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/
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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.
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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.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer (R) and then British ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson during a welcome reception at the ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC., February 26, 2025
… Parliament determined last month that all government communications relating to Peter Mandelson’s disastrous appointment as ambassador to Washington in December 2024 be made public.
That is to allow voters to understand how this first-order misjudgement, naming to the country’s most prestigious diplomatic post a man famous for his overaffection for the rich, twice dismissed from government amid scandal, and most importantly known for his prolonged intimacy with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
…
No communications are likely to have been more relevant to the appointment than those from and to McSweeney, then Downing Street chief of staff, effectively running the government as top aide to the ineffectual Keir Starmer.
McSweeney was mentored by Mandelson as a close associate in Labour’s unending factional wars, with the younger man carrying forward the latter’s obsessive hatred of the left and socialism.
It is clear that he was instrumental in pushing Keir Starmer to name Mandelson to Washington. It is believed that he was charged with asking the now-disgraced New Labour grandee about his relationship with Epstein.
While the Prime Minister bears the responsibility, it appears that this was a calamity engineered largely by McSweeney, whose messages on the subject would therefore be central to any understanding of it.
Yet it is now unclear if we will ever read them. Now, McSweeney announces that his mobile phone was stolen in London last year, a month after Mandelson’s enforced departure from Washington and when it was already highly likely that some form of public accounting for the misjudgement would follow.
The police concur that McSweeney reported the theft at the time it apparently occurred. Giving an incorrect location, and then asserting that he was near a park in east London when he was in fact miles away in Westminster may perhaps be attributable to the stress of the moment.
Failing to advise the police that he was the No 10 chief of staff, and that his device held any number of secret communications of state significance is far less comprehensible, since that omission must have downgraded the police response.
Still odder, No 10 is unable to confirm that the contents of McSweeney’s phone have been fully backed up in line with government regulations for handling official business.
So on this occasion, the stench of cover-up is powerful, however much Starmer may deny it.
Keir Starmer discusses Peter Mandelson, Jeffrey Epstein and the UK Labour Party’s tradition of excusing and protecting child rapists.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 confirms that he’s proud to be a red Tory continuing austerity and targeting poor and disabled scum.
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.”
