KEIR Starmer’s embattled chief of staff is facing fresh questions after it emerged he ignored official warnings to declare thousands of pounds of donations.
Morgan McSweeney was told explicitly he must declare donations to his Labour Together think tank, which was instrumental in propelling Keir Starmer to power, according to the Daily Mail.
Despite being told in November 2017 that gifts to the organisation were covered by electoral law and must be disclosed, McSweeney failed to do so.
He subsequently failed to report nearly £740,000 in gifts over a three-year period and the organisation was later fined for more than 20 breaches of electoral law.
Records released by the Electoral Commission show that McSweeney was told he must declare donations of more than £7500 – though he would go on to insist that the money could be kept hidden.
A leaked mail earlier this week showed that McSweeney had told Labour Party lawyers that he had been advised by the commission in “early 2018” that his organisation did not need to declare donations.
But Gerald Shamash, a lawyer for the party, told him that neither the Electoral Commission nor Labour Together had any record of this conversation taking place.
There was therefore “no easy way to explain how Labour Together finds itself in this situation” given the scale of the donations, Shamash said.
He told McSweeney (below) that the commission “have a record of a number of calls with Labour Together but none with you”.
McSweeney was advised that unless he could back up his claim, it risked antagonising the commission, which had by that point already launched a major investigation into the issue.
Shamash said that it would be better to portray the episode as an “admin error” and to “not refer to you at all”, which was the course of action eventually deployed by Labour Together.
The Electoral Commission does not have a record of a call with McSweeney in 2018 but it does have details of one the year before where he was told that Labour Together must declare its donations because it was a “members’ association” engaged in political activity.
He was told to declare all donations immediately and explain why he had failed to do so previously.
A summary of the call obtained by the Daily Mail read: “Labour Together have not been reporting donations to us. Mr McSweeney was under the impression that Labour Together did not have to report because they do not campaign.
“However, Labour Together is a registered members' association on our system [...] I advised him to report the donations to us with a cover letter saying why they had not been reported sooner.”
The watchdog followed this up the following month, explaining that Labour Together had a legal duty to report all donations of more than £7500.
The large sums of money were donated to the group by multimillionaire businessmen and venture capitalists and the think tank worked to undermine then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with a view to replacing him with Starmer.
Tory chairman Kevin Hollinrake (above) told the Mail: “The facts are clear. Morgan McSweeney engaged in a significant cover-up of a secret slush fund that he used to install Keir Starmer as Labour leader.
“No matter what spin Labour try and use, these documents and the leaked legal letters show that there is now nowhere for the Prime Minister's chief of staff to hide, even as Starmer continues to demonstrate his appalling judgment by backing him.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4, senior Tory shadow minister Alex Burghart said: “This is incredibly serious – it is a criminal offence to deliberately withhold information from the Electoral Commission about money you have received.”
He added that the email from Shamash “seems to show that Labour Together [...] deliberately withheld information from the Electoral Commission about donations it had received”.
A spokesperson for Labour Together said: "Labour Together proactively raised concerns about its own reporting of donations to the Electoral Commission in 2020. The Electoral Commission's investigation, with which Labour Together fully cooperated, was completed in 2021.
"The outcome was made public and widely-covered by the media at the time.
"Since this time we have taken measures to ensure Labour Together is fully compliant with all Electoral Commission regulations."
Labour were approached for comment.
