blatant homophobia. In fact, the day after the meeting at which Kathy was said to have allowed homophobia to run amok (and at which she was elected chair of the CLP), she attended her daughter’s wedding – to another woman. Unsurprisingly, despite years of investigations and alarmist reporting, not a single individual was ever sanctioned or found guilty of homophobia in this case.
Nevertheless, Eagle’s supporters flooded the bureaucracy with complaints alleging that homophobia at the meeting, alongside a generalised air of left-wing menace, meant it was no longer safe or appropriate for the CLP to convene meetings. Of course, if the party agreed, the newly elected left-wing leadership of the CLP would be unable to move motions that could censure Eagle – or seek to replace her as an MP. Emails show that at this time, Labour Party bureaucrats opposed to the Corbyn leadership were working with Eagle to ensure her CLP remained suspended in order to prevent her deselection.
Discussing a forthcoming book by investigative journalist Paul Holden titled The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy.
Downing Street’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who was the director of the Labour Together think tank, undated image (PA)
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Holden’s book will contain allegations of irregularities concerning what he calls “a secret unlawful fund” and more than £700,000 of hidden donations to a think tank run by McSweeney.
These revelations are potentially dangerous for McSweeney. Far more importantly, they may impact viscerally on Starmer himself.
This is because, according to Holden, the purpose of McSweeney’s think tank, misleadingly called Labour Together, was to supercharge Starmer’s path to Downing Street.
Once Starmer was installed in No 10 he rewarded McSweeney by making him Downing Street chief of staff.
The Tory Party is now claiming that new evidence has come to light that “raises the question of whether a criminal offence has been committed”.
In a letter to the Electoral Commission, Tory chairman Kevin Hollinrake makes the devastating allegation that the “funds were used by Labour Together in a sustained political campaign to bring down Jeremy Corbyn and secure the election of Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour Party”.
This is especially significant because official records show Starmer did not declare any support from the group in the official Commons register.
Under the Commons code of conduct, MPs are required to declare support worth more than £1,500 designed to help their “candidacy at an election for parliamentary or non-parliamentary office”.
To put the charges made into plain English, the Tories are in effect accusing McSweeney of arranging a secret slush fund to launch Starmer into Downing Street.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (right) and then British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson during a welcome reception at the ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC, February 27, 2025
