David Lammy held off the books meeting with pro-Israel lobbyist

David Lammy held an off the record meeting with Sir Trevor Chinn, an influential businessman and one of Britain’s leading pro-Israel lobbyists, Declassified can reveal.

The meeting took place on 11 February 2025 but was not recorded in official transparency data published by the Foreign Office.

Lammy’s sole public appointment on that day was a meeting with the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator to discuss “humanitarian crises around the globe” including the situation in Gaza.

The Foreign Office only released details about Lammy’s meeting with Chinn in response to a Freedom of Information request issued by Declassified.

It said this was a “political meeting” and no minutes from the discussion were taken.

The Foreign Office also disclosed that Middle East minister Hamish Falconer met with Chinn on 18 March 2025 in another rendezvous that was not recorded in transparency data.

Lammy, Falconer and Chinn did not respond to questions about whether the meetings focussed on Israel.

Chinn said in 2013: “I’ve spent my entire life working for Israel”. Since the 1980s, he has funded Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel.

He has played a leading role in Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), previously described by the Guardian as “Britain’s most active pro-Israel lobbying organisation”.

Doorstepping Chinn

Declassified recently revealed that Chinn – now 90 – met with a top British diplomat to discuss arms exports to Israel despite the government initially claiming the purpose of the meeting was “to discuss geopolitics”.

Chinn did not respond to Declassified’s request for comment on that story. So when we saw him disembarking a taxi outside the Chatham House think-tank in London last month, we quickly asked him for an interview.

Chinn, gripping a copy of the Financial Times, declined our request.

“You’re a very generous benefactor to the Labour Party,” we said as he was ushered inside. “What do you think about the situation in Gaza at the moment? Why do you donate so much money to the Labour Party?”

He ignored our questions, which related to his £50,000 donation towards Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign in 2020.

Chinn’s donation was not disclosed until after the election had taken place.

He has also donated to key members of Starmer’s cabinet including chancellor Rachel Reeves, deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, health secretary Wes Streeting, education secretary Bridget Phillipson, culture secretary Lisa Nandy, and Lammy.

Chinn entered the building on the heels of Israeli opposition politician Yair Golan, who was in the capital for meetings with politicians, including Falconer, and local Zionist organisations.

Golan said in October 2023 that Israel’s starvation of Gaza was “completely legitimate”, before later criticising Israeli forces for killing “children as a hobby”. As a Brigadier General in the IDF, Golan was disciplined in 2007 for using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Chinn and Israel

Chinn is a British multi-millionaire who has spent decades working in the motor industry, chairing such organisations as the AA, the RAC, and Kwikfit.

He is also a longstanding pro-Israel lobbyist.

Recently declassified files revealed how Chinn repeatedly lobbied John Major’s Conservative government regarding its policy towards Israel during the early 1990s.

“He can be quite a tough protagonist of the Israeli cause and is by no means a dove”, one Foreign Office official wrote about Chinn in November 1991.

“My own feeling is that he is not very subtly tuned into the Israeli political scene, although he meets a number of leaders through his fund-raising activities”, the diplomat continued.

Trevor Chinn’s father, Rosser Chinn, was the president of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in Britain.

The JNF is a quasi-governmental organisation which has supported illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine, and was described by historian Ilan Pappé as a “colonialist agency of ethnic cleansing”.

Last year, Israeli president Isaac Herzog awarded Chinn the Israeli Medal of Honor for his “service to the state [of Israel] and the Jewish people”.

Herzog said his country was extremely fortunate to have “great friends and supporters in the world” like Chinn “who fight alongside us against antisemitism, defend Israel’s name in the media, and have long fought for Israel’s place among the nations”.

Months earlier, the Israeli president’s words – that the “entire nation” of Gaza was responsible for October 7 – had been cited by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as plausible evidence of incitement to genocide.

Herzog has also signed bombs due to be dropped on Gaza.

Lammy’s ties to Chinn

Lammy has longstanding links with Chinn.

In 2012, the two men went to Israel on a delegation funded by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and, with a token £90, by the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs.

Two years later, during his campaign to become London mayor, Lammy accepted £30,000 in donations from Chinn.

The mayoral campaign was directed by David Mencer, a former director of LFI who is now a spokesperson for the Israeli government.

Between November 2023 and April 2024, Lammy accepted a further £67,000 from Labour Together, a controversial thinktank founded in 2015 whose core funders have included Chinn and hedge fund manager Martin Taylor.

Chinn’s motivation for funding Labour Together, the brainchild of Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, was closely linked to former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s position on Palestine.

He “had great concerns about the election of an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state as Labour leader”, wrote Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick McGuire in their recent book Get In.

One of Labour Together’s first acts was to attempt to delegitimise independent media organisations which supported Corbyn, namely The Canary, by falsely accusing them of “fake news” and promoting anti-Semitism.

“Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us”, McSweeney had told Labour Together MPs, according to the book Taken as Red.