Good morning. It’s been a rough couple of months for Keir Starmer’s all-powerful consigliere, Morgan McSweeney. After Downing Street dragged its feet over the Peter Mandelson affair, many Labour MPs blamed the No 10 chief of staff; before long, some were arguing that he had to go.
Now, a well-timed leak, promoted with alacrity by the Conservatives and the Daily Mail, has put him on the front pages again – and while the new row has many of the features of a partisan bunfight, it raises real questions about the probity of Starmer’s most senior aide, and the judgment of the prime minister himself. This is not the build-up to Labour conference that Starmer would have wanted.
The story centres on Labour Together, a secretive campaign group run by McSweeney that played a key role in propelling Starmer to power, and an email which the Conservatives say shows he deliberately misled the Electoral Commission over donations. The government, for its part, is dismissing the story as a reheated exaggeration of a set of errors that have already been adjudicated.
Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s investigations reporter Henry Dyer – who was the first to report on questions over Labour Together’s donations in 2021 – explains what’s old, what’s new and what’s at stake. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
UK news | Deprived areas of the UK will be given tens of millions of pounds each from a new fund that Keir Starmer hopes will help Labour tackle the threat posed by Reform UK. More than 300 areas across the country will each be given the cash to patch up derelict shops, pubs and libraries.
Science | Huntington’s disease, a devastating degenerative illness that runs in families, has been treated successfully for the first time in a breakthrough gene therapy trial. The gene therapy slowed the progress of the disease by 75% in patients after three years.
Ukraine | Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appealed to global leaders to intervene to prevent Russia from leading the world through “the most destructive arms race in human history”, warning that the combination of drone technology and artificial intelligence would end in catastrophe.
US news | One detainee has been killed and two others injured in a shooting at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Dallas, officials said. A shell casing was engraved with the phrase “ANTI ICE”, according to a post from Donald Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel.
Environment | The world’s oceans have failed a key planetary health check for the first time, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels, a report has shown. In its latest annual assessment, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said ocean acidity had crossed a critical threshold for marine life.
In depth: ‘It is not a smoking gun, but McSweeney certainly has questions to answer’
In their excellent book about Keir Starmer’s rise to power, Get In, the political journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund describe the astonishing role Labour Together played in reshaping the Labour party after Jeremy Corbyn. Presented to Corbyn as an unthreatening campaign group that would work to unite Labour, the truth is that McSweeney ran it as a resistance movement that sought to erase his influence on the party for good.
The mission, according to a strategy paper written by McSweeney and quoted by Maguire and Pogrund: “Move the Labour party from the hard left when JC steps down as leader.” The crucial task: “A candidate to win a future leadership election on the political platform we are developing.” That candidate turned out to be Starmer.
Labour Together was hugely successful – and is now viewed by many on the left as a Trojan horse for the right of the party that operated with outrageous duplicity. But its success required money, and the rules said that donations would have to be declared. The failure to do so meant that the identity of their sources remained a secret.
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What are the allegations against McSweeney?
The story has blown up this week because of a leaked 2021 email from Labour lawyer Gerald Shamash to McSweeney, published by the Conservatives and said to have been “passed from within the Labour party to outside sources”. By this point, McSweeney was working for Starmer directly; but his successor at Labour Together, Hannah O’Rourke, had found that donations of £739,000 over almost three years had not been declared.
Shamash’s email sets out a suggested strategy to deal with the problem. There is “no easy way to explain how LT [Labour Together] finds itself in this situation”, he writes. And he says: “If LT cannot deal substantively with questions I pose then perhaps best to simply base our case as to the non‐reporting down as admin error.”
According to the Conservatives and the Mail, the message contradicts the public claim by Labour Together that it had been as “open and transparent” as possible and that the mistakes were down to “human error and administrative oversight”. That may technically be an overreach: the email doesn’t directly say that this wasn’t the reason, just that it would be the most sensible legal strategy to argue.
Still, it’s understandable if some read the email and conclude that the main interest is in what would make the problem go away. “It is not a smoking gun,” Henry Dyer said. “But McSweeney certainly has questions to answer.”
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Is this new information?
Anyone without a master’s in Labour Kremlinology could be forgiven for seeing this week’s stories and thinking that this is a new scandal. In fact, Henry first reported on it for Business Insider in 2021, with one story breaking the news that Labour Together was under investigation and another reporting the subsequent fine.
Two years later, the Sunday Times published a front-page investigation (£) that revealed the extent of McSweeney’s involvement, and how his decision to stop reporting donations meant that it appeared that major supporters had stopped giving, when in fact the donations were getting bigger.
“We’re not finding out about new donations that hadn’t come to light,” Henry said. But there is important information in the new stories, he noted – chiefly the way framing the issue was discussed. “Such a large administrative error is hard to comprehend. What this email appears to suggest is that saying that was a very deliberate tactic.”
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Why has it come out now?
Labour Together has said this week that the story was “widely covered by the media at the time”. But that’s not really true: when Henry’s first stories came out, they drew little wider attention. “The issue was that it came out during Covid, and so only people who were really invested in following this were interested,” he said. “There was a lot going on.”
Even the front page story in the Sunday Times drew limited follow-up, with the next day’s Daily Mail only deeming it worthy of coverage on page 10. Yesterday, Pogrund, one of the reporters on the piece, suggested that it was “awkward and not the right time in the political cycle”.
As Jessica Elgot drily notes in this analysis piece, “History is littered with the resignation letters of those who have tried to drive a wedge between Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney.” But with Starmer under fire and McSweeney already on the ropes, it’s certainly the right time in the political cycle for the Conservatives now. We don’t know when they obtained this email, or how – but its timing for the week before Labour conference and soon after the protracted sagas over Peter Mandelson and Angela Rayner suits them perfectly.
They, the Daily Mail, and the Mail on Sunday are certainly stretching it out for everything it’s worth, and perhaps a bit more: the Mail’s front page was preceded by essentially the same story in its sister paper, but without the email text. Last night Kevin Holinrake, the Tory party chair leading the charge, posted an X thread which he claimed was “new evidence” that Labour Together funded Starmer’s leadership campaign – but relies heavily on details drawn from the 2023 Sunday Times story.
The Mail has today splashed on a 2017 phone call between McSweeney and the Electoral Commission in which he was told that donations should be reported, and claimed it as an exclusive. But that fact had been published by the Conservatives two days earlier, and detailed in a response to a freedom of information request (PDF) in January last year.
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What did Labour Together do for Starmer?
Those who aren’t Conservative loyalists may think that, first and foremost, the Labour Together saga is about a secretive project to defenestrate Corbyn that might not have succeeded if the truth about the group backing Starmer had been known.
Starmer won the leadership promising to maintain the values Corbyn stood for, most infamously through his 10 pledges to party members – and then set about a comprehensive change of direction. The fact that his campaign was linked to a group whose main backers were Martin Taylor, a hedge fund manager, and Trevor Chinn, a businessman who had funded anti-Corbyn MPs and Owen Smith’s failed leadership challenge, might have seriously affected his chances.
“They were not the sort of donors who supported Labour under Corbyn,” Henry said. “It is difficult to square a leadership platform of continuity Corbyn with their financial support.”
Labour says Starmer’s campaign received no donations from Labour Together during the leadership election. McSweeney ran his campaign, and made use of his research on the party membership in his old job to direct operations; Labour said last night that the campaign paid his salary. Chinn and Taylor were direct donors to Starmer’s campaign but not declared until the race was over. And while Labour Together claimed not to support any one candidate at the time, a statement on its website later said: “In 2020, Labour Together played a key role in Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign.”
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Why else does this matter?
To the understandable fury of Corbyn supporters, that issue’s political significance has now receded. But even if you set it aside, or question whether there is as much fresh information in the Tories’ attacks as they claim, there are profound issues about how politics works raised by both the old stories and the new one.
“It’s about knowing who funds our politics,” Dyer said. “People do a lot of reporting and thinking about who’s giving money to an MP, or a frontbencher, or the party itself. But there are lots of groups like Labour Together that provide substantial support to politicians and avoid that transparency. If I give money to the Widget Association, and the Widget Association give money to an MP, but also got money from three other people, who’s to say if the money really came from me?”
What else we’ve been reading
The photographer Yushy spent three years shooting London’s underground raves. The results are beautiful. The only thing that’s missing is my invite! Aamna
When Keir Starmer welcomed Donald Trump to the UK last week, he heralded the “tech prosperity deal” as a great prize for the UK. But, Aditya Chakrabortty writes in this excellent column, the data centres that will result hold little promise to improve the lives of ordinary people. Archie
I loved reading about the personalised letters written by university students from similar backgrounds, sent to thousands of sixth formers with top GCSE results in some of England’s most deprived areas, encouraging them to consider university. Aamna
Today’s long read, an extract from a new book by the historian Mark Mazower, is a fascinating guide to how American Jewish support for Israel has shifted over the decades – and became “so essential to being Jewish that any deviation would itself seem remarkable”. Archie
This is a devastating read about the monumental hurdle imprisoned women in the US must overcome in managing a menstrual cycle. The lack of dignity afforded to these women is astounding. Aamna
Sport
Football | Nottingham Forest were denied victory in their opening Europa League when Antony’s late goal for Real Betis pegged them back to 2-2.
Cricket | Rob Key has all but confirmed Chris Woakes has played his last game for England and insisted Harry Brook’s promotion to vice-captain for the Ashes is not “an elaborate scheme” to oust Ollie Pope from the team.
Football | Fifa is not planning to expand the men’s World Cup to 64 teams for the centenary edition of the tournament in 2030, despite its president, Gianni Infantino, meeting a delegation of South American leaders to discuss the idea in New York.
The front pages
“PM gambles on new ‘levelling up’ funding to tackle rise of Reform,” is the splash on the Guardian on Thursday. “Pressure on PM to life two-child benefit cap,” is the focus at the Times, and at the Mail: “Starmer’s top aide WAS told by electoral watchdog that donations had to be declared.” “The country is sick of activist judges,” writes the Express. “Burnham: MPs want me to oust Starmer,” says the Telegraph.
“Sudden hope: breakthrough gene therapy can treat Huntington’s for first time,” is the lead story over at the i, while the Metro runs with: “Khan: Trump must have a crush on me.” “Afghan refugees goes on hols to, er, Afghanistan (then we let him back in!),” exclaims the Sun. The Mirror covers “Strictly star Thomas [Skinner] and the unpaid £50k Covid loan.” In the FT, it’s “Bond giant Pimco bets falling inflation will pave way for deeper BoE rate cuts.”
Today in Focus
Escaping Gaza City, while reporting on its destruction
Malak A Tantesh on fleeing the Israeli ground offensive in Gaza and becoming a reporter in the most dangerous place on Earth for journalists
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Kherson is possibly the most dangerous city in Ukraine. But in an underground shelter in the city, children are chasing each other between plastic chairs. Outside, mortars, artillery and drones fly their deadly paths back and forth across the Dnipro River that separates the city from Russian forces.
This makeshift underground play centre is one of the few places where kids can socialise in safety, and get support from teachers and psychologists. It was set up last year by the chair of a local housing association, Oleh Turchynskyi.
For a few hours, at least, the war can seem far away. When the explosions get too close, teachers working at the centre clap louder or turn up the music to drown out the noise.
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
