But what about the McSweeney Files? The virus that corrupted Labour

Bryn Jones assesses the investigative journalism that has exposed dirty dealings in the party

The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Labour Together, and the Crisis of British Democracy by Paul Holden published by OR Books

Morgan McSweeney’s fall from his key role in Keir Starmer’s government has given this book’s catalogue of deceit a relevance beyond the preoccupations of Labour critics and campaigners. Accounts of Starmer’s purge of most left-wing activists, and many MPs, was common knowledge in political circles. Crystal clear also was that many of this government’s policies and public stances had moved closer to those of the Tory right, and often to the right of that arch-triangulator, Tony Blair. What Paul Holden does in this detailed forensic history from 2017 to 2024 is to explain the who and how of this transformation. He shows that the remoulding of Labour was achieved by underhand, sometimes illegal methods and elaborate deceptions, channelled through a front organisation, Labour Together (LT), and a rigid attachment to external power-brokers, whether financial and business elites or advocates for the state of Israel. However, in the light of revelations from the Mandelson-McSweeney affair two particular strands of Holden’s analysis deserve closer attention.
            A colloquial motto for analysing political developments is to “follow the money”. So I’m looking here at the external financing of LT’s research that was used to promote Starmer to the leadership and the preferential internal financing of right-wing Labour MPs over left-wingers in general elections. This means skating over other key developments that Holden recounts in great detail. These include: the effective takeover of the originally innocuous LT campaign group by McSweeney; the sabotage of Labour’s 2019 election campaign and its aftermath; Starmer’s actual election as Labour leader; topic-framing misinformation projects that weaponised antisemitism allegations and led to internal purges and proscriptions; plus the intensive incorporation of business and financial interest in and beyond the 2025 election victory.
            Holden deploys primary sources – interviews and the legal receipt of huge tranches of internal Labour Party communications – to show how secret funding supported the Starmer cause. From the initial promotion of a Starmer leadership and its ties to the powerful pro-Israel lobby within the Party who were beholden to monetary fixes involving undeclared donations and covert manipulation of Party funds. Those involved in these money trails then played key roles at crucial stages in Starmer’s path to Number 10. 

Financing the Starmer Campaign
LT started as a broad policy-oriented group aiming to “unite” different sections of Labour’s “broad church”. However, by 2019, it had been repurposed into a vehicle dedicated to destroying “ Corbynism” and promoting Starmer as successor to Corbyn as Leader. Part of this covert enterprise involved paying for large surveys of Labour members and supporters in order to identify their most favoured policy stances. This data was then funnelled, again  covertly, to Starmer’s  campaign team, to inform the notorious “Ten Pledges” that cast the Shadow Brexit Secretary as a keeper of the Corbyn flame. Promises that were gradually junked – and never really meant – after he won.
            Only after Starmer won the Labour crown did it emerge that the financing for this and other LT campaigning was largely provided by two huge donations totalling £235,000 from businessmen Trevor Chinn and Martin Taylor. The former, also a director of LT, made other donations to Starmer and his regime that Holden implies may have been connected to expectations of support for Netanyahu’s Israeli government. However, Holden’s central and repeated criticism is that these and other donations, totalling £700,000, were not officially declared by  McSweeney and LT until  2020. This avoidance, which McSweeney attributed to “administrative error”, broke electoral law and ought to have incurred severe legal penalties. Since the publication of this book, the Conservative chair, Kevin Hollinrake, applied to the Electoral Commission to have the misdemeanour re-examined because the late and misreporting was deliberate. Rejecting this application, the Commission declared that the small fine levied on LT was sufficient and the case should not be reopened. As well as this illegality, Holden also shows that the concealment of this funding and the purpose of the surveys amounted to deception of Party members and misuse of their data.

The Chinn donation links to LT’s other mission: to support the UK’s Zionist establishment in “bigging up” charges of antisemitism against left-wing members and, particularly, the beleaguered Corbyn. Chinn has for years been a financial and political intermediary between Israeli governments and British political parties through Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel. These links built upon previous LT projects: the creation or support for “astroturf” campaigns such as the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and Stop Funding Fake News that spread antisemitism charges – smears aimed primarily at the Labour left.

Manipulation of Internal Party Funds

The internal Party counterpart to the Chinn-Taylor donations was the Ergon House affair. Anti-Corbyn Labour staff connived in the secret transfer of election funds from the main 2017 election campaign, via a special unit in the Ergon House offices, to a select list of right-wing MPs including Yvette Cooper and veterans like Tom Watson, Margaret Beckett, Mary Creagh, and a potential LT supporter, one Keir Starmer. Holden’s argument is that virtually none of these sitting MP candidates in safe seats needed that extra funding for Get Out The Vote materials. Had it gone instead to marginal constituencies that Labour failed to gain, these extra Labour gains would have slashed Theresa May’s bare Tory majority further, and a bigger contingent of Labour MPs might have then dictated the terms or composition of a minority or coalition government.

Key beneficiaries from these schemes were those Labour MPs who benefited from LT support or actively promoted its projects, as well as several Party officials. Of these, the most prominent were ex-Assistant General Secretary David Evans, Croydon-based owner of polling firm The Campaign Company, who later became Starmer’s new Party Secretary-General and Alex Barros-Curtis.  Via his Movement for Another Future company, the latter collated data for Starmer’s leadership bid. Barros-Curtis later became a senior official in Labour’s legal affairs unit and the Leader’s office, eventually becoming an MP in 2024. 

Notable MPs were Shabana Mahmood MP – an active LT member and prominent in Starmer’s leadership campaign – providing a springboard for her appointment as Justice, then Home Secretary, a role she took over from Yvette Cooper, another recipient of Ergon House slush funding for her 2017 General Election campaign. Plus, of course, Keir Starmer himself, who was not a LT activist but, in Holden’s account, was identified early on as “groomable”. LT combined with the Arlington Group of disaffected ex-MPs to recruit Starmer to front their plans for a leadership takeover.                                                                                                                                    

Conclusions

            The sheer mass of evidence cited – covering nearly 600 pages – bolsters the credibility of Holden’s account. However, it does not answer more general questions. Does the mass of “trees” obscure the “wood”? Holden doesn’t reveal what, apart from visceral hatred of the Labour left, drives and motivates the plotters. Like their figurehead Starmer, there seems to be no definite ideology beyond an instinctive bias towards Blairist policies and hatred of the Labour left. Some do seem to have a penchant for the perks of power: acceptance of “freebies” and the trappings of an elite lifestyle. But these barely meet legal definitions of corruption and don’t amount to significant material corruption.
            Another puzzle is the identity of the main plotters. The Croydon set, which leveraged McSweeney’s career, were a fringe group who, at the time of their rise, were relatively small fry in the Labour establishment. Largely absent from Holden’s script are Labour’s “big beasts”, such as the now disgraced Labour ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, or ex-PM Tony Blair and his lobbying empire. Did such powerful figures simply sit on the sidelines as McSweeney, who rose from a lowly role as political aide to Croydon councillor, and now Minister, Steve Reed, and a handful of apparatchiks built the network to subvert the Party? One explanation might be that Labour’s veteran “barons” didn’t need to engage directly with the LT project because the Party bureaucracy that they hadinstalled could be relied on to obstruct and oppose Corbyn’s fragile regime.

What Holden’s account does confirm is that the project’s defining ethos – deceit and amoral authoritarianism – has now saturated the whole Party machinery. A culture embodied in Starmer’s leadership and the elevation of LT’s favoured MPs, plus McSweeney and his associates. The recent exclusion of Andy Burnham from standing for Parliament is a case in point. Holden ends by suggesting that this amoral ruthlessness will destroy Labour’s electoral credibility. A claim echoed by ex-LT MP Jon Cruddas.

In the wake of the Mandelson affair, sceptics have shrugged off the outrage, claiming that politics, especially party politics, has and always will be an inherently squalid, amoral business. That “national interests”, an all-intrusive and malevolent media, as well as confidential deals, necessitate deceit. That backstabbing and party infighting are part of the deal. Perhaps, but in the case of the Starmer-McSweeney dirty tricks operations deceit has become so habitual as to undermine trust in any of its policies and promises. The massive furore and cynicism over the appointment and then removal of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the U.S. being one glaring symptom.
 

To summarise:

• LT, its participants and activities became effectively a “party within a  party’. A virus that eventually invaded most of the organisation, an affliction comparable to the Militant Tendency’s “entryism” in the 1980s. Is such “entryism” only unacceptable when it comes from the Left?
• As a result of LT’s strategy, Labour is mainly dependent on and subject to policy capture by big business, especially the finance sector. Only two major unions donated to Labour’s 2025 election campaign fund.
• The pre-existing influence of pro-Israel funders and MPs (most of the Cabinet are Friends of Israel and several are former LT members) has become entrenched.
• If Labour is to recover a semblance of internal democracy, its entire byzantine Labour bureaucracy must become more accountable to the Party as a whole, not just to its Leaders. They are virtually free to appoint senior officials like General Secretaries from McNicol through Evans to Hollie Ridley; these, effectively factional fixes, were usually nominees of the Labour right.
• Starmer’s image as a puppet; do his much-publicised weaknesses stem from obligations to his LT backers? His attempt to appoint Unite’s Anneliese Midgley as General Secretary in 2020 was quashed by McSweeney et al who pushed for David Evans instead, with Starmer impotent to resist. Similarly, Starmer was allegedly strong-armed into the appointment of Mandelson as ambassador to Washington, against his initial preference.

Starmer has no distinctive ideology, no factional support base within the Party, but a track record of deference to those with more power or influence. Complicity in the LT misdemeanours in his leadership campaign made him beholden to McSweeney. Allegations are now proliferating that McSweeney was, in turn, an agent and proxy for the perennially disgraced Mandelson, who appeared at Number 10 to promote his preferred picks in the September 2025 Cabinet reshuffle. Any further revelations of amoral rule flouting will almost certainly end the Number 10 tenancy that the plotters fought so deviously to achieve.