How Keir Starmer conned the British electorate

Three years ago Al Jazeera’s series The Labour Files laid bare the ruthlessness, racism and maniacal factionalism of the Labour right and its cynical exploitation of the antisemitism issue to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.

It was resolutely ignored by the British media.

Since then a body of literature has built up not just supporting this narrative but amplifying it.

Martin Forde KC’s report on bullying and racism in the Labour Party, commissioned by Keir Starmer, echoed many of its points_._ Forde himself said he was “fascinated” by the Al Jazeera series.

In their remarkable book “Get In”, Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire told much the same story, describing Starmer’s elevation to power as “the great deception … a plot without precedent in Labour history.”

And now Paul Holden’s new book “The Fraud” offers the most damning portrayal yet of a political project at once proudly Machiavellian but entirely devoid of moral and intellectual substance.

It comes as Starmerism unravels and denouement approaches, with Holden exposing it as a cruel hoax on a nation desperate for mature, responsible government following the chaos of the Johnson/Truss years.

Holden had access to internal Labour Party documents other authors did not and the casual reader may find the mass of detail daunting.

But this is the definitive case for the prosecution. Advance reporting has already led to the resignation of Keir Starmer’s strategy director Paul Ovenden.

Labour Together

As with “Get In”, the central focus is on Morgan McSweeney, protégé of the disgraced Peter Mandelson and now Starmer’s chief of staff.

Before 2020 McSweeney was head of Labour Together, a think tank which posed as an innocent forum for debate while working assiduously behind the scenes to undermine Corbyn and replace him as leader with Keir Starmer.

It did so using hundreds of thousands of pounds in undeclared donations from hedge fund managers and supporters of Israel.

The Electoral Commission fined Labour Together just £14,250, apparently accepting the omission was accidental. Holden argues convincingly that this is unlikely.

The failure to declare funding enabled Labour Together to fly beneath the radar as it conducted polling and established the astroturf organisations that were used to destroy Corbyn.

The story of how Labour Together and others encouraged and covertly exploited what, for many, was genuine confusion between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is now painfully familiar to those who were victims of it.

It has still to penetrate mainstream media and Holden’s chapter on the issue is a superb summary.

What emerges as particularly distasteful is the frequency with which Jews were targets.

The Labour Files exposed Euan Philipps, head of media at Labour Against Antisemitism, who adopted the Jewish sounding name David Gordstein to file antisemitism complaints to the Labour Party.

The activities of this faux Jewish activist, revealed by Holden for the first time, encapsulate the surreal absurdity of the antisemitism hysteria.

In 2019 the celebrated London School of Economics professor David Graeber wrote an article complaining non-Jews were spreading “rancour, panic and resentment” in the Jewish community with unfounded allegations of antisemitism.

The actor Miriam Margolyes shared this on her Facebook page. Unlike Philipps/Gordstein both Margolyes and Graeber are Jewish.

Holden reveals that, with no apparent sense of irony, “David Gordstein” immediately fired off a complaint to the Labour Party accusing Margolyes of antisemitism.

On this occasion no action was taken. Other targets were not so fortunate.

In September 2020 “Gordstein” was one of three complainants against Riva Joffe, an 80-year-old Jewish veteran of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa.

Her sin was to have described Israel as an Apartheid state (a view shared by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem) and to have urged Jeremy Corbyn to stand up to the “Zionist lobby.”

The Labour Party opened a formal investigation and Joffe spent the closing days of her life penning an immensely dignified response from her death bed. “This frenzy of purging you are driven to – it’s not the behaviour of mature adults. It smacks of desperation, fear and panic,” she wrote.

Joffe lived in Keir Starmer’s constituency and knew him personally. But a direct request on behalf of her son that the charges against her be posthumously dropped did not even elicit a response.

Toxic

In his report Martin Forde KC identified a “hierarchy of racism” in the Labour Party, with antisemitism taken far more seriously than other forms of racism.

Diane Abbot was identified as a particular target of racist abuse and the gross Paul Ovenden texts revealed by Holden echo the toxicity and infantilism of internal texts exposed by The Labour Files.

For all the talk of “grown ups in the room” what emerges here is an adolescent political culture where the dark arts are prized above all else – the protagonists consciously scripting and acting out a sub-par episode of The Thick of It.

In an incident Malcolm Tucker would have been proud of Holden reveals that in April 2022 Alex Barros-Curtis, then Labour’s executive director of legal affairs, wrote to the Party’s former general secretary Jennie Formby regarding legal action being taken against five ex-staffers accused of leaking an internal report that pushed back on the prevailing narrative about the Party’s handling of antisemitism.

The five former staffers “allege that the leak of the report was in fact authorised by the party’s leadership at the time, and that they were acting under those instructions,” Barros-Curtis told Formby, who had been appointed by Corbyn.

“This was entirely false,” writes Holden. In fact the five completely denied any knowledge of the leak and the party would eventually drop its legal action against them.

Holden’s portrait of the Starmer project presents a grim contrast with New Labour. Tony Blair hit the zeitgeist. Starmer and his team come across as a bad tribute band that has learned the chords and the lyrics but, try as it might, is simply unable to recreate the music.

Where Blair managed to win over his party and then the country through charm and persuasion, the Starmer project has relied from the beginning on back room maneuvering, smears, stitch ups and ruthless exploitation of the party’s disciplinary procedures. All facilitated by a compliant media.

The result is a soulless, empty husk of a political project. Morgan McSweeney and those around him detested the left. But that appears to have been the beginning and end of their political philosophy.

Targeted

Most worrying of all is the government’s authoritarian bent. “If a small group of secretive people can manipulate and control one of the two great parties in Great Britain, what will they do when they have control of MI5, when they have control of all the levers of the state?” asks an activist from Liverpool at the start of The Labour Files.

The last 18 months have provided an answer. Holden’s own experience is revealing.

In the autumn of 2023 he cooperated with the Sunday Times on an article regarding Labour Together’s failure to declare donations to the Electoral Commission.

Labour Together’s response was to hire a consultancy firm to dig for dirt on both Holden and Andrew Feinstein, Holden’s boss at Shadow World Investigations, an NGO that conducts research on the arms trade.

Feinstein was known as a local opponent of Starmer and would later run against him in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency.

Holden knows this because the consultancy’s reports were passed to him by a source, appalled at what was being done.

They sought to portray him and Feinstein as linked to the Russians, an absurd claim given Shadow World Investigations, at considerable risk, has regularly probed the activities of Russian oligarchs.

Labour Together also sought, unsuccessfully, to place smears against Holden in the media. He was obliged to threaten legal action after the Guardian’s Political Editor Pippa Crerar informed him the paper was planning a piece falsely claiming he was under police investigation for receiving illegally hacked documents.

Holden notes the consultancy’s reports on him never “claimed that my evidence was wrong, or that my information was incorrect, or that my leaked documents were inauthentic. Instead, they primarily indicated a burning desire to understand where I was getting my information from—and what else I might have.”

Now they know.The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to order from OR Books.