EXCLUSIVE: One of the first journalists to be given access to the book which has been sending shockwaves along Downing Street and making headlines on Fleet Street, Inside Croydon columnist ANDREW FISHER reviews The Fraud
Lots of books are written about British politics. Most are dreadful, gossipy affairs that, at best, contain a few mildly diverting anecdotes while fawning over their subject and glossing over the substance.
The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is different.
Investigative journalist Paul Holden, the book’s author, reveals how the fraudulent Labour Together project “was driven primarily by a man named Morgan McSweeney and by Steve Reed”. Both McSweeney and Reed will be familiar figures to readers of Inside Croydon.
Reed has been a Croydon MP since 2012, while McSweeney worked as Reed’s chief aide during his time as leader of Lambeth Council. McSweeney also worked for The Campaign Company, the Croydon-based public relations firm owned by David Evans, who Keir Starmer installed as Labour’s General Secretary when he became party leader in 2020. Today, McSweeney is the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff at No10 Downing Street.
The Fraud has already been a deeply impactful book which has claimed the scalp of Downing Street’s director of strategy and, quite plausibly, No10’s director of communications, too. Further resignations of Downing Street staffers, MPs, councillors and now senior government officials may be warranted, too, as the book is finally published.
In focus: central to the allegations in the book The Fraud is Morgan McSweeney, PM Keir Starmer’s chief of staff who used to work at Lambeth Town Hall and Croydon-based The Campaign Company
The findings in Holden’s book have generated a renewed focus on the murky goings on of Labour Together, an organisation which too often went under-investigated as it morphed from its professed pluralistic stance within the Labour Party and into a factional funnel for undeclared donations from wealthy individuals.
Labour Together once declared, “Our aim is to be broadly inclusive, and to involve people right across the movement. Jeremy Corbyn has rightly challenged the Labour Party to re-think the way it does politics.”
As Holden notes, Steve Reed, one of Labour Together’s co-founder, “bragged in 2023 that ‘in 2017 Labour Together developed a strategy for defeating the Hard Left’.”
So even their foundation claim of pluralism was a fraud.
Reed also boasted that “in 2020, [Labour Together] played a key role in Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, and Keir has since transformed our party”.
But the group denies having made any donations – in cash or in kind – to Starmer’s leadership campaign. This is even more strange given that Trevor Chinn – a major donor to Labour Together – is also quoted as saying Labour Together had “played a significant role” in getting Starmer elected as Labour leader.
Front page news: allegations in Paul Holden’s book have been generating Fleet Street headlines for weeks
These private views of Reed and Chinn were contradicted publicly by Shabana Mahmood, now the Home Secretary, who in February 2020 claimed that “Labour Together is not supporting any particular leadership campaign”.
But Mahmood’s claims of neutrality are themselves then contradicted by Labour Together’s own claim made in April 2023 that, “in 2020, with Morgan McSweeney as Director, [Labour Together] united the party behind Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign”.
But they also broke the law, admitting that they failed to fulfil the requirements of the Electoral Commission in declaring donations amounting to more than £800,000, which resulted in Reed, now the MP for Streatham and Croydon North and a member of Starmer’s front-bench team in government, being fined £14,250 for his failures as a Labour Together director to make the proper declarations – as this website was reporting almost five years ago.
That the Electoral Commission has recently refused to reopen its investigation into the undeclared donations exposes a weakness and laxity that risks being exploited by Reform and other parties in the future.
As Holden says, “I have enough evidence to plausibly argue that Morgan McSweeney may have purposefully broken the law when he failed to report hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Electoral Commission.”
He does, and yet the Electoral Commission has decided to look the other way.
More concerningly, the Electoral Commission has refused at least three Freedom of Information requests for copies of its investigative report into Labour Together.
As Holden writes in The Fraud, by not declaring these massive donations to Labour Together, “While McSweeney was running Starmer’s [leadership] election campaign, he was simultaneously breaking the law.”
First reports: Inside Croydon was reporting on the undeclared donations scandal almost five years ago
Holden likewise raises questions for the Electoral Commission emerging from the “Ergon House” operation, in which Labour right-wingers deliberately undermined their own party at the 2017 General Election.
As reported by the party’s own inquiry conducted by Martin Forde QC, some staff at Labour HQ secretly diverted party funds to the constituencies of their political allies and friends, while denying campaign money to marginal seats that Labour had a chance of winning.
Labour took 40% of the vote at that 2017 General Election, removing Tory Prime Minister Theresa May’s Commons majority and creating a hung parliament, though crucially not quite enough to put then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street.
In his book, Holden finds evidence to suggest that local spending by sitting Labour candidates in some constituencies may have been declared by the party as “national spending”, to avoid stricter local spending limits. Again, Holden says that this is a matter worthy of Electoral Commission investigation.
But the fraud alleged by Holden is as much moral as its is legal.
Keir Starmer, for example, pretended to be “the heir to Corbynism”, with his leadership campaign’s “10 Pledges” in 2020. But these had almost entirely vanished before the 2024 election, as had his commitment to party unity, democratic MP selections and an end to factionalism.
The disappeared: Starmer’s 2020 selection pledges have been erased from the Labour Party’s website
In The Fraud, Holden notes how Labour’s 2024 manifesto mentioned “inequality” just once.
Yet the tackling of inequality had been the central theme of the 2017 “For The Many, Not The Few” manifesto which I, as Labour’s policy director, had been closely involved in producing, and which Starmer previously praised as his “foundational document”.
Holden also uncovers Reed and McSweeney’s involvement in the antisemitism crisis that engulfed the later years of Corbyn’s leadership.
Addressing this subject requires care, and Holden is right that “there was and is antisemitism in the Labour Party”. But he observes that it was not “pervasive throughout the party”.
Perhaps the biggest revelations come in Holden’s account of how Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together actively worked to lobby the Equality and Human Rights Commission to conduct an investigation into antisemitism within the Labour Party.
Holden exposes the links to pro-Israel lobbyists that inflamed the issue, and also notes that in 2020, Reed “submitted dossiers on 10 individuals to the head of Labour’s Governance and Legal Unit”. Four of the 10 on Reed’s list were Jewish!
Dodgy dossier: Steve Reed waged a campaign against Inside Croydon
Reed also found time as an MP to write a dossier against the editor of Inside Croydon, which he submitted to the party, accusing Steven Downes of acting to “undermine public confidence and support in the Labour Party”, at the time this website was exposing Croydon Council’s multi-million-pound mismanagement that led to its financial collapse.
It is what most reasonable people might otherwise recognise as accurate and entirely justified journalism, the kind of journalism which Inside Croydon has continued to pursue during the equally disastrous leadership of Conservative Mayor Jason Perry.
That ought to give you a taste for how The Fraud lifts the lid on a uniquely corrupt, malicious and factional period in Labour’s history, which has hollowed out what was once a mass movement.
In many ways, the collapse in Labour’s membership numbers ahead of the 2024 General Election mirrors the collapse in Labour’s public support post-election. Just as Labour’s members felt defrauded, so the British public has been betrayed by broken promises, deceit and scandal.
Holden’s book shows the contempt with which senior Labour figures around Keir Starmer hold not just the left, but also truth, decency and the law.
Read more: The Fraud exclusive extract: how Reed’s Labour spied on Croydon councillors
Get 20% off the cover price of the sensational new book, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy, by investigative journalist Paul Holden, which has already rocked Downing Street- Visit the website of the publishers OR Books by clicking here and enter this discount code INSIDEFRAUD20 for this special, money-saving offer (valid until Oct 31, 2025)
- From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn
- Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
- Click here for more by Andrew Fisher
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This book is on my wants list. I am afraid to say that although there are many, many Labour Party supporters and members who are upstanding and true, they are being constantly undermined and ignored by those Councillors and MPs who have purposely discarded their moral and political compasses.
20% off for subscribers, Bob…
“All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” as someone once said …
Some will say that the revelations in Paul Holden’s book are just about internal Labour Party matters. But their importance is magnified by the fact that the same people who were responsible for these machinations are now in important positions in the running of our country.