Starmer campaign group’s alarming assault on press freedom
Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together acted as a fifth column within the Labour party seizing control from the Corbynites and smearing journalists who exposed its dirty tricks. That deception is coming home to roost for Keir Starmer, says Alys Denby
Ever since the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, factional in-fighting has been a defining characteristic of socialism. Keir Starmer’s Labour is no different. Much of the present discontent on the government benches has its roots in the Prime Minister’s purge of the Corbynites and his wresting away of the party’s internal democracy from the left. Starmer ran for the leadership posing as the continuity Corbyn candidate, pledging wealth taxes, free movement and climate reparations. By the general election this had all undergone homeopathic levels of watering down to become the bland, anaemic promise of ‘change’.
That pivot to the centre returned Labour to electability, but the betrayal bred lasting resentment – alienating MPs, large sections of the membership and media outriders. The chief architect of the project was Morgan McSweeney, then the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, and the vehicle he used was the think tank/fifth column campaign group Labour Together. Now, with McSweeney forced from his job, the anger he helped to provoke is coming home to roost. But the full extent of the group’s deception is only beginning to emerge.
Deception
The Sunday Times has found that Labour Together paid US PR firm Apco £36,000 to compile a dossier on two of its journalists after they found the group had failed to properly declare £730,000 of donations. The document examined the “backgrounds and motivations” of Harry Yorke and Gabriel Pogrund, including distasteful assertions about Pogrund’s Jewish heritage and supposed ideological motivations. This smear campaign – codenamed ‘Operation Cannon’ – was aimed at discrediting the journalists by falsely suggesting they were part of a Russian conspiracy and had relied on emails hacked by the Kremlin. That is particularly absurd given that Pogrund is currently sanctioned by Russia.
All of us who believe in a free press should be appalled by this. Journalists should be able to accurately report matters of national interest without being harassed, intimidated and traduced as spies. Likewise foreign PR companies and lobbyists should not be able to operate in the shadows. Frontbenchers Lisa Nandy and Steve Reed were legal directors of Labour Together at the time and Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons directly commissioned the report. They all have serious questions to answer, but so too does the man who most benefited from Labour Together’s dirty tricks: Keir Starmer.
The upshot of this sordid affair may be a double blow to our democracy: press freedom under attack and a reverse takeover from Labour Together with the Prime Minister replaced by a rival with a far left agenda for which they have no mandate.
Alys Denby is opinion and features editor of Morning Wire