Time To Park On The Yellow Lines

Regular readers of this site may have detected a mild degree of scepticism about the virtues of Keir Starmer, but he did at least use Prime Minister's Questions to remind Ed Davey that the Liberal Democrats had been in government in the days of austerity, when Davey had been in the Cabinet, and when Starmer had first started working on Hillsborough but the Coalition had failed to introduce even what little excuse for a Hillsborough Law that Starmer now proposed.

I had a similar little incident at a hustings in 2019, when the Lib Dem candidate at North West Durham went on and on about the bedroom tax until I pointed out that his party had been in office when it had been introduced. He has never spoken to me since. The Lib Dems complain that, with 72 MPs and with more Council Leaders than the Conservatives, they are not given nearly enough airtime. They have a point, but it is really that they are under-scrutinised, and that during their five years as Ministers they were scandalously so.

Full Account?

What, exactly, did Matthew Doyle do to deserve a peerage? Never mind a Labour one, since Doyle campaigned for an Independent candidate. That is an automatic expulsion from the Labour Party, and a five-year ban from even so much as applying to re-join. Or, at any rate, it is for anyone else. That that candidate was Sean Morton was beside the point, just as the criminal investigations into Peter Mandelson and into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor relate to misconduct in public office with a view to Jeffrey Epstein's financial gain, not to anything else.

If the Government is "a boys' club", then what do the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary, and the nine other women around the Cabinet table do? Harriet Harman has never got over not being made First Secretary of State by Gordon Brown, but if she thinks that the answer to Epstein of all scandals is even her opinion, never mind the return for which she may be angling, then her lack of self-awareness is almost admirable.

Far more probably, Harman wants the new First Secretary of State to be Jess Phillips, the better to position her for the Leadership now that Wes Streeting had rendered himself impossible by criticising Israel, though not so as to have spurred him to any sort of action. Phillips turns out to have been sending out nothing more than pro forma replies to complainants against Mohamed Al-Fayed, so she does sound just the sort to become Prime Minister of this Epstein Island, the country in the world most controlled by the Epstein Class.

The monarchy has proved no protection against that, so the monarchist and the republican arguments are both still rubbish in their own terms, meaning that the case for change has not been made. Starmer's rebranding of His Majesty's Government as "the UK Government" echoes his practice of referring to it as "my Government". Matters are not helped by Prince William's fawning over the Epsteins of Saudi Arabia, whose presence at Premier League events Sir Jim Ratcliffe presumably refuses to acknowledge, just as he presumably does not say so much as "Good morning" to much of the squad of Manchester United. How do the Monégasques react to him as a coloniser?

Managed Process?

Keir Starmer would never have suspended the whip from Matthew Doyle unless he had needed a way to embarrass Anas Sarwar. Sarwar has just suspended the whip from Pam Duncan-Glancy, so job done.

Starmer expects us to sympathise with him because, while he was Prime Minister and despite his considerable family means, his disabled brother had died in poverty. That expectation would have been bad enough even if this Government had had a better record on such issues.

Nothing that may still hang over Angela Rayner can compare to the removal of a career diplomat from Britain's most important ambassadorial posting in order to replace her, knowingly, with the best friend of the world's most notorious paedophile. A Rayner Premiership would have much to criticise. But at least she is not as bad as that.

Nor would we ever be treated to messages that suggested a very close friendship indeed between Rayner and the same Peter Mandelson who had corruptly secured Palantir all manner of British government contracts, including with the National Health Service that had been entrusted to the same Wes Streeting whose partner had worked for Mandelson for three years, which was how they had met.

A Nation Run This Way Cannot Be Sovereign

George Monbiot writes:

History is being rewritten. The story we are told is that an evil man called Peter Mandelson, pursuing his own interests, went rogue to collaborate with a serial abuser of girls and women, undermining the good work of people seeking to defend the public interest. All this is true. But – and I fear many will find this hard to accept – it is only half the story.

The much harder truth is that Mandelson’s disgraceful dealings with Jeffrey Epstein were less a betrayal of his brief than an unauthorised extension of it. In 2009 – just as, we now know, Mandelson was passing sensitive information to Epstein – I argued that the government department he ran, called Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (Berr), “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest”.

Berr was a smaller and less chaotic version of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge). Its purpose, I suggested, was to bypass the House of Commons on behalf of capital. It allowed Gordon Brown’s government to create the impression that it was defending the public interest while simultaneously, but more quietly, appeasing powerful lobbyists. In contrast to other government departments, Berr was largely run by unelected lords, who had either been corporate executives, corporate lobbyists or, like Mandelson, members of a concierge class operating on their behalf. I wrote that these ministers, appointed by Brown, “appear to have formed their own lobby group within government”.

Berr sought to part-privatise Royal Mail, breaking a manifesto commitment. It succeeded. It tried to block the EU working time directive: UK government filibusters delayed and weakened it. It attempted, less successfully, to undermine the equality bill, whose aim was to ensure equal pay for women (Mandelson’s simultaneous dealings with Epstein were not the only respect in which he showed disdain for women’s rights). It undermined environmental legislation. It was “quietly building a bonfire of the measures that protect us from predatory corporate behaviour”.

So when Brown, who was prime minister at the time, expresses his shock and betrayal, please forgive me a small gasp of frustration. In his interview on the BBC’s Today programme, Brown claimed that in 2009: “We were solving a major financial crisis … all my thoughts were on how we could save people’s jobs and savings and their livelihoods.” But not only did he allow Mandelson to attack the public interest on behalf of business, he greatly increased Berr’s budget. This was despite the fact that, as I noted at the time, Mandelson “was partly responsible, both in Blair’s government and as European trade commissioner, for promoting the culture of deregulation that catalysed the economic crisis”. On one hand, Brown was trying to solve it. On the other, at the behest of corporate lobbyists, he was setting up the next one.

Brown also told the BBC, in justifying his appointment of Lord Mandelson, that the man had “an unblemished record as the [European] trade commissioner”. An unblemished record of what, exactly? Neocolonialism, perhaps. While Mandelson was in that post, he sought to impose draconian trade provisions on some of the poorest countries on Earth. He put pressure on them to let EU corporations muscle out local firms and make privatisation legally irreversible, threatening people’s access to health, education and water. He sought to force African countries to hand over crucial resources at the risk of widespread hunger.

Yes, when Mandelson was a minister in Brown’s government, he betrayed the national interest. But this is what, by other means, he was appointed to do. His treachery, while it went way beyond his official mandate, was not a bug, but a feature. The corrosion of democratic values was institutional. And this spirit has prevailed ever since. Keir Starmer’s government of all the lobbyists is no exception.

Brown, in proposing remedies for the secretive machinations Mandelson conducted, writes: “Conventions about commercial confidentiality should no longer prevent public service contracts delivered by private companies being subject to reasonable freedom of information requests.” I could scarcely breathe when I read that. It is exactly the demand some of us made when Brown rolled out the private finance initiative (PFI) across the public sector, enabling businesses to get their hooks into every aspect of state provisioning. When we tried to see the contracts, to understand what was being done in our name, Brown’s Treasury repeatedly blocked our information requests on the grounds of “commercial confidentiality”.

The sense of betrayal that Brown quite rightly feels is the same sense of betrayal some of us felt towards the governments in which he served. Yes, Brown had and retains some great qualities, and did much good. But he is also a remarkable escapologist. Almost everyone appears to have forgotten how his PFI programme planted a timebomb in public services, enabling corporations to take the profits while leaving the risks with the state: one of the reasons why they are now in so much trouble. Almost everyone appears to have forgotten his crucial role in the Iraq war: standing with Tony Blair and financing it. He rightly called for Vladimir Putin and his “enablers” to face justice for their crime of aggression in Ukraine. Yet it’s the same crime that Blair and his enablers (including one G Brown) committed in Iraq.

But it is not just Brown who is rewriting history. The media are 50% of any problem, and the story most of it loves to tell is of one bad apple. Heaven forfend that we see the systemic problems. There is a reason why Mandelson kept returning to government, despite sackings for his over-enthusiastic relationships with plutocrats. He was brought in to do the dirty work. The governments in which he served could loudly claim to be doing something, while subtly and simultaneously undoing it.

Mandelson’s treachery is an extreme instance of the dominant mode of UK politics over the past 45 years: the subordination of democracy to the demands of the ultra-rich. Abuse and exploitation – of women and children, of poorer countries and their people, of workers and contractors, renters and customers – are baked into the system.

If you cannot diagnose a problem, you cannot fix it. We urgently need to see this for what it is. Mandelson’s grovelling to the sinister rich is disgraceful, disgusting, deceitful, a crushing of women’s rights and of democracy. But it is not a deviation from the system. It is a manifestation of it.

And James Schneider of GB News writes:

Britain’s political scandals have acquired a peculiar quality. They don’t feel like ruptures in an otherwise healthy system, but small windows thrown open onto the machinery itself. A loan here, a consultancy there, a weekend on an oligarch’s yacht, a minister leaving office on Friday and returning on Monday as a lobbyist for the firms he once regulated. Nothing necessarily illegal. Yet each episode leaves the same impression: that the real life of the British state is conducted elsewhere, beyond the theatre of parliament, in private rooms where wealth and power recognise one another without introduction.

The Epstein-Mandelson affair belongs to this category. It’s shocking because it’s so familiar.

In Peter Mandelson – minister, fixer, envoy, consultant, intermediary between cabinet and capital – one sees the career of Britain’s governing caste in miniature. A stratum that long ago stopped representing the public and instead made politics a form of brokerage: arranging introductions, smoothing obstacles, managing the flows of other people’s money. Mandelson isn’t a deviation from the system. He is its most perfect expression.

As business secretary under Gordon Brown, Mandelson appears to have passed Jeffrey Epstein advance notice of market-moving events: details of a €500bn eurozone rescue deal hours before it became public; a confidential paper outlining £20bn of potential asset sales; and suggestions that Epstein coordinate with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to pressure the government over taxes on bankers’ bonuses. They were the sort of signals on which currencies swing and fortunes are made.

Mandelson’s actions are best understood as the logical expression of what he’s long represented. His most famous line – that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” – is often remembered as a quip. In fact it was a doctrine. The role of government was no longer to discipline capital or direct investment toward national development. It was to reassure the wealthy that they would grow ever richer, and to manage the political consequences below.

The phrase is sometimes compared to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s “let some people get rich first”. But Deng’s tolerance of inequality was tethered to a project of national development, productive capacity, and strategic state power. Wealth was a means to secure sovereignty. In Britain, enrichment became the end in itself. Industry hollowed out. Finance swelled. The state stopped building and started selling. Where Deng used markets to strengthen the nation, Britain used the nation to service markets.

This settlement required political engineers. Mandelson was chief among them. He worked to modernise Labour’s language and rewire its loyalties – to make the party safe for boardrooms, pliable to lobbyists, and hostile to any revival of its older commitments to trade unions or public ownership. When Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership threatened that order, Mandelson boasted that he worked “every single day” to remove him. The candour was striking. It revealed what had long been true: that the party’s most senior figures felt more answerable to capital than to organised labour.

After office came monetisation. Through lobbying firm Global Counsel, Mandelson sold what really matters in modern Britain – access. Global Counsel’s client list reads like a directory of corporate power: JP Morgan, Accenture, Palantir, Shell, Nestlé, Anglo American. The firm hired him because he knew the wiring of the British state – which minister to call, which rule to soften, which door would open quietly after hours.

In other words: how to translate public authority into private advantage.

Nor was Epstein incidental to this story. At the founding of Global Counsel, the financier reportedly provided introductions and business advice, connecting Mandelson to the wealthy networks the firm would later serve. A man who would later be exposed as a child sex offender and human trafficker moved easily in these circles. This isn’t a quirk of British politics. It reflects an oligarchic logic perfected elsewhere.

In the US, wealth and office interpenetrate and elite interests reliably shape policy while public demands rarely do – as two political scientists showed more than a decade ago. Billions flood elections each cycle. Lawmakers trade shares in the very sectors they regulate. Congressional portfolios routinely beat the market. US Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s disclosed investments, for instance, have produced roughly an 838% cumulative return over the past decade – the sort of outperformance less suggestive of genius than of proximity to power. Britain has adopted the same habits with less spectacle and smaller cheques.

Here, as in the US, newspapers and broadcasters sit in the hands of billionaires and financiers. Around Westminster, politics and journalism have ceased to be adversaries and become parts of the same social world. Scrutiny softens into familiarity; policy dissolves into gossip; public life shrinks to the drama of personalities.

The media rarely treats any of this as disqualifying. On the contrary, it admires the fluency: the contacts, the cosmopolitan ease, the glide from Davos to Washington to Whitehall. It looks like sophistication. What it is is capture.

While this narrow caste circulates between cabinet, consultancy and corporate boards, the country it governs decays: stagnant wages, crumbling public services, foreign takeovers of strategic assets, an economy built on rent and speculation rather than production. Britain grows poorer even as its ruling class grows richer. The state works – efficiently, even brilliantly – for those at the top. For everyone else it pleads constraint.

Contempt for the governed has always been part of the package. Mandelson’s reported remark that working-class voters “have nowhere else to go” captures the emotional core of this regime: if your base is trapped, you are free to govern for someone else. This is what political scientist Peter Mair diagnosed as “ruling the void”: parties hollowed out, participation collapsing, democracy reduced to ritual while policy converges around the interests of capital.

So when we read those emails – a minister apparently passing sensitive state information to a private financier – we should resist the temptation to ask, “How could he?”. If politics has been reduced to managing relationships with wealth, then wealth becomes the real constituency. Everything else is theatre.

A nation run this way can’t be sovereign. Its secrets leak upward. Its wealth flows outward. And its politics are for sale.

Decline and Fall

Whatever the past indiscretions of any one or more of them, we may say with confidence that Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein did not have a threesome with John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak. Dignum et justum est that they must therefore have done so with Maxwell's old flame from Oxford, Boris Johnson, since he is one of the Gibbons, whose howl or hoot is that Christianity overthrew a superior civilisation.

The extreme depravity did not go underground. It went, as it were, overground, continuing in circles so elite that the rest of us could not usually see them. But we have seen them from time to time, and this is one of those times. Such are both the roots and the fruits of the refusal of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire.

I am the first to call for the release of Jimmy Lai, since I never went to Epstein Island. Enthroned in the West, in Israel and in the Gulf, by what authority does the Epstein Class presume to criticise the rulers of China or of anywhere else, such as Iran? If Reza Pahlavi is not in the published Epstein Files, then his name must have been redacted.

Iran, like Hamas, turns out to have no links whatever to Palestine Action, no member or supporter of which has been convicted of anything, never mind of anything violent. Any such future trial has been hopelessly prejudiced by Kemi Badenoch, by Chris Philp, and by various interchangeable Labour MPs whose membership of the 2024 intake proves that they were handpicked by Peter Mandelson. The only crime here is contempt of court by those politicians and by the people who, just as they never noticed anything to do with Prince Harry and drugs, also never noticed anything at all to do with the then Prince Andrew, and never noticed anything to do with Mandelson whether as a Cabinet Minister or as a European Commissioner.

After last week's acquittals, Palestine Action remains proscribed only because the present Home Secretary and the one who proscribed it, and who is now the Foreign Secretary, have threatened to resign if that proscription were lifted. Even in the context of this Government's wider travails, let them resign. Shabana Mahmood was already guaranteed to lose her seat to Akhmed Yakoob, and as for Yvette Cooper, Reform UK was already rumoured to be planning to field Lucy Connolly against her, so let the Greens or whoever put up one of the Filton Six.

Palestine Action was proscribed by an all-or-nothing measure that required any MP voting against it to vote against banning both the Russian Imperial Movement, and the Maniacs Murder Cult, which is part of the Order of the Nine Angels, itself part of the subculture that gives me most of my grief. Satanism is real, let me assure you. Now, since they needed to be banned at the same time as the feared Palestine Action, tell us about the progress of what must have been the urgently necessary action against the Russian Imperial Movement and against the Maniacs Murder Cult. They do not sound like blind wheelchair users or octogenarian clergywomen silently holding up signs. They sound like the kind of people who have turned up in the Epstein Files.

Control, Alt, Delete

As a former Director of Public Prosecutions struggles to remain Prime Minister while the present Justice Secretary and the last one both manoeuvre to succeed him, George Greenwood writes:

The Ministry of Justice is ordering the deletion of a large archive of court records, raising open justice concerns.

Courtsdesk, a data analysis company that supports media and campaigners in monitoring court records, has been ordered by the government to delete its archive, which provides a crucial tool for journalists covering the justice system.

The project was approved by the lord chancellor in 2021 to explore how a “national digital news feed of listings and registers can improve coverage of the courts by the news media” by opening up magistrate court records.

According to Courtsdesk, the platform has since been used by more than 1,500 journalists from 39 media organisations and the data provided has highlighted serious failures in the courts system.

It said journalists were given no advance notice of 1.6 million criminal hearings, the number of court cases listed was accurate on just 4.2 per cent of sitting days and half a million weekend cases were heard with no notification to the press.

Two-thirds of all courts routinely heard cases that the media was not told about in advance. Seventeen courts that sent outcome records had not once published an advance listing in the entire period, the company’s research found.

In November, HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) issued the company a cessation notice, citing what it called “unauthorised sharing” of court data, on the basis of a test feature, claiming this was a “data protection issue.”

When the company wrote to the department asking for the matter to be referred to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which regulates data protection, it says no referral was made.

Chris Philp, the former justice minister who approved the pilot and now shadow home secretary, wrote to Sarah Sackman, the courts minister, demanding the decision be reversed.

Last week the government issued a final refusal, meaning the archive must now be deleted within days.

Enda Leahy, the Courtsdesk chief executive and a former legal affairs correspondent at The Sunday Times, said: “We built the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts.

“HMCTS’s own data proves they can’t do it — their records were accurate 4.2 per cent of the time, 1.6 million cases were heard without any advance notice to the press.

“We wrote 16 times asking for dialogue. Last week we got our answer: delete everything. If the government were interested in open justice, they would engage in a dialogue.”

The Ministry of Justice was approached for comment.

Leaving Mandelson’s Shadow

Mark Seddon writes:

I’m pinching myself. It is February 2026, and I am writing for Tribune about Peter Mandelson. Moreover, it’s much the same as I was writing over thirty years ago for Tribune — except that, on this occasion, Mandelson has finally managed to surpass even his own appalling record of venality and avarice. At the time of writing, Mandelson’s latest partner in political crime, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, has fallen on his sword, while erstwhile former friends of Keir Starmer are busy sharpening their knives. Mandelson himself has seen his two homes raided by the police as part of an investigation into misconduct in public office; from everywhere come the noisy sights and sounds of hindsight being played out across the airwaves and across our screens, as former cronies and colleagues scurry to distance themselves from him.

I first came across Mandelson back in 1992, as a volunteer in Gordon Brown’s office during the 1992 general election. A few years earlier, Neil Kinnock had put him in charge of Labour’s communications efforts, and Mandelson caused consternation amongst the trade unions for taking his orders directly from Kinnock, while bypassing the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC). Famously, when the NEC voted to break off all relations with Rupert Murdoch during the bitter Wapping dispute, Mandelson kept up his clandestine briefing meetings with Times journalists. When his own press officer, John Booth, unaware that these meetings were continuing, told another Times journalist that they weren’t, Mandelson sacked him.

Although by 1992 Mandelson was himself a candidate in Hartlepool, the gadfly activities for which he became famed were on full display. He was here, there and everywhere; yellow Post-it notes would be placed on phones and chairs for Brown and further down the corridor for Tony Blair, reading, ‘Peter called — call back!’ On one occasion, he took me to lunch not far from parliament, pinching the odd chip from my plate, angling for information and gossip. The point is that, even then, Mandelson had a reputation for untrustworthiness. Kinnock’s successor, John Smith, for example, would have nothing to do with him.

After Smith died suddenly, Labour’s former long-time chief whip, Nick Brown, told me that while Margaret Beckett and others were in tears, he, Mandelson, was already on the phones, glad-handing MPs on behalf of Blair. He told Gordon Brown that he supported him, and then told Blair the same. Liverpool MP Peter Kilfoyle, who helped organise votes in the PLP for Blair, said, ‘Tony, I’m doing this — but only if you promise that Mandelson will have no role in your campaign.’ Blair promised that this would be the case. After Blair won, and Brown had been betrayed, Mandelson couldn’t help himself. He let it be known through one of his many client journalists that, actually, he had been a key figure in Blair’s campaign all along, operating under the nickname ‘Bobby’.

Fast forward to early January 2001, and I was looking out from the old Tribune offices, in Gray’s Inn Road, as a fine sunset lit up the Gothic backdrop of St Pancras station. The person on the phone was breathlessly telling me about some funny business involving the now minister, Mandelson, the Millennium Dome, for which he was responsible, and something to do with some rich Indian businessmen called the Hindujas and their attempts to gain British passports in return for funding the Millennium Dome. The ‘Hinduja affair’, or ‘cash for passports affair’, was to cost Mandelson his job in government. All that we could do at Tribune was to ask questions, which we did, thus playing a small role in his departure. This was the second major scandal to engulf him and his second resignation, following his failure a few years earlier to reveal that the then paymaster general, Geoffrey Robinson, had secretly loaned him £373,000 for home improvements.

John Smith, Ed Miliband, and Jeremy Corbyn distinguished themselves by not falling for Mandelson’s blandishments. They didn’t even need to be warned about him. Not so Blair; not so the betrayed Gordon Brown, who brought him back into the government (either out of fear or out of some misplaced judgement that he could do some good). Not Corbyn, of whom Mandelson famously boasted, ‘I try to undermine Jeremy Corbyn every single day.’ Yet Starmer did, and we now learn that he was apparently advised by everyone around him, including National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, Angela Rayner, and David Lammy, not to make Mandelson ambassador to Washington.

The massive flaws and foibles of Mandelson have been widely known for almost four decades. Throughout that time, he was a key architect of Labour’s shift from being a broadly federal, democratic socialist party rooted in the trade union movement and working class, to becoming, via the New Labour interregnum, a barely recognisable political vehicle presided over by an inflexible, right-wing, top-down leadership, and populated, for the most part, by ambitious political professionals, frequently parachuted into what were once safe Labour seats by Mandelson and others.

Mandelson prospered and returned because he was revered by a whole generation of political professionals, ex-students, and lobbyists and because he personified ‘how politics was done’. Some things remain constant. Back in 1997, Mandelson was helping to weed parliamentary candidates out, but, when a few left-wingers and members of the awkward squad slipped through in seats, he never thought that the party would ever win and resolved to tighten the net further. Fast forward to the last general election, and Mandelson was up to his old tricks, presiding over spreadsheets of candidates with his new pal, Morgan McSweeney. Such was Mandelson’s continued access that he was reportedly also involved, with McSweeney, in helping to reshape Starmer’s cabinet following the resignation of Angela Rayner.

Blair famously once said, ‘I will know that my project is complete when the Labour Party has learned to love Peter Mandelson.’ Blair is currently uncharacteristically quiet about his old chum, but even he will know that he has failed — even if he may neither appreciate nor care that the Labour Party that was supposed to love Mandelson is now at risk of being read the last rites. As for Mandelson, after Gordon Brown amazed everyone by bringing him in from the cold and making him the business secretary, he revealed to Labour Conference delegates that his immediate reaction was, ‘Apprehension. Returning to the goldfish bowl of British politics — and all my fans in the media. It made me pause. I had been in this movie before — and its sequel — and neither time did I like the ending.’

When Your Home Became Their Portfolio

Paul Knaggs writes:

When did the roof over a Londoner’s head become nothing more than a high-yield asset class for a shell company in the British Virgin Islands?

Walk through Battersea. Look up at Circus West Village, the first phase of the Power Station redevelopment. Nearly every window frames an empty chair, an unlived-in kitchen. Of the 866 luxury apartments built here, 824 were sold before construction even began. The overwhelming majority went to overseas investors who will never turn a key in these locks, never complain about the boiler, never learn their neighbours’ names.

This is not housing. This is financial engineering dressed in glass and steel.

The Architecture of Extraction 

The numbers confirm what Phin Harper observed when he surveyed London’s skyline. In some new developments, the percentage of homes sold to overseas investors approaches totality: 96%, 88%, 100%. These are not homes being built for people who need shelter. They are products being manufactured for people who need somewhere to park money.

Analysis published in January 2026 by Tax Policy Associates reveals that approximately 45,000 UK properties, valued at £190 billion, are owned through offshore structures where the beneficial owner cannot be identified. London accounts for £107 billion of this hidden wealth. In 44% of cases, despite legal requirements to disclose ownership, the real human beings behind these corporate veils remain invisible.

The architects of these developments are not to blame for their “anodyne and charmless” appearance. They are responding rationally to their clients’ requirements. An overseas investor scrolling through property brochures in Singapore or Dubai does not care about street-level vitality or neighbourly interaction. They care about capital preservation, currency hedging, and quarterly returns. The resulting architecture reflects this perfectly: buildings with the emotional resonance of a bank vault and the civic contribution of a storage unit.

Harper’s phrase “high emissions, low joy” captures something essential. These are structures optimised for financial performance, not human flourishing. They house capital, not communities.

The Price of Refuge 

Research by economist Filipa Sá, published by the Royal Economic Society, demonstrates that foreign investment in residential property raised house prices across England and Wales by an estimated 19%. Without this offshore demand, the average home in 2014 would have cost approximately £174,000 instead of £215,000.

This is not abstract market pressure. It is a direct transfer of wealth from working people who need housing to global investors who need somewhere safer than their home currencies. The “trickle down” is real, but it flows upward. Every luxury apartment purchased sight-unseen in Knightsbridge exerts gravitational pull on prices in Peckham, in Barking, in zones four and five where actual Londoners struggle to remain.

The historical parallel is instructive. Victorian Britain saw vast capital accumulation through imperial extraction, which then sought returns in domestic property. The landed gentry became rentiers. Today’s pattern is remarkably similar, except the empire is financial rather than territorial, and the extraction is mediated through tax havens rather than colonial administration.

The British Virgin Islands, Jersey, and Guernsey feature prominently in property ownership data not because they are centres of British culture or business, but because they are centres of British opacity. They allow wealth to flow freely while accountability dissolves.

The Broken Promise of Supply 

The standard neoliberal defence runs as follows: overseas investment funds construction that would not otherwise occur. More supply means lower prices. Everyone benefits.

This is demonstrably false. Sá’s research found no evidence that increased foreign investment leads to increased housing construction. The money does not build more homes. It simply bids up the price of existing and planned supply.

Consider the mechanism. When a developer can pre-sell an entire apartment block to overseas buyers before breaking ground, they face reduced financial risk. This makes projects more viable. So far, accurate. But here is what the defenders omit: that same overseas demand crowds out domestic purchasers from the market entirely. The homes that do get built are permanently removed from the pool of housing available to Londoners.

A 2017 LSE study, often cited by industry advocates, claimed that less than 1% of overseas purchases result in permanently empty properties. But this statistic obscures as much as it reveals. A property occupied by an absentee owner’s university-age child for eight months, then empty for four, does not appear in “buy to leave” statistics. Neither does a pied-à-terre used for occasional business trips. Yet neither contributes to the stable, year-round residential community that makes neighbourhoods function.

More importantly, the “rental to Londoners” defence misses the fundamental point. When foreign capital purchases housing as an asset class, it converts a social good into a financial instrument. The relationship between resident and housing changes from citizen and home to tenant and investment vehicle. Power shifts. Rents rise. Security vanishes.

Four Policies to Stop Foreign Investors Pricing Londoners Out 

Transparency alone will not suffice. The Register of Overseas Entities was meant to shine light into these shadows. Yet here we are, two years after its creation, with 44% of offshore-owned properties still concealing their beneficial owners. Companies House lacks the resources to verify filings. HMRC lacks the appetite to prosecute false declarations. The system was designed for compliance, not enforcement.

We require structural reform that prioritises use rights over investment returns.

First, strict residency requirements for new developments. Any building receiving planning permission should be required to market at least 70% of units to residents of the United Kingdom for a minimum of two years before offering them internationally. This is not xenophobia; it is the same policy Singapore, Hong Kong, and Vancouver have implemented to protect their own housing markets from speculative excess.

Second, a substantial levy on empty properties. If a residential unit is unoccupied for more than 120 days in a calendar year, and the owner cannot demonstrate extenuating circumstances, impose a tax equal to 10% of the property’s assessed value. This is not punitive; it is corrective. Housing in a city of housing shortage should be used or released.

Third, prohibit any entity registered in a tax haven from owning residential land in the United Kingdom. The British Virgin Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, the Cayman Islands, and similar jurisdictions exist primarily to obscure beneficial ownership and facilitate tax avoidance. If transparency is genuinely the goal, this follows logically. If an owner is unwilling to register their property through a transparent, tax-compliant structure, they should not be permitted to own British land.

Fourth, empower local authorities to use compulsory purchase powers to acquire long-term vacant properties at discounted rates and convert them to social housing. The Cadogan Estate in Kensington contains luxury flats that have stood empty for 5, 10, even 15 years. This is an obscenity in a city where families sleep in temporary accommodation. Compulsory purchase, at a valuation reflecting vacant rather than market rates, would both punish hoarding and expand affordable supply.

The Politics of Shelter 

This is not a technical problem requiring technical solutions. It is a political problem requiring political courage. The property development industry funds political parties, lobbies planning authorities, and shapes economic policy discourse. The City of London benefits enormously from capital inflows, regardless of their effect on housing affordability. British banks profit from lending against inflated property values. Solicitors, estate agents, and wealth managers all take their percentage. 

The political class has chosen, repeatedly and deliberately, not to intervene in this market because intervention would threaten powerful interests. Labour councils sell off housing estates to overseas consortiums. Conservative governments implement toothless transparency measures that change nothing fundamental. The Liberal Democrats talk about building more supply while ignoring the question of who that supply serves.

Meanwhile, working families in London face a choice between crippling housing costs and displacement. The average house price in the capital now exceeds £500,000. A couple earning median wages cannot afford to buy. Private rents consume 40% or more of take-home income. Social housing waiting lists stretch into decades.

 This is the material consequence of treating housing as just another asset class, no different from shares or bonds or foreign currency holdings. When the wealthiest 1% of global citizens can use London property as a safe deposit box for their capital, ordinary Londoners cannot afford to live in their own city.

A City or a Commodity? 

London should be a city for its people, not a diversified portfolio for a billionaire in a different time zone. The skyline should tell a story about communities, about history, about the people who live and work here. Instead, it tells a story about opacity, extraction, and the slow conversion of the city into a financial instrument.

Harper is right: architecture has become a commodity, “good at moving money around, good as an investment opportunity, somehow less good at its deeper purpose.” Until we decide that housing serves people before profits, this will continue. More estates will be sold. More towers will rise. More ordinary Londoners will be forced out.

The question is simple. Do we believe housing is a human right, or do we believe it is an asset class? We cannot have both. And if we continue choosing the latter, we should stop pretending we are building a city at all. 

London’s skyline is no longer a silhouette of a city. It is a bar chart of stolen wealth.

The Same Applies To McSweeney

In Byline Times, Peter Oborne writes:

Keir Starmer’s Chief-of-Staff Morgan McSweeney resigned on Sunday afternoon following the fallout from the Peter Mandelson scandal.

McSweeney, who was a close ally of Mandelson, had pushed for his appointment as ambassador to the US, despite his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

As he prepares to leave Downing Street, we re-publish all of Peter Oborne’s reporting on McSweeney, who Oborne identified early on as “the most powerful individual in Britain.”

Long before anyone else, Oborne traced how a backroom strategist had succeeded in seizing the levers of power, while pursuing a factional war against the left and playing into the hands of the nationalist right.

The Sweeney Strategy 

August 2024, p.11 

There is a serious problem. And, if recent history is anything to go by, it may end up inflicting grave damage on the Starmer premiership. Starmer is much too dependent on his campaign strategist, Morgan McSweeney, who is now the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications.

There is nothing unusual about this. Almost every PM since Tony Blair has employed their version of McSweeney. Alastair Campbell destroyed Blair’s reputation for integrity. David Cameron hired Murdoch henchman Andy Coulson with shameful consequences. Nick Timothy all but lost Theresa May the 2017 election. And Boris Johnson disastrously relied on Dominic Cummings. Of the above, McSweeney most closely resembles Cummings – who drove out the Tory left, stripping the whip from Ken Clarke, Rory Stewart, Dominic Grieve, and others.

In the short-term, Cummings’ project to split the Conservative Party helped Johnson secure his massive election victory in 2019. But in the medium-term, it gave far too much power to the far-right of the party – Patel, Braverman, Jenrick, etc – and removed the Tory soul.

McSweeney has been waging a Cummings-type war against the Labour left. This explains the cynical recruitment of populist Tory Natalie Elphicke; the deranged bid to prevent Diane Abbott from standing as a Labour MP; and the vindictive decision to ban pro-Palestine advocate Faiza Shaheen from running in Chingford and Woodford Green, which handed the seat back to former Tory Leader Iain Duncan Smith. Yet more shocking was the withdrawal of support for Labour’s candidate in Clacton, paving the way for a smooth victory for Nigel Farage and the synchronised dog-whistle attacks against Britain’s vulnerable Bangladeshi community.

McSweeney’s core job is electoral strategy, and I suppose I can see the rationale in mopping up as many voters as possible regardless of how racist or bigoted they are. But Harold Wilson was onto something important when he said the Labour Party was a “moral crusade or it is nothing”.

Wilson, like his great predecessor Clem Attlee, understood Labour is a broad church uniting left and right. There is, moreover, a great deal to be said for doing the right thing and not just the strategic thing. Indeed, Starmer’s promise to put ‘country before party’ involves doing exactly that.

Cummings or Going? 

September 2024, p.11

According to lobby reports, Keir Starmer’s Downing Street Chief of Staff Sue Gray is currently engaged in a power struggle against Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s Director of Political Strategy. There is likely to be an element of truth to this. I have never met either party, but I strongly take the side of Gray. In a properly-run government, a political strategist should not be in Downing Street at all. They should be in party campaign headquarters.

This is especially the case with McSweeney, who has already been responsible for a series of judgments that, while in the short-term interests of Labour, have done unnecessary damage to Keir Starmer’s Government.

The first was the unforgivable decision to pull the Labour candidate out of Clacton and give a free pass to Nigel Farage. The second was to introduce an element of racist bigotry into the election campaign, compromising Labour’s recent message over the racist riots. Sue Gray is quite right to keep McSweeney, and his cynical and crude political calculations, as far away as possible from the daily business of government.

All precedent suggests, however, that he will win. McSweeney has a formidable political machinery behind him – for example, it stares you in the face that the leaks come from his camp. Ultimately, Starmer may have to choose between the two. If he allows McSweeney to force out or downgrade Gray, he will inflict deep long damage on his administration – rather as Boris Johnson did when he hired Dominic Cummings.

Starmer’s Disaster 

November 2024, pp.10-11

I predicted in this column in August that Morgan McSweeney would win his power struggle with Sue Gray. He has duly done so, and has replaced her as Keir Starmer’s Downing Street Chief of Staff. This is a disaster for Labour, but even more so for Britain. McSweeney is a political strategist. Such creatures may be useful during election campaigns, but should not be allowed near government. Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff was Jonathan Powell, who had many years’ experience as a diplomat. In Downing Street, he played a distinguished role in creating the Good Friday Agreement.

There is no chance of McSweeney doing anything like that. His consideration is winning votes. This means he will automatically oppose the difficult or unpopular decisions which serious Prime Ministers must make if they are to do their job properly. Starmer’s foolish attachment to McSweeney explains his failure to show leadership as Prime Minister. Instead of using the opportunity granted to him by a massive Commons majority to address Britain’s multitude of problems, Starmer appears to be listening to McSweeney’s advice of not offending voters – thus creating a vacuum inevitably filled by minor or non-existent scandals. For these reasons, Sue Gray was right to try to keep McSweeney at arms length.

McSweeney has established himself as the most powerful individual in Britain. He, not Starmer, sets the tone. This is an awful shame because anybody who loves Britain yearns for good government after the incompetence and moral corruption of the Tory years.

I try not to read mainstream newspapers these days. The reporting is bent, the opinion columns deranged, and you almost never learn anything new or worthwhile. But, the day after Donald Trump won the American presidency for a second time, I made a special trip to the newsagents and bought the lot. Almost without exception, they amplified, normalised or celebrated the result, while mocking Trump’s defeated opponent, Kamala Harris. This was power worship rather than serious journalism.

Britain’s three big newspaper groups – Murdoch, the Rothermere empire, and the Telegraph Group – between them account for about three-quarters of newspaper readers. Yet, anybody with half an ounce of decency and intelligence can see that Trump’s victory is an unmitigated disaster for the United States and a mortal threat to her allies. It is plain from the favourable newspaper coverage here in Britain that Trump’s victory is a spectacular and, in all likelihood, game-changing gift to the far-right.

The Sun set aside two pages for Islamophobe Douglas Murray, who praised Trump for his war on immigration. Elsewhere, Murray issued a photograph of himself in consultation with the next US President at an “historic evening yesterday at Mar-a-Lago”. The Telegraph awarded Nigel Farage front page space for an article calling on Britain to “roll out the red carpet” for Trump. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail gave over a full page to a tirade demanding that Farage should be the next British ambassador to the United States.

Trump’s noxious brand of Republicanism, which has nothing in common with British conservatism, is already crossing the Atlantic. Two former Conservative Prime Ministers – Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – supported Trump ahead of the election. They and others want to do to the Conservatives what Donald Trump has achieved with the Republicans: capture a famous political party and use its name for the promotion of a movement that has more in common with fascism than Conservatism.

With three major newspaper groups on-side, it is hard to see what will stop the eventual merger of Reform UK and the Conservatives, and the creation of a party akin to AfD or National Rally in Germany and France. In theory, the Tory lurch to Trumpian politics ought to open up immense vistas of political space for Keir Starmer.

Very sadly, under the baleful influence of his strategist (now Chief of Staff) Morgan McSweeney, the Labour Leader has so far chosen to appease rather than challenge Trump’s mutant politics. In the wake of Trump’s victory Starmer will need to choose between Macron’s Europe and Trump’s United States.

A Sad, Bad State of Affairs 

January 2025, pp.6-7

Much of this flows, as I have explained before, from Starmer’s dependence on his new chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who maintains that Starmer can only win the next election by governing through a ‘permanent campaign’. This calamitous methodology, which first saw the light of day in the Blair era and was adopted by Boris Johnson, means that every decision is dictated after consultation with focus groups and pollsters for its likely effect on target voters. It is the antithesis of the 20th Century proposition that British Prime Ministers should govern in the national interest, leaving political campaigns to the few weeks before each general election.

The ‘permanent campaign’ guarantees bad government, and I am not even sure that it works electorally. There is a reason for this. Prime Ministers who depend on focus groups and care what newspapers think end up at the mercy of fashion, do a great deal of inadvertent harm, and achieve nothing substantial. Sue Gray, trained in the traditional civil service, despised this debauched system of popular rule. This explains why it was so important for McSweeney and his allies to dispose of her.

With Gray out of the way, McSweeney can now focus on his short-termist stunts (Starmer’s ‘relaunch’ in December was a good example) and dog-whistle messages to racist voters. Serious discussion about the great issues of our time – the legacy of Brexit, social degradation, climate change, political corruption, the growing menace of the far-right – has been eradicated.

Instead, McSweeney has secured a world in which Cabinet ministers such as Streeting run along to cultivate Marshall at meretricious events such as the Spectator dinner. It’s all so sad. We so badly need the Starmer Government to succeed. This moral and political delinquency makes me want to cry.

It’s barely a year since Tom Baldwin, a former Labour press officer, published his biography of Keir Starmer. Baldwin told the story well: toolmaker’s son; legal career; likes football; family man; decent chap. The book served a purpose, secured good reviews, and I believe sold well. 

Now, another Starmer book has come along, Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, written by distinguished Times columnist Patrick Maguire with Gabriel Pogrund, the most brilliant political reporter of his generation.

A comparison of the two volumes recalls Julian Barnes’ minor masterpiece Flaubert’s Parrot. Barnes’ book concerns an amateur Flaubert enthusiast, Braithwaite. On holiday in France, Braithwaite discovers that two museums both claim to display the stuffed parrot the great writer placed on his desk beside him as he wrote. Braithwaite sets out to find the real stuffed parrot. Barnes exploits this literary device to explore Flaubert. Renowned literary genius whose career went from strength to strength? Or the private tale of humiliation, failure, and despair ending in an early death from syphilis?

To be fair to Pogrund and Maguire, they dismantle Baldwin’s stuffed parrot with silky sympathy. The stiletto is inserted between the shoulder blades with such unobtrusive skill that Tom Baldwin may not even have felt it. In a postmodern touch, that Flaubert himself would surely have relished, they slowly reveal that Starmer has no agency and is the hapless protagonist in a project he cannot comprehend.

The Downing Street Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, appears to have briefed the authors ahead of the publication of this book. I assume that some part of him wants the world to know he’s the organ grinder and that Starmer is his monkey. This is, of course, humiliating for the Prime Minister.

The contempt felt for Starmer by his aides is beyond computation. Take this comment: “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.” The DLR is London’s fully automated, computer-controlled metro system.

Normally, I’d advise people not to waste their spare time reading contemporary histories. But this book is essential reading because it has penetrated the psychodynamics of a government with obscene clarity. Exceptionally well-informed, it has created an image of the Prime Minister clueless about how he got the job or what to do now he’s got it. This image will stick. It goes without saying that it is deeply upsetting, and above all wrong, that a British Prime Minister should have chosen such advisors.

Unjust Treatment 

April 2025, p.11

Has Starmer got the gumption to do anything about it? A test looms in the shape of the venomous briefing campaign already underway against Richard Hermer, the Attorney General. I cannot say for certain that McSweeney is behind it. But the campaign has many of the hallmarks of last year’s defenestration of Sue Gray, especially the deployment of the right-wing press as a weapon against a core member of the Government.

Hermer, unlike Gray, is not a direct rival to McSweeney, but he is certainly a potential blockage in the way of McSweeney’s political strategy: winning back Labour’s lost ‘hero’ voters. Hermer is also personally close to the Prime Minister. Probably the most brilliant mind in the Government, Hermer is a throwback to Starmer’s early years as a principled (and very gifted) human rights lawyer.

The attacks on Hermer are an action replay of the attacks on his Conservative predecessor Dominic Grieve. As with Grieve, they are false and brutally unfair. Last month, senior lawyers wrote to the Guardian warning that these attacks were causing “immense and untold damage” both to society and the rule of law. They certainly are. It will be a disaster if Starmer fails to stand by Hermer.

Access and Control 

June 2025, p.10-11

In a rational world, we would have seen a national clamour for Morgan McSweeney to be sacked after Labour’s recent electoral disaster. McSweeney is the architect of Starmer’s calamitous strategy of appeasing Nigel Farage by copying his policies.

This campaign plan went disastrously wrong in the local elections. But there has not been a whiff of media criticism of McSweeney. Even the Financial Times, the reporting of which tends to be more accurate and balanced than most, went out of its way to portray him as the innocent victim of policies inflicted on him by others.

This apparently illogical reaction to the local election results is a classic case study in the reality of British political reporting. British journalists very rarely tell readers how power works. On the contrary, they have an overriding obligation not to do so.

Downing Street controls access to information, meaning any political reporter who breaks ranks can be ‘put in the freezer’ and, over time, professionally destroyed. This power is especially frightening for broadcasters because networks demand ‘exclusive’ live interviews with the Prime Minister and leading Ministers.

This constraint even applies to the two outstanding mainstream political journalists operating in this country today: Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund. As I described in this column two months ago, their book, Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, relied on intensive briefing from McSweeney and his allies. This access shaped their interpretation.

Consider their coverage of Sue Gray, McSweeney’s predecessor as Starmer’s Chief of Staff. McSweeney badly wanted her job. A series of vicious smear stories about Gray appeared in the press until she was driven out. The only way Gray may have saved herself would have been by launching a briefing campaign of her own against McSweeney and the excitable young men who surround him. This she would not do, and paid a heavy personal price.

Gray’s removal was good for McSweeney but wretched for the Starmer Government. Wisdom is almost unknown at Westminster. Gray had her faults but she has knocked around the world and would have saved Starmer from many of the administrative fiascos and moral disasters that have turned the early months of his Government into an open shambles.

It is profoundly relevant in this context that she also represented and viscerally understood the tradition of integrity and public service which instruments of the ascendant system of oligarchical rule, such as McSweeney, rightly see as an obstacle and are determined to destroy.

There is nothing original in my analysis. The destructive poison sucking the life out of the Starmer Government (and doing appalling long-term damage to Britain as well) is well-known across Whitehall and among the more acute students of government. But you will never read about it in the mainstream press because of a system of lobby reporting based on backhand deals, client relationships, deceit, complicity, and increasingly direct control by offshore billionaires.

Figures of Note 

September 2025, p.10-11

Plenty of Irishmen have played a role in British politics. Erskine Childers, author of the spy novel The Riddle of the Sands, remains a fascinating and glamorous figure. He advised the Asquith Government before joining the IRA, taking part in the Irish Revolution, and being sentenced to death during the Irish Civil War. Before his execution, he insisted on shaking hands with the firing squad. He made his son, Erskine Hamilton Childers, a future President of Ireland, promise to seek out and shake the hands of all those who had signed his death warrant. Childers’ moral nobility was absolute: even in death he was set on putting an end to feuds and creating a path to reconciliation.

Brendan Bracken, of County Tipperary and founder of the Financial Times, was one of Winston Churchill’s most loyal supporters. According to his biographer Charles Lysaght (against whom we first played cricket in 1984 and countless times since), Bracken has a claim to have changed the course of history.

After Chamberlain fell in 1940, the issue arose as to who would succeed him as Prime Minister and thus head of a national government. Churchill was convinced that Labour would not accept him at any price and was resigned to supporting his rival, Halifax. Bracken dissuaded him, then came up with the ruse that Churchill should remain silent when Halifax’s name was raised at the selection meeting – at which point the idea of a Halifax premiership collapsed. Bracken was rewarded with the post of Information Minister during the Second World War and ended up as First Lord of the Admiralty. 

Project of Hate 

September 2025, p.10-11

But no Irish citizen has wielded a fraction of the power of McSweeney. This is a consequence of the new system of British government which has evolved over the last quarter century. Power has passed from the elected Prime Minister to fixers and strategists. Alastair Campbell pioneered this arrangement under Tony Blair, and Boris Johnson was run by Dominic Cummings until the pair fell out.

McSweeney is the starkest example. He is the leading member of the entryist group Labour Together, a right-wing version of the Militant Tendency, which used Keir Starmer as its chosen vehicle to capture Labour. This operation was expertly described by Neal Lawson in June’s Byline Times, who revealed Starmer as McSweeney’s creature.

This is a disaster. McSweeney has no experience of ordinary life. His speciality is Westminster manoeuvering, calculation, and the pursuit of power for power’s sake. He has no sense of the public good, is bereft of moral purpose, and has no generous vision of what Labour stands for. He sees the British people – and to be fair, with some excuse, as an Irishman from Cork – as brutes.

McSweeney’s bleak analysis lies behind Starmer’ hideous reversion to the racist politics of Enoch Powell, turning on minorities with talk of an “island of strangers”. McSweeney appears to idolise the far-right press, which presumably explains the recent decision to appoint David Dinsmore as a government communications chief. Dinsmore was the repellent Sun Editor who hosted the racist columnist Katie Hopkins, who labelled asylum seekers wishing to come to this country as “cockroaches”.

The appointment of Dinsmore is a vivid reminder that the McSweeney/Starmer project can only succeed by preying on divisions, creating new ones, and in the process turning Britain into a rancid, hate-filled nation. The strategy is to take the majority of Britons (for the most part kindly and decent people, as Orwell beautifully described) for granted while competing with Reform UK and the dying Conservative Party in an unsavoury squabble over the relatively small group of what McSweeney calls “hero” voters in so-called Red Wall seats.

The Prime Minister and his advisor believe that this can only be achieved with the collaboration of newspapers such as The Sun and the Daily Mail. There is an irony here. Had he guided Starmer along a more generous and less discordant path, these papers would have turned viciously on McSweeney, with banner headlines asking why a foreigner is allowed to play organ grinder to Starmer’s monkey.

Because McSweeney is a specialist in the politics of hatred, the Daily Mail and The Sun are happy to reward him with honorary British citizenship. If current trends persist, the McSweeney/Starmer legacy will be twofold: the final destruction of Clem Attlee’s Labour Party – and a Nigel Farage premiership.

Telling Silence 

February 2026, p.8-9

I was a lobby correspondent for almost 20 years so I know the system: bribery tempered by intimidation. Behave, and you will be rewarded with the access that your editor craves. Cause trouble, and you get put in the freezer.

This is why I have been intrigued by Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, an account of Keir Starmer’s rise to power, published before Christmas.

Holden is a complete outsider. He has no relationships at Westminster to protect, no comfortable deals, brokered over lunch in expensive London restaurants. He is impossible to bribe and cannot be intimidated.

His background is investigative reporting, above all 15 years exposing state capture in South Africa. This kind of work requires rigorous attention to detail and study of documents. It’s also brave. Find out too much and someone may want to kill you. At one point Holden needed to leave South Africa in a hurry.

Holden’s book shows how a coterie of political saboteurs picked out Starmer and ran him as their candidate for the Labour leadership. Their leader is Morgan McSweeney, now Starmer’s Chief of Staff. Their objective was the destruction of the left, and Holden shows that they were not scrupulous about the means.

The book has received no reviews in the mainstream press. This does not apply simply to Conservative outlets such as The Times and the Telegraph, but also to theoretically left-wing outlets such as The Guardian and the New Statesman. 

The Guardian has not mentioned the book on a single occasion. It did not even do so even when it reported on last year’s resignation of Paul Ovenden, Starmer’s Director of Political Strategy. Ovenden was obliged to resign after revelations first made in Holden’s book. The Guardian covered the resignation, but chose to leave its readers in the dark about the context in which they emerged.

The New Statesman did not review the Holden book either, but the magazine did run a hatchet job on the author before it was even published.

In the Oligarchs’ Interests 

February 2026, p.8-9

Let’s now examine the media reception of Tom Baldwin’s biography, Keir Starmer.

The book was based on extensive private access to the Prime Minister. It was serialised ahead of publication in the Sunday Times, received a series of generally excellent reviews in the mainstream media, and was named political book of the year in The Times, the newspaper for which Baldwin used to work before he jumped the fence and became a political press officer.

Personal hagiographer to the Prime Minister carries near official status in the media/political establishment and has done for ages. Roy Jenkins performed the same function for Clem Attlee in the 1940s; whereas Bruce Anderson’s instant biography of John Major, hurriedly put together in the wake of the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher, remains well worth reading today as an unrivalled portrait of high Tory politics written from the point of view of a sympathetic insider. Some of the greatest writers in the English language have been Tory hacks: Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson (“I took care that the whig dogs should not have the best of it”) for example.

The collapse of mass party membership and the long assault on trade unions have left both the Conservatives and Labour hopelessly dependent on donor cash 

Tom Baldwin therefore stands in a distinguished tradition.

His book is an informative and well-written contribution. It stands to reason that his book should have been reviewed. But so should Holden’s. (I should perhaps declare that we share the same radical publishing house, OR Books, based in New York’s Lower East Side.)

The great New Statesman Editor Kingsley Martin would have given Holden a thorough airing. Former Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger would have given ample space both to the book and its critics.

They would have done so because Holden has written a deeply serious piece of work which goes straight to the heart of our national political predicament. The British system of government, and in particular the two traditional political parties, have both been captured by tiny factions.

McSweeney and Starmer entered Downing Street together through the means of a group called Labour Together. The name was misleading, presumably deliberately so. It was, in reality, divisive and even sectarian. As Holden proves, Labour Together preferred to manoeuvre in the dark: one of its primary tools was deceit.

Holden was the first journalist to focus on irregularities in its funding. The evidence suggests that the New Statesman hatchet job reflected well-justified alarm in official Labour circles about what the book may have contained. (At one stage a reputation management firm was hired to investigate Paul Holden and his family.)

It is easy to account for the point blank refusal of the British political press to review Holden’s book. His analysis is not simply a challenge to Britain’s political establishment, it is also a humiliation for the mainstream media. This is because he shows how political reporters have abandoned their traditional role of holding power to account.

His analysis also provides the starting point for an explanation of one of the most important developments in British politics in recent years: the rise of the political fixer who can wield more power than the Prime Minister while typically viewing him or her with contempt.

Dominic Cummings is another example. Nobody has yet provided a proper explanation for this phenomenon. Holden’s book suggests that money is the key.

The collapse of mass party membership and the long assault on trade unions have left both the Conservatives and Labour hopelessly dependent on donor cash. Cummings and McSweeney have both been written up by admiring client media as brilliant strategists.

The evidence suggests otherwise. Anyone who takes the trouble to read Cummings’ ramblings (not recommended) can spot at once that the man is actually a crank. His key talent was the only one that mattered: he knew how to create and sell the donor-friendly policies to the billionaires and oligarchs who have captured the British political system. The same applies to McSweeney.

Starmer Must Go

Ricky Hale writes:

Starmer’s chief adviser Morgan McSweeney has resigned from his role, due to the fallout from the Epstein/Mandelson scandal. Despite the severity of the scandal, McSweeney was said to be “in two minds” about quitting, which seems to contradict his words about taking “full responsibility”. One anonymous Labour MP described him as “the very worst of our party” according to Sky’s Faye Brown.

While McSweeney and Starmer are claiming that Mandelson deceived them about his friendship with Epstein, and are making this about one error of judgement, a poor recommendation for US ambassador that unexpectedly went wrong, I’m about to show that claim is laughable. The full story goes so much deeper than Mandelson, or anything you will have been shown by the corporate media so buckle up…

It’s fair to say that McSweeney has been one of the most powerful figures within the Labour Party for some time. His roles have included: Director of Keir Starmer’s Leadership Campaign, Chief of Staff to the Leader of the Opposition, Director of Campaigns for the Labour Party, Head of Political Strategy at 10 Downing Street, and Downing Street Chief of Staff.

McSweeney has often been described as the protégé of Peter Mandelson and by some of Lord Alli. He founded Labour Together — the group whose primary goal appeared to be to end Corbyn as a political force. He and Mandelson arranged for Sir Keir Starmer to visit Palantir in a non-official meeting that we are not allowed to know the details of. Palantir CEO Peter Thiel was an Epstein associate, and so was, apparently, Lord Alli. I told you this went deeper than just Mandelson!

Things are so bad that according to The Canary, Starmer’s rivals are calling his circle the “political wing of international paedophilia”. Labour’s Lord Glasman was scathing, saying: “The government and the party has to repent and reject New Labour as an alien body that took over the Labour Party. And this is where it leads: perversion and paedophilia.”

I’m not gonna suggest they’re all paedophiles because there is no evidence of that, but I think it’s fair to refer to them as “the Epstein wing of the Labour Party”. Let’s take a look at those Epstein links:

Remember Lord Waheed Alli — the guy who bought gifts for MPs, and designer clothes for Starmer’s wife, during the Freebiegate scandal? Well, it appears he hung out with Epstein at least twice.

Lord Alli was on the guest list for a dinner hosted by Epstein at New York’s Monkey Bar restaurant in February 2010. One of Epstein’s emails lists Alli as a contact along with Mandelson. In another email, Epstein refers to Lord Alli as “Walid”, suggesting familiarity. Epstein says the men stayed together on Shelter Island.

Lord Alli insists he never knowingly met, or communicated, with Epstein, but the evidence suggests he mixed in the same circles. To reiterate: Morgan McSweeney has been described as the protégé of Lord Alli and Lord Mandelson — and Alli has a friendship with Mandelson going back decades.

During the 2024 election, McSweeney and Alli’s teams collaborated on Starmer’s campaign, regularly meeting at Alli’s Soho townhouse and other properties. Alli chaired Labour’s 2024 election fundraising and had temporary Downing Street access post-election for advisory/event roles.

Lord Alli has been involved in multiple controversies, such as evicting a family from their London home last year so he could increase the rent. This happened at a time when Labour was pushing the Renters’ Rights Act that would have outlawed such practices.

Lord Alli has breached the House of Lords Code of Conduct multiple times, including failing to disclose business interests — one of those interests involved a company based in a British Virgin Islands tax haven. He was reportedly responsible for blocking a move by Angela Rayner to ban foreign political donations.

Lord Alli was put in the House of Lords by Tony Blair in 1998 when he was just 34, making him the UK’s youngest peer. Since 2020, Lord Alli has given over £500,000 to the Labour Party and he chaired its 2024 election fundraising. He funds the hugely influential Labour Together which I will get to later. This begs the question of why such individuals should be able to buy influence…

You might have seen the name Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem in the Epstein files. Bin Sulayem had a long-term friendship and business relationship with Epstein — the Epstein files show the pair often discussed sexual matters. In one exchange, Bin Sulayem sent Epstein a link to his “very own hairy porn site”. In another exchange, he arranged for Epstein’s masseuse to train at a luxury spa in Turkey so she could “learn as much as she can”. Epstein described bin Sulayem as a “close personal friend”.

Bin Sulayem also had a close relationship with Peter Mandelson after the pair were introduced by Epstein. Coincidentally, bin Sulayem’s company has been awarded many lucrative UK government contracts.

Bin Sulayem is CEO of Dubai-based ports giant DP World — the company responsible for many of the UK’s freeports. When Mandelson was business secretary in 2009, Epstein helped bin Sulayem lobby for the London Gateway port project on the River Thames — a £1.8 billion DP World venture. It was described as the” UK’s largest inward investment infrastructure project”.

Epstein forwarded messages from bin Sulayem to Mandelson seeking government loan guarantees, investment, and backing for the project. Epstein provided Mandelson’s personal email address to bin Sulayem and offered advice/edits on communications. The project ultimately went ahead and is run by DP World to this day.

When Labour returned to power under Starmer, it expanded freeports and continued giving contracts to DP World, including one for The Hive — an amenities and innovation hub at London Gateway Logistics Park.

DP World was also given Ministry of Defence and NHS contracts, despite huge concerns regarding workers’ rights and human trafficking. If you think this is bad, it somehow gets worse. It’s time to move onto Palantir…

Peter Mandelson founded lobbying firm Global Counsel which has represented Palantir as a client since 2018, helping it secure government work. Mandelson held shares in Global Counsel, even after he became US ambassador, meaning he was profiting from a lobbying firm that was helping secure government contracts. Does that sound like a conflict of interests to you?

Not only was Mandelson one of Epstein’s buddies, but so was Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. Epstein and Thiel had a business relationship through Valar Ventures and regularly met for lunch. In one email exchange, they discussed how disaster capitalism would benefit them and Brexit was “just the beginning”.

Another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale has suggested that Palantir was founded to kill “commies”. He later added Palantir was founded to “save Western Civilization from our adversaries, especially communists and Islamists”. Palantir’s CEO and co-founder Alex Karp echoed the sentiments, saying Palantir was set up to “scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them”.

Given that Palantir was clearly set up by psychopaths, you would think any self-respecting politician would run a mile, but Starmer crossed an ocean to meet them.

Starmer made an informal visit to Palantir’s Washington DC HQ in February 2025 that was arranged by McSweeney and Mandelson. This visit involved a Q and A with staff and a meeting with Alex Karp. The meeting did not appear in Starmer’s official register of visits and he has rejected requests for the minutes/briefings.

Alarmingly, Palantir has secured over £670 million in UK public contracts since 2023. The £330 million NHS contract for Palantir to manage patient data has been well publicised, but fewer people are aware of the contract to “modernise” our military with AI/data analytics. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a massive security risk.

It’s worth reiterating Peter Thiel named Palantir after Sauron’s seeing stone in Lord of the Rings. Palantir is renowned for its surveillance tech and AI systems that are used to slaughter Palestinians, and now this company sees your health records and your country’s defence infrastructure. Does this make you feel comfortable?

You’re gonna feel even less comfortable when you hear Labour received its largest ever donation of £4 million from a hedge fund called Quadrature Capital. This hedge fund just happens to hold significant shares in Palantir. It is also a major investor in arms firms like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Ask yourself if such a hedge fund donates to Labour out of the goodness of its heart, or expects to something in return. Take all the time you need…

Now it’s time to discuss Labour Together — the corporate think tank acting as the Epstein arm of the Labour Party. Labour Together was instrumental in Keir Starmer’s rise within Labour. It funded Starmer’s candidates prior to the 2024 general election. I think few would deny that Labour Together’s main purpose was to purge Labour of Corbyn and his supporters and return it to a pro-establishment party.

Labour Together was established by Morgan McSweeney and he served as its director for three years from 2017 until 2020. Lord Alli was a significant contributor to Labour Together during McSweeney’s tenure.

The pair are understood to have collaborated on candidate selection for the Labour Party. Such candidates include the odious Luke Akehurst who was parachuted into the North Durham seat where locals strongly dislike him [he has always been perfectly civil to me]. Akehurst served as director of We Believe in Israel from 2011 to 2024 — the group was established to combat “delegitimisation of Israel”. He has close ties to Labour Friends of Israel and BICOM — the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre. Throughout the genocide, Akehurst has defended the UK’s military ties to Israel in parliament and emphasised Israel’s right to defend itself.

Other financial contributors to Labour Together include: pro-Israel lobbyist Trevor Chinn who has been described as “Labour’s great benefactor”; founder of Nevsky Capital/Crake Asset Management, Martin Taylor; former CEO of Belron, Gary Lubner; and Labour peer and former special adviser to Peter Mandelson, Lord Hollick. These individuals have donated millions to the Labour Party, Labour Together, and related causes.

Labour Together shared office space with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, an organisation supported by Israel. These organisations worked together on Stop Funding Hate, a censorship effort to bring down pro-Corbyn organisations like The Canary. Morgan McSweeney played a leading role in these efforts, famously saying: “We need to kill The Canary before it kills us”. The Canary has been making no secret of its joy that McSweeney is gone, saying, “guess we’re the last bird standing”.

In a recent scandal, it was revealed that Labour Together hired PR firm APCO Worldwide to investigate journalists probing its funding scandals. APCO has represented clients, such as Elbit Systems (Israel’s largest arms firm) and big tobacco/defence-linked entities.

Labour Together has strong ties to Israel and the military industrial complex. The above mentioned Trevor Chinn has funded Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel since the 1980s. He has played leading roles in the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) and the Jewish Leadership Council. BICOM promotes strategic partnerships between the UK and Israel, including cooperation on arms trade and military tech.

Another donor to Labour Together, Gary Lubner, is a long-standing donor to United Jewish Israel Appeal. Lubner’s business history includes sanctions-busting during South African apartheid. His son Jack is active in the Jewish Labour Movement and anti-BDS campaigns. The funding from these individuals corresponds with Labour’s shift away from pro-Palestinian /anti-war policies.

Sir Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson are both members of the pro-war Trilateral Commission. Given that Mandelson has been a member much longer, it has been speculated that he brought Starmer in. Jeffrey Epstein was described as an “enthusiastic member” of the Trilateral Commission who boasted how the organisation counted “every great leader in America” among its members. Peter Thiel has also been listed as a member.

I think it’s fair to say I have established that Starmer’s circle has strong ties to the Epstein ring, unsavoury political donors, the military industrial complex, and the apartheid state of Israel. Now let’s dive into Morgan McSweeney’s background to see if we can shine some further light on what is going on.

I must give investigative journalist Jody McIntyre credit here, because he has done a lot of digging on McSweeney and I will be discussing some of his findings:

McSweeney dropped out of university in 1994 and spent time volunteering on Kibbutz Sarid, an Israeli settlement in the Jezreel Valley, northern Israel. It was established on land originally taken from Palestinians in 1926. McIntyre describes this as a “formative experience” for McSweeney, noting his exposure to Zionist organisations like settler group Hashomer Hatzair. The Jerusalem Post confirms McSweeney worked in a factory, learning discipline amid the kibbutz’s communal lifestyle.

As discussed previously, McSweeney founded and directed Labour Together — a pro-Israel think tank. The group received over £730,000 in undeclared donations between 2017–2020, leading to a fine from the Electoral Commission. Much of the funding came from pro-Israel lobbyist Trevor Chinn—a major donor to groups like BICOM and Labour Friends of Israel.

Leaked documents and whistle-blower accounts suggest McSweeney might have concealed the funds partly to “protect Trevor” from scrutiny. Over 40% of Starmer’s cabinet have received donations from the Israeli lobby, often linked to LFI trips or campaigns.

One absurd aspect of the Epstein scandal is how politicians are claiming Epstein was a Russian spy, but the Epstein wing of the Labour Party is overwhelmingly pro-Israel and hostile towards Russia.

Peter Mandelson is so pro-Israel that he made a Balfour Declaration Anniversary Speech in Tel Aviv in 2001. He’s such a piece of shit that he expressed opposition to the Gaza ceasefire, calling the idea “ridiculous”. McSweeney did not make any major decisions on candidate selections, reshuffles, and Downing Street strategy without consulting Mandelson. McSweeney was instrumental in pushing for Mandelson to become US ambassador.

One of the reasons that McSweeney resigned is that when all of the Mandelson communications are published by law, it is going to look so much worse. Given Starmer’s extensive ties to all of this, it seems absurd that he is positioning himself as the solution to the mess he was ultimately responsible for. Starmer must go.