At the opening of the Hollywood thriller Fight Club – a film about a sinister, underground organisation that ends up unleashing havoc on an unsuspecting society – Brad Pitt famously explains to its members: ‘The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.’
If the Prime Minister’s most senior adviser Morgan McSweeney had heeded those words, the donations scandal currently engulfing Downing Street may have swirled into the Westminster sewer unnoticed.
But he didn’t. And as the latest revelations from this paper reveal, Keir Starmer is now drowning beneath a tide of sleaze.
The leaked messages from a WhatsApp group of senior Labour MPs and peers with close links to McSweeney’s shadowy lobbying group Labour Together are damning and unequivocal.
They demonstrate it was open knowledge within the Labour Party that a secret slush fund was being used to propel Keir Starmer to the leadership. They show the vehicle that carried him there was Labour Together.
And they prove the claim from Government ‘sources’ that ‘neither Keir, nor his leadership campaign, accepted monetary or in kind donations from Labour Together during the leadership election’ is a straightforward lie.
But we don’t actually need leaked messages to tell us that. Because we have an even better source for the revelation Morgan McSweeney breached the law, and strict parliamentary regulation, as he guided Keir Starmer to No10. Morgan McSweeney himself.
When he first took control of Labour Together, McSweeney’s imperative was secrecy. His plan was to use the organisation to destroy Jeremy Corbyn and install a suitably moderate and malleable figure as his replacement – eventually selecting Keir Starmer as his patsy.
But for it to succeed, he had to keep his true intentions hidden. Both from the vengeful Corbynites and the MPs who were nominally in charge of what they thought was a relatively innocent Labour think-tank.
Last week, I met with a senior former member of the Labour Together board. ‘It was all smoke and mirrors. They were using us to be the face of the organisation above the line. But below the water they were plotting something else. We were all played for suckers,’ they admitted.
‘Labour Together was basically the Keir Starmer Shadow campaign vehicle. And then when Corbyn lost, it just became the public campaign vehicle.’
Leaked messages from a WhatsApp group of senior Labour MPs and peers with close links to Morgan McSweeney’s shadowy lobbying group Labour Together are damning and unequivocal
McSweeney’s covert plan worked spectacularly. £750,000 in donations were successfully hidden. A series of surreptitious dinners were held at the home of former Labour MP Jenny Chapman – later appointed his Campaign Chair – to map out how to pivot Labour Together’s network of funders and pollsters into direct alignment with his leadership bid.
And when Corbyn finally stood down, he and his allies personally took charge of that campaign and ruthlessly crushed their opponents on the Left.
At which point McSweeney could have discreetly closed the book on his masterful coup. But he couldn’t help himself. Not only did he and his colleagues commit the cardinal sin of talking about Fight Club. They scrambled to the top of Labour’s Southside HQ and began gleefully bellowing about it from the rooftops.
Over the past five years there is not a journalist in Westminster who has not been regaled with a detailed account of how Morgan McSweeney used Labour Together to vanquish the Corbynites and catapult Keir Starmer into power.
The story of how current Housing Secretary Steve Reed, then Labour Together’s Chair, met Keir Starmer in the basement restaurant of the Royal Court Theatre, and asked him if he would run for the leadership and accept Labour Together’s help. ‘Yes and Yes,’ Starmer replied.
The moment current Home Secretary and then Labour Together board member Shabana Mahmood told McSweeney he could thank her later for the data he had transported across to Starmer’s leadership campaign.
When he first took control of Labour Together, McSweeney’s imperative was secrecy. His plan was to use the organisation to destroy Jeremy Corbyn and install a suitably moderate and malleable figure as his replacement – eventually selecting Keir Starmer (pictured with his top advisor) as his patsy
The infamous quote from a McSweeney ally who claimed ‘Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.’
‘Left Out’. ‘Get In’. ‘Keir Starmer: The Biography’. The shelves of Westminster are positively groaning under the weight of tomes chronicling the McSweeney/Labour Together putsch.
Yet suddenly we are being told we must reclassify them as works of fiction, rather than current affairs.
Yesterday I spoke to a senior government adviser who worked closely with McSweeney, and was supportive of his efforts to rid Labour of the scourge of Corbynism.
But even he conceded: ‘It’s the lying that gets you. They literally boasted about what they did. And now they’re trying to hide it.’
Yet they’re not simply trying to hide their actions. In a desperate attempt to keep the Electoral Commission and Parliamentary Standards Commissioner at bay, Downing Street is now actively attempting an almost Stalinist revision of history.
One in which the image of Morgan McSweeney hunched over his laptop beneath a red campaign poster hubristically stating: ‘Keir Starmer: Another Future Is Possible’ is quietly airbrushed out.
But it’s too late for that. The Labour Together scandal is now breaking open from within. As one minister told me: ‘No10 have
been ordering people to go out on broadcast and say no rules have been broken. And everyone’s refusing. Because they know what’s coming.’
What’s coming, one way or another, is the truth. Because the questions are not going to go away.
Why McSweeney asked for staff to be seconded to the Starmer campaign, rather than directly employed, in a bid to keep salary costs down. Then claimed to be taking a direct salary himself.
Why Labour Together’s published accounts seem to show no record of the large sums that constituted the secret slush fund. Even though they purportedly had a turnover of £750,000 in just 36 months.
Why did McSweeney’s successor as director of Labour Together, Hannah O’Rourke, claim the failure to declare the slush fund had been ‘entirely unintentional’? When leaked internal emails have proven them to be anything but.
This weekend there is mounting speculation within Government that Morgan McSweeney is shortly going to be asked by Keir Starmer to take on a less high-profile role.
The position of Labour Party general secretary has apparently been proposed.But wherever McSweeney runs to, he is not going to able to hide. Because the first rule of Sleaze Club is: Don’t talk about Sleaze Club. And the Prime Minister’s most senior adviser has broken it.
