On Friday, December 20, 2019, the website at Companies House was updated with a fresh entry. A new limited company with the uplifting, if slightly derivative, title Movement For Another Future Ltd had just been incorporated. It was given the company number 12373398.
Movement For Another Future had only one officer, a solicitor who listed his name in the filing as Alexandre Samuel Barros-Curtis. But it had a very important purpose. It was the official campaign vehicle for Keir Starmer and his Labour leadership campaign.
We know this because, although Barros-Curtis didn’t advertise the fact, nor did Keir Starmer subsequently declare the establishment of the company in the Register of Members’ Interests, a data licence was discreetly obtained which stated its purpose was to ‘register you as a supporter of Keir Starmer’ and ‘inform and engage you about the Campaign’.
Immediately after the company’s incorporation, the campaign was joined by Morgan McSweeney, at that time the director of another company called Labour Together, who would spend the next four months attempting to guide Sir Keir to the leadership.
As this newspaper recently reported, Labour Together used its donors’ network, own campaign data and staff to boost Starmer’s bid. Even though, at the time, no one except McSweeney was aware Labour Together was itself being financed by a secretive £750,000 political slush fund.
McSweeney and Barros-Curtis’s hard – if surreptitious – work paid off, and Starmer was duly elected. At which point something odd started to happen.
A perusal of the Companies House register reveals that, four days before formally registering Keir Starmer’s campaign company, Alexandre Samuel Barros-Curtis quietly resigned as director of a third company entitled Owen2016 Campaign Ltd. This was the campaign vehicle he’d established for Owen Smith’s doomed challenge to Jeremy Corbyn. It had been effectively dormant for two years.
Keir Starmer has made great play over the need for full transparency and accountability within British politics. But the nature of his campaign company means that the full nature of its activities remain obscured from public view
But despite this, on the same day Owen Smith was himself appointed as the new director. The entry also shows that when Barros-Curtis had registered that company he had used a derivation of his name, Alex Barros-Curtis.
Meanwhile, a further examination of Companies House reveals that on December 19, the day before Movement For Another Future was incorporated, Morgan McSweeney formally resigned as a Person Of Significant Control from a fourth company called Centre For Countering Digital Hate Ltd. This company was supposedly established to counter online extremism. But, by fortunate coincidence, it also seems to have been used to target Keir Starmer’s political opponents, within the Labour Party and externally, including Nigel Farage and members of the Brexit Party in the run-up to, and during, the 2019 European Election campaign.
Again, there seems to have been no attempt to register this activity with the Electoral Commission.
And the mystery deepens. The use of a company structure to support party leadership campaigns is not of itself unusual. And they are quickly wound up once the campaign is over. But Movement For Another Future continues to function. According to the accounts, at the end of Starmer’s campaign the company had current assets of £34,227, of which £3,600 were debts to creditors. It reportedly had employed an average of nine permanent staff over the relevant reporting period.
A year later the company had no permanent staff, but was still operating. Yet now it had current assets of £28,322, but had somehow accrued £27,695 of debt.
The year after, the company supposedly established solely to get Keir Starmer elected Labour leader, and that apparently had zero staff, now had current assets of £9,812, but debt of £16,574. And, according to the latest accounts, this Mary Celeste of campaign vehicles currently has assets of £9,777, but has increased its debt to £19,664.
Alex Barros-Curtis (pictured) has been aggressively pursuing Reform leader Nigel Farage over his purchase of a house in Clacton
On Friday, December 20, 2019, a new limited company called Movement For Another Future Ltd was incorporated. It was given the company number 12373398
There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing on the part of Alexandre Samuel Barros-Curtis, or Alex Barros-Curtis or Morgan McSweeney. But there’s something decidedly murky about this network of seemingly interconnected political campaign companies, all of which have dabbled in internal and external Labour politics. And which directly and indirectly have had a significant role in ushering Starmer into power.
Some of this opaqueness is due to be further challenged in a forthcoming book, The Fraud, due to be published later this week. But the imminence of its publication also seems to have coincided with another mystery.
The director of Keir Starmer’s campaign was also director of a fifth company, entitled Good Campaigns Company Ltd. This time he was registered on Companies House with the spelling Alexandre Samuel Barros Curtis, hyphen deleted.
He reportedly resigned as director in January 2024, a few months before being parachuted into the safe Labour seat of Cardiff West.
Last month, as rumours began to circulate about apparently damning emails relating to Morgan McSweeney and his campaigning work for Starmer, an application was filed to strike the company from the register, and dissolve it.
Again, there is no suggestion of any breaches of electoral law similar to those uncovered relating to McSweeney’s management of Labour Together.
But there are still a number of questions that remain to be answered.
It’s now a matter of record Movement For Another Future directly supported Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign. But there is no mention of the company in any of his entries in the Parliamentary Register.
Morgan McSweeney was the director of another company called Labour Together in 2019, which worked to guide Sir Keir to the leadership
The campaign concluded on April 4, 2020. But the company used to transport him to the Labour leadership continues to operate as a going concern, with seemingly significant internal cash-flows.
Keir Starmer has made great play over the need for full transparency and accountability within British politics. But the nature of his campaign company – as a ‘micro-company’ it is not required to publish audited accounts – means that the full nature of its activities remain obscured from public view.
And in recent weeks the company’s sole director, the multi-monikered Alex Barros-Curtis, has been aggressively pursuing Nigel Farage over his purchase of a house in Clacton.
‘The man who likes to bang on about fairness, standing up for ordinary people and holding others to account,’ he charges in a slickly produced campaign video.
In response, the Tories are starting to smell a rat. ‘There may be nothing illegal here. But it has all the hallmarks of a classic “sock-puppet” operation. Using different campaign skins to hide who’s actually behind it,’ a Tory source told me.
A senior Labour MP who has worked closely with McSweeney and Barros-Curtis agrees. ‘It’s not necessarily against the rules. But all these interconnected campaigns are suspicious. They’ve been up to something.’
It’s time for the PM to come clean. And tell the country the truth about precisely what’s going on inside Company 12373398.
