From Phantom Heresy To Uncomfortable Reality

As one who would hitherto have been described as a conservative, Fr Dwight Longenecker writes:

Scrolling through social media this morning, I was struck by a double image: a jet fighter with a large icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary blazoned across it, next to an AI-generated image of Donald Trump radiating a kind of messianic glory in front of a flowing American flag and the motto ‘Thank God for Trump’. The person posting bore the profile name ‘Our Lady of Guadalupe’. Above the double image that ‘Our Lady of Guadalupe’ posted was the text: ‘God bless America and Trump. Thank you Jesus for sending Trump to stand up to an apostate pope in error with church doctrine.’

The bitter vituperation against Pope Leo by right-wing American Catholics is astonishing. After the Pope’s clash with Trump over the war in Iran and his support for the poor and immigrants, social media posts from Trump supporters have called Pope Leo a homosexual, a lackey of the Lavender Mafia, a puppet of the left-wing Obama/Axelrod political machine, a socialist, a communist and a hand-picked successor to the Marxist shielder of sex offenders, Pope Francis. The frightening fanaticism of die-hard Catholic Trump supporters is bewildering, but when one looks at the history and wider context, it is not surprising.

For wider context, one needs to understand American politics from the post-war period onwards. Of the two political parties – Republican and Democrat – the Democrats presented themselves as the party of the poor, the dispossessed, the immigrants and the working class. They were for the little man: the trade unions, equal rights, welfare and standing up against the wealthy East Coast establishment. As such, the Democrats also had the Catholic vote. The Republicans stood for the wealthy, the property owners, the white Protestant middle class, much of the university-educated and the establishment elite.

But from the 1960s onwards there was an about-turn. It became fashionable to defend the poor and fight for equal rights, and those equal rights were not only for black Americans. Feminists and homosexuals were also demanding equal rights. As intellectuals, the entertainment industry and media figures joined in, the Democratic Party became the party of a new kind of elite – the politically correct elite. What had been support for the poor, ethnic minorities, the working class and immigrants evolved into support for a wide spectrum of aggrieved identities. 

As the Democratic Party shifted from the working class to this new elite, its traditional base began to move. Ordinary working-class Democrats (and Catholics) realised that their common-sense values – both economic and moral – were more aligned with the Republican Party. This shift was driven in part by the ‘Moral Majority’ in the 1970s, which entered the culture wars over sexual morality and abortion, and through which Protestants and Catholics began to see themselves as allies rather than enemies.

In a television interview with Donald Trump decades before he pursued political ambitions, the interviewer was walking down a street in New York City and asked Trump if he had ever considered politics. Trump replied, prophetically: ‘Sure, and if I did, I’d win.’

‘Who would vote for you?’ the interviewer asked.

Pointing to the construction workers on one of his building projects, Trump said: ‘Those guys up there’.

They were all waving to him and calling his name.

After the blue-blood East Coast establishment reign of the Bush family over the Republican Party, billionaire Donald Trump came to prominence. Formerly a registered Democrat, he understood the cultural shift that had taken place. The workers, the ‘little guys’, the silent majority were now Republicans, not Democrats. He portrayed himself as an ordinary man who had made good. He was shrewd and spoke – and acted – not like the Bush family, but like the construction workers.

Was he coarse and foul-mouthed? They were too. Did he have an eye for a beautiful woman? He was like them. Did he cut deals and make money? They wished they could. Did he avoid taxes, distrust big government and suspect the establishment of being corrupt? That was their view too. When he ended up being persecuted by that crooked and corrupt establishment, he became their martyr. When he survived an assassination attempt, that sealed the deal.

Now let us weave in religion. Many of these same working-class and middle-class Americans were Christians – both Catholic and Protestant. They did not like Trump’s language or morals, but they preferred him to the alternative, for by now the Democrats were firmly aligned with abortion rights, feminism, LGBTQ+ activism, transgender ideology and open borders.

Catholics who once voted Democrat because it was ‘the party of the poor’ hesitated when ‘the poor’ appeared to include a wide range of social outliers. In their attempt to be tolerant, the Democrats seemed, to these voters, to indulge the worst elements of the underclass – the indigent, addicts and the homeless. Catholics may have wanted to help the poor, but for many this was a bridge too far.

Donald Trump came with a promise to clean up cities, deport criminal immigrants, support the family, ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington and ‘Make America Great Again’.

When he took action alongside Israel regarding Iran, these supporters cheered – Catholics included. Many viewed Muslims as a threat and saw Iran’s actions, both internationally and domestically, as justification for American force.

For right-wing American Catholics there was an additional factor: Pope Francis. Many conservative Catholics believed that Francis disliked America, did not understand traditional Catholics and did not wish to. They viewed him as aligned with liberation theology and hostile to their concerns. If Francis did not like them, they returned the sentiment.

Now Pope Leo has assumed the throne of Peter, these same Catholics have convinced themselves that he is the result of a conclave shaped by Francis and his allies – Cardinals Cupich, Tobin and McElroy.

Too many are declaring that they are Catholic, but ‘this Pope is not my Pope’.

Mr Trump is their hero instead, and their battle cry is: ‘Thank you Jesus for sending Trump to stand up to an apostate pope.’

I realise there is little I can do to address this situation.

However, there are five steps I think ordinary American Catholics should take. First, we should heed the words of St Paul: ‘I urge that petitions, prayers, intercessions and thanksgiving be made for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness’ (I Timothy 2:1–2). Considering these words were written during the reign of Nero, it should not be too much to ask.

Second, we should admit that it is the Pope’s role to speak out on moral as well as doctrinal issues and that it is acceptable for him to challenge the White House. Third, we should do the Holy Father the courtesy of discovering what he really said, rather than relying on scare headlines from bias-affirming news sources and social media. Fourth, we should be better informed about Catholic social teaching, realising that it offers a more expansive approach to world affairs that is balanced and fully Catholic.

Finally, we should all try harder to see the issues from the other side. We may disagree with our fellow Catholics on political questions, but if we grant that they hold their positions in sincere good faith, they might return the courtesy and grant that we also hope, pray and work for the best. In this mutual respect, the unity at the heart of the Catholic faith will be nurtured and prosper.

And as one who would hitherto have been described as a liberal, David Gibson writes:

In 1899, Pope Leo XIII sent a letter to the Catholic bishops of the United States condemning the errors of what he called “Americanism”—a temptation, he warned, to embrace pluralism, religious liberty, and freedom of expression and other dangerously “Protestant” ideas in an effort to help Catholics assimilate to the surrounding culture. Not only did the Catholic Church eventually embrace most of the concepts that Leo deplored, but even at the time, the American bishops assured him that his objections were unfounded. In their view, Catholics in their country could be both good Americans and good Catholics. The bishops were right, and what became known as “the phantom heresy” of Americanism was largely forgotten.

But if Leo XIII was wrong about what would corrode the religious identity of Catholics back then, it turns out he was right to worry about American Catholic identity; he was just a century ahead of his time. The recent clashes between Pope Leo XIV—who took that name to signal his commitment to advancing the previous Leo’s better-known teachings on social justice—and the Trump administration have underscored how U.S. Catholics have come to behave as though they are religious authorities unto themselves. This ecclesiological framing best explains the unprecedented drama between Washington and the Vatican and the challenge facing the first American pope as he marks the one-year anniversary of his election.

President Trump sparked the war of words with a characteristically blustery social media post blasting Leo as “WEAK on Crime” and warning that Leo “should get his act together as Pope” because he was “hurting the Catholic Church.” It sounded as if Trump were lambasting a local official who had disobeyed a party boss rather than a Roman pontiff who had critiqued the president’s genocidal threat to send Iranians “back to the stone age, where they belong.” Trump refused to apologize for the post and doubled down on his insults (even as he deleted another post that depicted him as Jesus working a miracle, an AI image that offended many in his Evangelical base).

What was striking was that, despite some initial tone-policing from Trump’s Catholic allies, many prominent Catholics in the United States soon shifted the focus to debates over just-war theory or the proper relationship between church and state, and some of them suggested that it was Leo who had stepped over the line. “I love the Catholic Church,” border czar Tom Homan told reporters. “I just wish they’d stick to fixing the Church because there’s issues—I know because I’m a member—instead of politics.” Vice President J. D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, went so far as to tell the pope that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality” and “what’s going on in the Catholic Church.” Later that week he warned the pope to “be careful” when he “opines on matters of theology.”

This episode is not just about the outsized egos of politicians or even policy differences, nor can it be chalked up to the naïveté of converts. Yes, Church leaders likely regard Vance’s pronouncements on theology the way epidemiologists view RFK Jr.’s opinions on vaccines. But the split really goes back to a deeper alienation between the U.S. Church and the rest of the Catholic Church. While the Catholic Church in the United States started as a “church of immigrants,” many of these newcomers followed the classic American progression from Democratic urban ethnic enclaves to mainline Republican suburbs, and from social liberalism to establishment conservatism. Throughout the relatively conservative papacies of John Paul II (1978–2005) and Benedict XVI (2005–2013), the emerging leaders of this rightward-leaning Catholicism could plausibly claim favored status in Rome. But there were awkward tensions even then. Occasionally, conservative Catholics in the United States had to redact a papal teaching to make it align with GOP economic orthodoxy and culture-war politics. They often spoke as if their zealous commitment to the Church’s teaching about abortion gave them leeway to disregard inconvenient papal statements—like John Paul II’s forceful denunciation of George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion in 2003. Notwithstanding their own differences with John Paul II and Benedict XVI, they insisted that any Catholic not aligned with the pope was a “bad” Catholic and unworthy of inclusion in the workings, ministries, and even sacraments of the Church.

Then two things happened. First, the conclave of March 2013 elected an Argentine cardinal, Pope Francis, who upended those conventions. Francis ended special access for conservative Americans and insisted that the Gospel message demanded that they, like all Catholics, welcome the stranger and care for the most vulnerable. Suddenly many self-styled “orthodox” Catholics could no longer claim a papal mandate for their ideology but neither could they claim a “good” Catholic had to agree with the pope because they obviously did not. One popular response to this predicament was to argue that not only was the pope wrong, but that he was promoting heresy and fomenting schism and might not even be a legitimate pope. This was not just dissent but a thoroughgoing dismissal of the papal magisterium.

The second development was the rise of Donald Trump. Having loosened the ties binding them to the wider Catholic world, many conservative U.S. Catholics attached themselves to Trump’s nationalist populism and then to the increasingly powerful Christian nationalism of his Evangelical base. Each step drew them further away from Rome’s orbit. In response to Mater et magistra, Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical on the Church’s role promoting social justice, William F. Buckley’s National Review famously retorted, “Mater si, Magistra no”—mother yes, teacher no. The slogan of many conservative Catholics in 2026 might be “MAGA si, Magistra no.” U.S. Catholics these days can talk about Rome the way anti-Catholic Protestants used to, and they seem to think this is normal. Their first loyalty is not to the pope or any bishop, but to the leaders of their anti-globalist political movement. Consider that Vance’s backer and mentor, the idiosyncratically Christian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, says he worries about Vance’s “popeism” and counsels the vice president to distance himself from Rome, which he sees as the source of a potential “Caesaro-Papist fusion” that could usher in the anti-Christ.

The election of Pope Leo a year ago has not reversed this trend. Though different from Francis in various ways, Leo has made it clear from the start that he intends to maintain the missionary impulse and prophetic stance of his predecessor. Conservatives convinced Francis’s pontificate was anomalous were shocked that the College of Cardinals voted for continuity, not revanchism. Much of the Catholic right has spent the last year trying to interpret Leo as one of their own, but Leo eludes easy categorizations, and recent weeks have shown that he is no less willing to speak his mind than Francis was. Many Catholics in the United States would rather he didn’t.

The fierce response to Leo’s words represents a historic shift in the religious sensibility of American Catholicism, away from the communal toward a radical individualism, from the universal to a tribal nationalism. MAGA Catholics act as if they are arguing with some guy dressed in white running an NGO in Rome; they are in fact rejecting what the pope speaks for, and from: a tradition developed over centuries and a “sense of the faithful” representing some 1.4 billion other Catholics around the world (U.S. Catholics constitute just five percent of the Church).

The wealth and influence of U.S. Catholics has certainly contributed to this mindset, giving many an outsized view of their own might and righteousness. Some, like the bloviating Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, may declare themselves done with Catholicism. But most will stick around, while continuing to believe that, whatever any pope says, they themselves know best. Even if Trump falls out of favor with American Catholics, as he has with nearly every other sector of the electorate, what was once a phantom heresy will remain an uncomfortable reality.

Can the trend be reversed? One way forward would be for American Catholics to look outward. In Leo XIII’s day, the concern was to keep American Catholics connected to Rome. For Leo XIV, the challenge is to connect them to global Catholicism. It was perhaps providential that Leo embarked on his first marathon foreign trip, an eleven-day journey to Africa, just as the American president was taking aim at him. Much as Leo tried to tamp down the narrative that his every utterance was a direct response to Trump, the issues he highlighted during his four-nation journey were ones that also resonate in the United States—violence, corruption, economic inequality. In strife-torn Bamenda in northwest Cameroon, Leo told those gathered in the cathedral that, “in a world turned upside-down” and “ravaged by a handful of tyrants…today you are the city on the hill, resplendent in the eyes of all!” Here was the first pope from the United States conferring the foundational American identity—an image drawn from the Gospel of Matthew by the Puritan leader John Winthrop—on an African country that Donald Trump probably considers a “shithole.”

Similarly, on July 4, as his native country celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Leo will be celebrating Mass on a rocky Mediterranean island where desperate African refugees first find safe haven if they survive the perilous crossing. The pope’s visit to Lampedusa could be seen as a declaration of interdependence, a message that American ideals are inclusive, not tribal, as well as a vivid demonstration of how to be both a good American and a good Catholic.

Fear or Favour?

Shomrim limits its community's authority to lecture anyone else on integration or assimilation. London has always been "the world in one city", and the place where people went to escape England. But having been right in its heart last month, if anything they seem to have met in the middle. And was London multicultural in the 1930s? I am tempted to say, "Only if you meant the Jews." Not quite true, but not far off. Or what about the 1950s and the early 1960s, when the Union Movement was on the march? Specifically, how many Muslims were there?

In any case, feelings are real, but they are not facts. Poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but it is economic inequality that is a fact. Gender identity is a real feeling, but it is sex ("biological sex") that is a fact. When a child fears a bogeyman under the bed, then that fear is real, but, in point of fact, the threat is not. And after late night adolescent arson had included a couple of incidents against empty Jewish ambulances and an empty synagogue, there have been three knife attacks by one of this country's numerous deinstitutionalised psychotics, of which two of the victims happened to be Jewish, and all three survived. It is clear what the problems are. And what they are not.

While I am all for heckling politicians, and anyone who makes an intervention such as Mark Rowley's against Zack Polanski has entered the political fray, the man who started the chant of "Shame on you!" against Rowley and against Sarah Sackman had shouted without consequence that Sackman was "ugly" and "a bitch". For comparison, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Victims, Alex Davies-Jones, though whom the Government has threatened to ban the Gaza peace marches, was asked by two constituents about the war in Gaza, so she had them prosecuted for harassment. Summarily convicted, of course, they successfully exercised their absolute right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court. Long may that right remain.

London's next Gaza march will be 16 May, as will the latest Unite the Kingdom march and rally, which no one is proposing to ban. On the contrary, the Met has made it clear on Twitter that it regarded Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as the boss to whom it had to buddy up. It is frightened of him. Using bladed articles that they had brought for the purpose, Yaxley-Lennon's drunken and coked up supporters attacked the Police at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day 2023, leading to the second sacking of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, that time because she had encouraged them. That was the first Zionist terrorist attack in London in many decades, but it was not the first ever. Anything comparable in the Palestinian cause would have led to the imposition of martial law.

As for sacking the Home Secretary, if Shabana Mahmood had lasted that long, then whoever was the Prime Minister might ask her to explain why she had granted visas to speakers who, as everyone knew that they would, had called on Donald Trump to invade the United Kingdom, which the United States could do in seconds, and effect regime change. Yvette Cooper got away with it last time, but she has a lowbrow showbiz husband to rouse the rabble if necessary.

The rabble. Never to be confused with the Wretched of the Earth. The phrase "Globalise the Intifada" may be better avoided for the time being, but "intifada" comes from "nafaDa", "to shake of the dust", because of course Arabic has a simple and specific word for so everyday a necessity in its linguistic heartland. "Intifada" therefore has connotations of waking up, of rising out of the dusty squalor of poverty, and so on. It is not of Islamist origin. On the contrary, it was developed in the trade unions and on the women's committees of the Left.

But there is always the lumpenproletariat as well, ever willing to team up with the petit bourgeoisie in the service of the Plutocrat Populists. Hence the fury towards Craig Guildford, eventually costing him his job, over his approach to the infamous fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv; the fury of the very people who were now cheering on Rowley against Polanski. Rowley has never said a word against their frequent and vitriolic charges of two-tier policing. Nor should he have done. But even so.

Rowley's supporters ordinarily despise the Police, and while some of the elements that have lately accrued to Polanski have been known to demand that the Police be defunded, his fiercest enemies have been getting on with defunding the Police for decades. Far from placating them, Polanski's grovelling has only emboldened them. It would take a lot for me to agree with the likes of Insulate Britain, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, but what do they make of Polanski after his prostration to the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis?

Now Hear This

That is also more or less how both Beowulf and The Rule of Saint Benedict begin. Peter Hitchens writes:

Now hear this: once upon a time, a thoughtful doctor discovered that cholera was spread by filthy drinking water. This was usually lurking in contaminated wells.

At the time, the middle of the Victorian age, that deadly disease killed tens of thousands of people in this country. The clever doctor, whose name was John Snow, had long suspected that the disease could be spread through water.

In 1854, he showed by on-the-spot research that a severe outbreak of cholera in London’s Soho was directly linked to a particular pump. He chained up its handle. The epidemic faded away. Now here is the amazing bit: it then took nearly 30 years before the establishment admitted he was right.

The official view was that cholera was spread by ‘miasma’, through foul air. In Oxford, one college built high walls on either side of an especially smelly stream to keep the cholera from escaping.

They did this round about the same time that John Snow was taking the handle off that poisoned pump. I wonder how many people fell ill and died, thanks to the long delay in admitting the truth?

What has all this to do with modern Britain? I do not claim to have the courage or the scientific skill of John Snow. But for some years now, my friend Ross Grainger and I have been noting cases, here and abroad, where violent crimes have been committed by users of the drug marijuana.

Ross looked at wild, savage, pointless acts committed by petty criminals, or similar. I looked into the use of marijuana by the killers of (for example) Fusilier Lee Rigby and murders by the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo killers in Paris, and by others in North Africa, Nice, the USA, Canada and Belgium.

In 2022 I made a written submission to the House of Commons select committee on this subject. Mr Grainger and I also provided detailed accounts of the evidence to Professor Dame Carol Black, when she was engaged on an inquiry into drugs and violence. If any of what we said made any difference, we do not know. Nobody seemed to be terribly interested.

The first stage of this argument, that marijuana is linked with mental illness, is now more or less established. This is thanks to the work of the eminent psychiatrist Professor Sir Robin Murray. He said in 2015: ‘It is now well known that use of cannabis increases the risk of psychosis.’ He noted that doubters claim that the drug is not an important cause of mental illness. But his view was that we could prevent almost a quarter of psychosis cases if no one smoked high potency cannabis.

This was very much like the moment in 1950 when the Oxford scientist Sir Richard Doll concluded that there was a link between smoking and lung cancer. In both cases there has been powerful resistance. Big Tobacco fought like a tiger to save itself. It claimed the link was unproven, it prevented bans on advertising and sale, long after it knew it was selling a horrible poison. Marijuana too has a big lobby in the Western world.

Some of it comes from businessmen who hope to legalise the drug and make billions from it. I know from experience how utterly cynical they are. Some of it comes from the large number of people in our establishment who take marijuana, or used to, or let their children take it now.

Then there are those who really, really, want to believe that organised Islamic terrorism reaches into every corner of Britain and requires us to abandon our liberty to cope with it. And so, again and again, we ignore the obvious explanation for mad killings, such as the Calocane case where the culprit’s home ‘stank of weed’, and the Southport killings where the pattern of the murderer’s life completely fitted the horribly common one of the schoolchild who goes incurably crazy after starting on cannabis at the age of 11.

My opponents pretend to think I am trying to make excuses for these maniacs and killers when I point this out. This the most awful bilge. On the contrary. What I want, and what would save countless lives, is for the police to arrest, for the CPS to prosecute and for the courts to punish severely the undoubted crime of marijuana possession. Then, after a while, these killings would just stop. You will not cure or control a disease if you do not know how it spreads or what it is.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, yet not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that included the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And we need Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools.

Markedly Different

Kate Knowles writes:

Shabana Mahmood’s postal ballot was examined in an explosive vote-rigging trial, in which the judge concluded there had been “widespread fraud” in two wards at the 2004 Birmingham city council elections. The elected candidates were required to step down and banned from office for five years.

The case turned, in part, on signatures by the same person that didn’t match, prompting allegations of ballot-tampering and fraud. The Dispatch has seen relevant documents, and can reveal that Mahmood’s signatures on her postal-vote application and the declaration of identity she submitted with her ballot appear markedly different.

Mahmood’s special adviser at the Home Office last night threatened to sue The Dispatch for defamation and breach of privacy, as well as to invoke “injunctive relief to restrain publication” when we sought comment from the home secretary. The adviser had earlier in the day explained that the discrepancy between the two documents came about because Mahmood used two different signatures at the time.

When we pushed back against the legal threats and said we were publishing the story today, a spokesperson for Shabana Mahmood said: “Shabana Mahmood signed both of these documents, which are clearly in her own handwriting. False allegations that her father signed these documents were dismissed, with no adverse finding, over twenty years ago.”

The spokesperson added: “Shabana Mahmood is a dedicated public servant, who serves Birmingham, this country, and has long championed our democracy.”

The two signatures from Shabana Mahmood’s postal ballot documents, displayed next to each other for comparison. 

The special election court case came about after six local Labour politicians were accused of using forgery, ballot manipulation, and theft to rig thousands of votes.

Richard Mawrey KC, who presided over the case as an election commissioner, said that the evidence he had heard would “disgrace a banana republic”.

Mawrey found that “there were corrupt and illegal practices committed by the Labour Party Respondents and their agents” that likely affected the outcome of the election. Mahmood Ahmed, Shabana’s father, was Labour’s election agent in Bordesley Green, one of the two wards involved in the case. Ahmed’s role has largely escaped public notice, apart from a brief mention in a 2013 Birmingham Post report.

Ahmed also witnessed the signing of three declarations of identity, which a voter must complete to cast a postal ballot, all of which became part of the evidence in the vote-rigging case initiated by a rival party. That party had identified apparent discrepancies between the signatures on the declarations and the form used to apply for a postal vote. One of the forms he witnessed was Shabana’s — then a 24-year-old Law graduate from the University of Oxford who was training to be a barrister in London.

The spokesperson for Shabana Mahmood said it was “completely untrue” that Ahmed had signed on others’ behalf. “The matter was tested by the court, twenty years ago. Independent expert advice was provided and considered, and the allegation was dismissed with no adverse finding.”

However, Mahmood Ahmed is not named in Mawrey’s 100-page judgment, nor does Mawrey address or dismiss any allegations against him.

Justice Mawrey concluded his ruling with a question: “Is the court able to form a view as to whether corrupt practices were widespread in Birmingham in June 2004?” And an answer: “In my judgment it is.”

The six Labour councillors in Bordesley Green and Aston had their victories declared null and void, and all were banned from running for election for five years. One of the former councillors for Aston was later cleared by the Court of Appeal of being personally guilty of corrupt and illegal practices.

The judgment in the case was handed down a month before the 2005 general election, in which Tony Blair was elected as prime minister for a third term.

Nick Raynsford, then the local government minister, said at the time: “We are determined that the fraud in these cases in Birmingham does not undermine public confidence in the electoral system.” Then home secretary Charles Clarke responded to the scandal by demanding that police chiefs “crack down on electoral fraud”.

The two signatures

The postal ballots and accompanying documents — the applications and declarations of identity — had been released for the court and the petitioners to scrutinise ahead of the four-week hearing in February and March 2005. The court heard of ballots that had been robbed from postal workers and taken to an empty warehouse to be filled in. Some had been altered with Tipp-Ex. Others had been applied for without voters’ knowledge and filled in on their behalf — much to their dismay when they showed up at the polling station only to be told they had already voted.

The Dispatch has obtained documents from the case, including the documents accompanying Shabana Mahmood’s postal ballot. On Shabana’s application for a postal ballot, her name is printed at the top. In the signature field at the bottom, there is a reminder that each person has to sign their own form. It also says: “It is an offence to make a false statement on this form — maximum fine £5,000.” Her name is written out in full, in a neat, curvy script.

Shabana Mahmood’s postal ballot application and her declaration of identity document. We have redacted the addresses but all three fields showed the same, family home address.

On the declaration of identity, however, her signature looks strikingly different. It is a loopy cursive, the “m” of Mahmood overlays her first name and the “d” ends with a flourish. The form is witnessed by her father, Mahmood Ahmed, then Labour’s agent in Bordesley Green and later the chairman of the Birmingham Labour Party.

You can see the two signatures in the image below — the first is from the ballot application, and the second is from the declaration of identity form that accompanied the ballot.

The two signatures from Shabana Mahmood’s postal ballot documents, displayed next to each other for comparison.

When we asked Mahmood about this discrepancy, her spokesperson did not deny that the signatures were unlike each other, but said that Mahmood used two different signatures at the time. When we asked several times why she would use a different signature for a document that exists to verify her identity based on the ballot application, they did not provide an explanation.

Last night, Mahmood’s spokesperson said in a statement: “Shabana Mahmood signed both of these documents, which are clearly in her own handwriting. False allegations that her father signed these documents were dismissed, with no adverse finding, over twenty years ago.”

The ‘schedule’

The special election court looked at irregularities in Aston and Bordesley Green. Three Labour councillors had been elected in each constituency, but in both cases, they had been accused of vote-rigging by rival parties. The Liberal Democrats had brought the case against the Aston candidates. In Bordesley Green, it was the People’s Justice Party (PJP) who claimed foul play.

In the Bordesley Green case, PJP members and supporters had accused the elected councillors Shafaq Ahmed, Shah Jahan and Ayaz Khan of electoral fraud. The petitioners had analysed the postal vote applications and the declarations of identity that had been signed by voters, witnessed, and submitted to the council alongside their ballots.

The volunteers matched them up and recorded any irregularities, including if the signatures did not appear to match. Barbara Holland, who was and remains a member of the Labour party, was responsible for compiling all of the evidence from the analysis of the papers into a large spreadsheet which she printed into a book and called the “schedule”.

In his judgment, Justice Mawrey examined “fifteen types of fraud” in Bordesley Green. “Evidence established that over 1,600 postal votes were cast in favour of the Labour Party candidates in which the signature of the [voter] set out on the declaration of identity differed from the signature Page for that [voter] set out on the application for a postal vote submitted in their name,” he wrote.

He said his finding was confirmed by reports of handwriting analyst Michael John Allen, who analysed 201 sets of documents with apparently mismatched signatures, and by Holland’s schedule. Mahmood’s papers were not part of the sample Allen looked at, but their discrepancies were recorded in Holland’s comprehensive schedule.

Holland was also questioned at the trial. Mawrey wrote: “Ms Holland gave evidence before me and impressed me as a careful and thorough lady whose approach had been, as I say, cautious throughout. I am entitled, therefore, to place considerable reliance on Ms Holland’s evidence and I do.”

Holland and other volunteers also compiled a list of names that cropped up repeatedly, something they deemed to be suspicious. “Top of the list was the election agent for the Labour party” in Bordesley Green, she told The Dispatch, referring to Mahmood Ahmed. “Because he was the agent and should have had oversight of the campaign.”

Holland and her husband Raghib Ahsan have kept the documents from the case and provided Shabana Mahmood’s records to The Dispatch because they are concerned with her recent efforts to restrict migrants’ rights. “She has recently made statements that have concerned us, and one is that she has put forward her own family as an example of migrants being involved in the local communities and she wants that now to be a requirement for people who want leave to remain and citizenship,” says Holland. “And I think nobody has taken a look at, well, what is the record of Shabana’s family?”

Five years after the vote-rigging case, Shabana Mahmood was elected as the Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood, which includes both wards in which the fraud had taken place. Since Labour re-entered government two years ago, Mahmood has risen quickly, first serving as justice secretary and then being appointed home secretary in September last year. As home secretary, she oversees policing and the prevention of crime across the country and in her speech to the Labour conference last September, she pledged to “get tough and tackle crime” from violent crime to shoplifting. She recently launched the government’s new Fraud Strategy. Mahmood said that fraud “undermines public trust” and sent a “clear message” to criminals that there is “nowhere you can hide.”

The legal threats

Just before 7pm last night, Shabana Mahmood’s special adviser Joshua Williams sent us a three-page letter threatening us with a series of lawsuits if we published our story about the home secretary. The letter demanded that we promise by 9pm that we would not publish any article that names “any member of the Home Secretary’s family” or that implies that any member of the Mahmood family engaged in electoral fraud.

The threat was explicit: “If we do not receive that confirmation by 9pm today, or if you publish in breach of this notice, we reserve the right to issue proceedings for defamation and misuse of private information,” Williams wrote, adding: “We expressly reserve the right to apply for injunctive relief to restrain publication.”

Williams also wrote that the Home Office “will be examining the lawful basis” on which we hold information relating to this story, suggesting that the government plans to investigate The Dispatch purely for reporting on the family and therefore “processing their personal data in connection with these allegations”. His letter was signed: “Special Adviser to the Home Secretary”.

The letter was marked Private and Confidential, but we are choosing to quote it here because of how highly unusual it is for a senior adviser on the government’s payroll to attempt to intimidate journalists in this way. It’s normal for an adviser to ask for certain personal details not to appear in a story and for us to agree to those requests, as happened in this case. But we have never been sent a letter by a government employee threatening injunctions and lawsuits in defamation and privacy, and it is unclear on which lawful basis these threats were meant and who would file them.

The Dispatch believes there is a clear public interest in reporting on documents signed by the now home secretary which formed part of a notorious elections trial.

We replied to the letter just before 10pm last night, confirming that we would be publishing our story and pushing once again for an explanation of the handwriting discrepancy. We also asked whether the home secretary knew in advance about the legal threats being sent by her adviser Williams, who served as the director of strategy at the lobby group Labour Together before he entered government.

Just after midnight, Williams wrote to us again, this time from his personal email rather than his government account, clarifying that all of his correspondence had been from him as an adviser to Mahmood and not on behalf of the Home Office. He did not repeat any of his legal threats.

Plutocrat Populists

The man who saw it from the start, Fraser Nelson, writes:

How did Nigel Farage manage to rustle up £215,000 to invest in Kwasi Kwarteng’s crypto company? When I was investigating Reform’s financial ties a few months ago, drawing up a map of who was connected to whom, this was the biggest mystery. Nine years ago, aged 53, he declared himself “skint” because “there’s no money in politics”. Only two years ago he was telling friends that he could not afford to run in the coming election. Then suddenly, his fortunes seemed to change — and change utterly. How?

The likely explanation emerged this week: he was given £5 million by Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based crypto billionaire and Reform UK donor. The money, Farage says, was a personal gift — so, not disclosable. It was to pay for bodyguards, he said, making him “safe and secure for the rest of my life”. But such protection costs are, at most, £300,000 a year. Farage was given a lifetime of financial security, clearing the way for his return to the political arena. Albeit with a lifelong feeling of debt to Harborne, who sits in a web of interlocking global financial interests.

The world of donors is one of sharks and angels. Many donors want to support causes (or people) they believe in, with no ulterior motive. But then there are the CRiSPers — cash-rich, status-poor — who’ve often made their money using murky means. They usually seek a return on their investment: often a knighthood, peerage, reputation laundering or policy favours. So how to separate honest donations from attempted corruption? The British model has always been simple: insist on full disclosure. Let voters judge.

Harborne says he wants nothing in return for his donations. Perhaps. But it just so happens that Farage proposes a new “Big Bang” that could add tens of billions to crypto companies’ market value. A Reform government would order HM Treasury to stop work on its own digital currency apparatus, which could threaten the current crypto elite. The Bank of England would instead be told to hold Bitcoin, elevating it from a cowboy currency to a UK-approved official asset class. Tax on crypto trades — and only crypto trades — would be cut from 24 to 10 per cent.

All this would greatly help Tether, a crypto giant in which Harborne holds a 12 per cent stake. Farage says the company is worth $500 billion. If he’s right, then Harborne could afford to give away £5 million a day, each day, for the next two years and barely eat into 1 per cent of his fortune. By the standards of UK politics, Harborne’s donations are enormous: no living man has ever given as much to any party. Two thirds of all the money Reform spends is wired from Thailand. But in crypto world, it’s a bar tip.

This is perhaps the hardest thing to appreciate about crypto: the sheer size. A wall of money stands ready to flood our politics, having already done so in America. Wall Street banks, Big Pharma, trade unions: no one has donated more to campaigns than crypto did in the 2024 election. We know this because US transparency laws are strong. But the Farage case exposes a loophole in the UK system: donations can be secret if the money is framed as a “personal gift” with “no expectation”. And if you’re not an MP — like Zia Yusuf, Reform’s hyperactive “shadow” home secretary — there’s no financial transparency at all.

The next UK general election looks set to usher in hundreds of Reform MPs to join the governing party (or coalition). How many more life-changing sums are being passed on right now — on a purely personal basis, of course? Are any of Reform’s higher-profile converts being paid? No shame if so, but transparency matters. Farage proposes an unelected cabinet, allowing him to parachute in whoever he likes. Who would scrutinise them? How much would we know about their “personal” benefactors?

“Politics is no longer about right versus left,” Yusuf declared last weekend. “It’s establishment versus anti-establishment. The establishment must be smashed.” He means “replaced”. As each month passes, we see that Reform is not an insurgency; it’s more of a counter-elite. It is using the language of popular grievance while advancing the interests of its own patronage networks.

Yusuf knows the absurdly rich very well, having made his fortune entertaining them. The company he sold, Velocity Black, offered jaunts such as tracking snow leopards in the Himalayas, flying fighter jets or training with ninjas in Japan. “A life without limits,” was its motto. Now Yusuf’s own bespoke elite experience beckons: a stint as home secretary and deporter-in-chief. There is something ironic in seeing someone climb out of a golden Land Rover to demand the smashing of the establishment, but it’s instructive. It shows us what’s really going on.

The left have champagne socialists; the right have plutocrat populists. As next week’s local election results will certainly show, it’s a very effective formula. Farage’s voters don’t care if money comes from Bangkok with love: he’s offering genuine hope to people who feel betrayed by the established parties. Effective border control and a decent economic model is hardly a radical demand. Failure to provide it has had huge consequences, most of them felt by Reform’s core voters.

And yes, Farage is using unorthodox ways to finance all this. But there has never been anything orthodox about him or the movement that is still leading in the opinion polls. Under this new model there is, it seems, money in politics. Harborne says he’ll find ways to get around any curb on overseas donations. Ben Delo, a crypto billionaire recently pardoned by Trump for flouting US money-laundering rules, has said he’ll move to Britain to keep his cash flowing to Farage. He recently gave £4 million.

So a new model of politics is meeting an old model of donation transparency — a dangerous mix. Farage dislikes being grilled on questions such as how his partner managed to buy a £885,000 house in his Clacton constituency for cash, but this matters. A single register, updated in real time by the Electoral Commission, could treat a £5 million “personal gift” exactly as it treats a £50,000 cheque to party headquarters: as something the public has a right to know about. Major party figures should be subject to MP-style transparency. A new era needs new transparency rules.

Short of a lifetime cap on donations, which would also have to apply to trade unions, there is nothing Starmer can do to stop the crypto cash. His best way of fighting Reform is to govern better. But if he wants to be clearer about the choice at the next election — and the new elite that is preparing to govern — then we will need more of what Farage seems to dislike most: daylight on the money.

Brutal, Honest and Undeniable

Paul Holden writes:

On the evening of Thursday 8 February 2024, The Guardian’s political editor, Pippa Crerar, informed me by email that the paper was 24 hours away from publishing an article that I feared would significantly damage, if not destroy, my professional reputation. She explained:

“We are planning on running a story on the Guardian site tomorrow, and in Saturday’s paper, that the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is investigating whether information obtained from an Electoral Commission hack may have been used to target the Labour party. We understand the NCSC probe centres on a series of private legal emails between the political thinktank Labour Together, which was previously run by Morgan McSweeney, and the Electoral Commission.”

McSweeney is the former chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer. He resigned in February, carrying the can for the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the US. The NCSC is part of the UK security services, sitting within GCHQ.

I have been investigating McSweeney and the underhand projects he ran for close to four years, examining how he used a seemingly anodyne thinktank called Labour Together to undermine former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and discredit news outlets he felt threatened by.

“The Guardian understands that part of the NCSC’s investigation is whether emails (subsequently leaked to you) came from that cyber hack,” Crerar continued.

I was given a deadline of less than 14 hours to respond.

My first reaction was confusion. I had literally no idea what Crerar was talking about. I quickly Googled “electoral commission hack” and discovered that the commission had, indeed, been hacked in 2021, probably by a hostile foreign actor such as Russia or China. Crerar confirmed that, yes, this was the hack she was talking about.

My second reaction was dismay. I feared that soon the Guardian’s huge global readership would believe that I was being seriously investigated for receiving documents from an illegal hack, probably by a hostile foreign country, targeting a Labour party just about to sweep to power.

This would have been devastating for me and my colleagues at Shadow World Investigations (SWI), which I set up with my colleague Andrew Feinstein eight years ago. SWI focuses on exposing grand corruption and militarism. We just about scrape by with philanthropic funding, and our funders rightly expect us to maintain the highest levels of probity and good governance.

Crerar’s article would have evaporated our funding. The small team of young researchers we employed would be out of work, and maybe forever tainted by their association with me. It would have dropped a bomb on my life, my colleagues and my family.

My third reaction was anger. I’d never even heard of this hack, let alone received materials from it. I was painfully aware of how The Guardian’s story would undermine my investigation into McSweeney and the Labour party he in effect controlled. I also knew it would fatally undermine my ongoing work tackling corruption in South Africa, where I was born and lived until my mid-20s.

Crerar’s email had not come out of the blue.

Two days before she had written to me, the Telegraph had approached Labour Together and its erstwhile director, Josh Simons, for comment. The Telegraph informed Simons that it was due to publish a story based on documents I’d got out of the Electoral Commission through a freedom of information request. That story would report damaging new information about McSweeney, Labour Together, and the large pot of undeclared money McSweeney had used to transform British politics. (I tell that story in more detail below).

“I want to make this very, very clear,” I wrote to Crerar after talking to my lawyer. “If there is any hint in your reporting that I received material from the hack of the Electoral Commission referred to above, whether knowingly or unknowingly, I will immediately be bringing defamation proceedings against you and The Guardian … The allegation that I have received information from a hack of the Electoral Commission is not only false, but I can positively prove it to be false.”

Crerar acknowledged my response but did not ask me how I could prove it to be false. Instead, she told me, “on background”, that she had confirmed the “nature and scope of the NCSC’s investigation with her own sources”. She told me that a story would be published shortly, although it would state that there was no evidence I’d received any hacked material. But if that was the case, why even publish an article mentioning my name – something I quickly pointed out to her?

“I’ll let you know what we do,” she responded. She never did.

Instead, I waited up anxiously overnight, checking The Guardian website to see if anything had appeared. Nothing. I wrote to Crerar the next day asking what was going to happen. She said that she would get back to me in a few days.

I never heard from her again, and she has not responded to requests for comment for this article.

£730,000 in undeclared cash

Crerar had confirmed, in one of her emails to me, that the alleged NCSC investigation into me was prompted because Labour Together had “reported their concerns” to GCHQ. It is only in recent months, following fresh revelations in The Guardian, Sunday Times and the excellent Substack Democracy For Sale, that I’ve learned the full, lunatic story.

In mid-2023, I had approached Gabriel Pogrund of the Sunday Times. Two years previously, I’d lucked into a trove of documents from the Labour party, leaked by party whistleblowers worried about misconduct by senior Labour figures. The cache included damaging documents about McSweeney and Labour Together, who, until that time, hadn’t been scrutinised by journalists. But the documents I found spoke to their outsized and problematic impact on the Labour party and British political life.

In July 2017, McSweeney had left his job in the Local Government Association to join Labour Together. The reason was Labour’s unexpectedly good showing under Jeremy Corbyn during the 2017 general election. McSweeney, according to multiple accounts, despised the socialist, anti-imperialist politics of the so-called “hard left”, and the near-win of 2017 was an emergency.

McSweeney plotted the downfall of Corbyn, incubating numerous dodgy projects to do so – all with a distinct whiff of the Mandelsonian “dark arts”. With Corbyn defeated and undermined, McSweeney and his Labour Together collaborators – most notably the current cabinet minister Steve Reed – would choose a pliant successor who would cleanse the Labour party of its leftwing tendencies.

The man they eventually alighted on was Sir Keir Starmer. From at least July 2019, Starmer worked closely with McSweeney to plot Starmer’s tilt at the Labour leadership. The campaign that Starmer ran to solicit the votes of a left-leaning Labour party membership was very much a McSweeney and Labour Together product.

McSweeney executed this plan with significant financial backing. Close to £1m was donated to Labour Together under McSweeney’s watch. Most of these donations were made by Martin Taylor and Sir Trevor Chinn.

Taylor is a multimillionaire hedge fund owner with interests in private healthcare. Chinn is British businessman and a long-time pro-Israel advocate.

But between February 2018 and April 2020, Labour Together – or more accurately, McSweeney – failed to report £730,000 of these donations to the Electoral Commission as required by law. In September 2021, Labour Together was fined just £14,250 for the offence by the commission. The thinktank said the failure to report donations had been a simple “administrative oversight”.

The documents I took to Pogrund told a different, altogether more concerning, story.

They confirmed that McSweeney was the person who should have reported donations. They suggested that McSweeney knew he was supposed to report donations, yet failed to do so. Labour Together were also repeatedly telling the public that they were reporting donations when they weren’t. Moreover, my documents suggested that Labour Together may not have been entirely candid with the Electoral Commission when they were placed under investigation, and considered withholding important details of what really went on.

In November 2023, the Sunday Times ran a front-page story on McSweeney and Labour Together’s undeclared funds: “The secretive guru who plotted Sir Keir Starmer’s path to power with undeclared cash.”

The article noted that I was the source of documents related to the Electoral Commission. It also announced that I was writing a book on Starmer, Labour Together and McSweeney. My publisher put up a brief blurb that made it clear I was already deep into an investigation into McSweeney and his secret projects.

Days later, I published the first of what was meant to be a multi-part series of stories with the American journalist Matt Taibbi on his Substack, Racket News. My stories exposed, for the first time, some of what Labour Together and McSweeney did with this undisclosed cash.

This story is long and bit complicated, but the key takeaway was that McSweeney and his allies had played a central – and entirely covert – role in inflaming the “antisemitism crisis” that was besetting Corbyn’s Labour party. As part of this campaign, McSweeney and his allies had launched an astroturfed campaign that demonetised legitimate leftwing media outlets whose reporting McSweeney saw as an obstacle to his political ambitions.

Many good journalists, several of whom were longstanding members of the National Union of Journalists, lost their jobs and livelihoods as a result.

Operation Cannon

In response to these articles, Labour Together appointed a reputation management firm called Apco Worldwide in about November 2023.

Josh Simons, the director of Labour Together, signed the contract. Simons is a longtime friend and political ally of McSweeney and one of McSweeney’s closest collaborators, Imran Ahmed. Ahmed was the co-founder, alongside McSweeney and Steve Reed, of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a controversial anti-misinformation outfit that wields considerable influence within the Labour party. My reporting with Taibbi had exposed the murky roots of CCDH, and the role of Labour Together in its creation.

Simons claimed, after the Apco story broke, that he had appointed Apco to investigate a potential “hack”. But there was no mention of a hack in the contract signed between Apco and Labour Together. Instead, it stated that:

“Apco will investigate the sourcing, funding and origins of a Sunday Times article about Labour Together, as well as upcoming works by authors Paul Holden and Matt Taibbi – to establish who and what are behind the coordinated attacks on Labour Together. The approach should provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up for use in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together.”

Apco listed the potentially invasive investigative methods they would use to conduct their investigation, including gathering “human intelligence” and conducting “financial investigations”.

The anxiety that something else might be coming our way – some other mad claim that would drop a bomb on our lives – refused to dissipate.

The Apco investigation was led by a former journalist called Tom Harper, who had once been part of the Sunday Times stable. At the time of his investigation, his wife, Caroline Wheeler, was the political editor of the Sunday Times.

To the best of my knowledge, Apco produced three reports to fulfil the Labour Together brief. The first, given the codename “Grimsby Town”, gave a high-level overview of what Apco was intending to investigate. It noted my upcoming book and highlighted a desperate need to find out what else I might report. It concluded with a list of “persons of interest”, with the strong implication that they would fall to be investigated.

I was included in the list alongside other US and UK journalists who had reported on either Labour Together or CCDH. The journalists included Pogrund and Harry Yorke of the Sunday Times, John McEvoy (now at DeClassified), Henry Dyer (now at The Guardian), Paul Thacker, Kit Klarenberg and Taibbi.

The second report was dated the end of December 2023. It investigated my organisation, SWI, and the various journalists we had collaborated with. The report’s big revelation was that SWI had shared office space with DeClassified, the excellent investigative outlet that has done so much to expose UK’s complicity with Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

But it wasn’t much of a revelation: the offices we share in central London are generously provided by a philanthropic organisation called the Bertha Foundation, which runs a hub for media practitioners and civil society organisations. (It is also where The Nerve was allowed to “squat” in its embryonic stages. It is not unlikely that The Nerve would also have fallen under the glare of Apco’s investigators if it had moved in earlier.)

Most strikingly, the report noted that SWI received funding from the Open Society Foundation. This was grant money used to fund my work on South African state capture, including working with law enforcement and regulatory bodies to trace and recover stolen assets. The report described this funding as a point of “leverage”.

The third report was called Operation Cannon. I have only recently seen extracts as they pertain to Andrew and me, but it is an outrageous document. It shows that Apco had identified my family members and my partner, Jessica. They had discovered our relationship by “tracing” us to my home address.

The Operation Cannon report falsely claimed that Jess’s father, Andrew Murray, was suspected by MI5 of being a Russian agent. This was plainly untrue: Andrew has twice received security clearance for a parliamentary pass as a lobby journalist and one-time peripatetic adviser to Jeremy Corbyn.

The report stretched every sinew to find that I and my colleagues were part of some elaborate pro-Kremlin network of journalists. This was used to put me in the frame for receiving documents hacked from the Electoral Commission by actors connected to Russia: even though, as we now know, the Electoral Commission was actually hacked by China.

I will not deign to repeat the insulting and deeply stupid libels that were presented to “prove” this connection: suffice to note that, if they were ever published or treated as fact, they would have utterly destroyed my reputation and posed real material threats to the various criminal and civil cases I am still involved with in South Africa and other countries.

Remarkably, Operation Cannon also targeted Pogrund, with whom I’d collaborated on the November 2023 article. I have not seen this part of the report. But from what has been reported so far, it sounds similarly discreditable.

On 23 January 2024, Simons submitted a complaint to the NCSC via its online portal. Over the next week, he and his colleague Ben Szreter urged the NCSC to open an investigation into me and my colleagues.

“Our evidence suggests that sensitive personal and political information obtained in this hack that was only held by the Electoral Commission and our lawyers has been disseminated to people known to be operating in a pro-Kremlin propaganda network with links to Russian intelligence,” Simons wrote to the NCSC.

This was, of course, an absurd allegation, not least because Andrew and I have faced legal and extra-legal threats because of our investigations into Russian oligarchs and the Russian arms trade. It was also untrue in a more fundamental sense. The documents I had access to were not “only” held by the Electoral Commission or Labour Together’s lawyers at all. They had come from my leak of Labour party documents.

“We suspect the articles may be a coordinated effort to discredit Labour Together in order to undermine Morgan McSweeney and, by extension, Mr Starmer in the run-up to next year’s general election,” Szreter complained, arguing that the “likeliest culprit is the Russian state, or proxies of the Russian state”.

Szreter attached a truncated version of the Operation Cannon report to support the allegations. Simons had removed the section on Pogrund, and later claimed that he did so because he never intended Apco’s investigation to include Pogrund or any other British newspaper journalists, and because he could see that its reporting on Pogrund was wrong and hurtful. But if Simons knew the Pogrund materials to be so misguided, why did he have any confidence in the rest of this ridiculous investigation? According to The Guardian’s most recent reporting, the NCSC never instituted an investigation into me and my colleagues. The Guardian has also claimed that Simons was informed that this was the case after a face-to-face meeting with NCSC officials.

This puts me, The Guardian and Pippa Crerar in something of a tangle. Crerar had, after all, told me that she had confirmed the “scope” of the NCSC investigation with her own sources. Now The Guardian was saying there was no investigation, and that Simons had been told that there would be no investigation. I have asked The Guardian and the NCSC for answers. I’m still waiting.

Where Operation Cannon went from there is still unclear. The Sunday Times’s Emanuele Midolo has reported that details from the operation had been “disseminated widely in Westminster and Fleet Street”, while the Times even suggested that its more out-there allegations had been raised in conversation by Peter Mandelson.

Anxiety and curtailed investigations

My interactions with Crerar in February 2024 confirmed to me that I had attracted the ugly attention of powerful individuals, who would soon be taking up high positions in an imminent Labour government.

At the time of Crerar’s email, Jess was seven months pregnant with our second daughter. The anxiety that something else might be coming our way – some other mad claim that would drop a bomb on our lives – refused to dissipate. And if Crerar was right, and there was an NCSC investigation, would we get the dreaded knock on the door?

Despite our best efforts, it couldn’t help but colour our lives as we brought our second child into the world. It also curtailed my investigations. I could no longer approach sources in case it somehow got back to Labour Together that I was still on the case. After working with the Telegraph on a story in late February and a follow-up with Novara Media, I decided it was no longer safe to push the issue. Jess, heavily pregnant, had recurring panic attacks, which started when the Telegraph article came out mentioning my upcoming book. Despite my overwhelming desire to warn the public about the true nature of this political project, it would simply have to wait until I’d finished my book – and developed a proper defensive strategy. 

This was why it was such a godsend that I was contacted by the stellar investigative journalist Khadija Sharife in the months after Starmer’s election. She had been investigating reputation management firms like Apco, and similar, more hands-on, outfits like Audere International, and the way they conducted their business.

Khadija explained that my name had come up in her investigations. She confirmed that Labour Together had hired Apco. She told me that they were looking into all aspects of my life, although she did not know the full details.

The upside was it allowed me to write about the experience in the preface to my book and make a plan to, in effect, smuggle the book into the public domain without attracting further unhelpful interventions.

But it also meant that Jess and I lived, for months, with severe anxiety. It was unnerving to know that our family was so exposed. And it was deeply, profoundly lonely. How can you tell people that you are being targeted by a thinktank without seeming like a crank? We might as well have told people we were being stalked by an ice-cream truck.

Two years later, that anxiety has passed, only to be replaced by deep and abiding frustration: there has been little accountability.

Simons has faced only the most limited comeuppance. He has displayed little public remorse for how Apco targeted me, my family and SWI colleagues. In execrable exchanges on X, he agreed that the Apco story was a “nothingburger”. In another late-night post, he dismissively characterised the story thus: “A think tank paid a PR firm to find out if it’s private [sic] were obtained through an illegal hack. HOWZATT.”

The system shrugs

Starmer soon sent the matter to the Cabinet Office for investigation – the same office in which Simons was a junior minister. When the details of the Operation Cannon report became public, Starmer referred the Cabinet Office investigation to Sir Laurie Magnus, the independent adviser on ethics. Magnus was asked to establish whether Simons had violated the ministerial code, which requires ministers to act with honesty.

On the same day that Starmer referred it to Magnus, Simons mistakenly posted to a Labour party WhatsApp group: “Jonny [Reynolds – the Labour chief whip] rang. PM will ask Laurie to look into it. Aim is to move fast. But PET did find I had not broken the code.”

PET refers to the Propriety and Ethics Team of the cabinet, which had conducted a “fact-finding” exercise into Simons’s conduct. This was, incidentally, the same unit that conducted the risible “due diligence” on Peter Mandelson prior to his appointment.

Alarmed by Simons’s message, I wrote to Magnus. I sent him an email via the Cabinet Office inbox and a physical letter. I told him that I would shortly be sending him a detailed letter setting out my evidence. I told him that I believed that Simons probably did break the ministerial code on honesty.

For example: soon after the story first broke, in early February this year, Simons had reached out to the journalist Kevin Maguire. Maguire had posted in response to the Apco revelations on X, commenting that Simons shouldn’t be a minister. The following day, Maguire posted on X that he had heard from Simons, who had told him that “he didn’t ask for British reporters to be investigated”.

I quickly contacted Maguire to explain that I had been targeted by the Apco investigation, that I was British, and that I am a member of the National Union of Journalists. Maguire, to his credit, posted on X to reflect my version the following day. “This controversy is far from over,” he commented.

On 27 February, I sent Magnus a detailed, 14-page letter. I gave him examples of how I believed Simons had broken the ministerial code, like the one above.

Later that day, Magnus wrote to Starmer, saying that he had found no reason to find that Simons had broken the ministerial code. However, he warned Starmer that fallout from the scandal might distract the government from its duties.

It was a typical Westminster two-step. Simons agreed to resign as minister but could wield Magnus’s letter as proof of his exoneration. In his published letter of resignation, Simons took an ugly swipe at Andrew and me.

I was furious.

“I simply do not understand why you did not give me the chance to give you evidence when I asked,” I wrote to Magnus a week after he had cleared Simons. “I now have serious doubts that you read it, let alone weighed it in your decision-making.”

In late March, Magnus wrote back. He confirmed that he hadn’t read my evidence – because the Cabinet Office had not sent him my emails and letters until after he had concluded his investigation into Simons.

Despite my remonstrations, Magnus has been adamant he cannot reconsider his findings because Simons is no longer a cabinet minister.

At the end of March, Simons appeared on BBC’s Newscast with Laura Kuenssberg. He was given 45 minutes to explain his conduct. Kuenssberg helpfully asked him if he was simply “naive” when he appointed a multinational firm to investigate multiple journalists looking into the slush fund that gave us a Starmer government. Simons agreed. He faced the gentlest pushback from his solicitous hosts.

By the end, Kuenssberg was commenting that she expected him back in cabinet soon, such was the strength of his ideas and personality. She confidently informed listeners that Magnus had found Simons had done some things that might embarrass the government, but that he was basically cleared.

I was not told about Simons’s BBC appearance or given any right of reply, even though I was mentioned repeatedly through the episode. Nor was my colleague, Andrew, or our organisation, SWI, despite also being discussed. I only found out that Simons was being rehabilitated through a softball interview after it had already aired, via a text from a friend.

When I put this to the BBC, it said: “Mr Simons was challenged and questioned on many points he made during his Newscast interview, and alternative perspectives were included.”

The Electoral Commission has refused to reopen its investigation into Labour Together after I published my book and new documents. The decision not to reopen a probe of McSweeney was eagerly reported by sympathetic press. Less well reported was the absurd reason why the Electoral Commission declined to do so.

In a terse statement, the Commission confirmed that it had failed to issue a formal notice of investigation to Labour Together during its investigation in 2021. This meant that the commission could not investigate Labour Together for lying or withholding evidence, because the Commission had failed to put them under oath.

The Electoral Commission also refuses to publish anything but the scantest details of its investigation. They have rejected multiple freedom of information requests. They have told me, absurdly, that the public interest test has not been met. I am now on the dispiriting path of challenging their rejections via the Information Commissioner’s Office. If needs be, I will take it to the ICO Tribunal. But this will probably take years. 

Apco has been reported to the Public Relations and Communications Association, the regulatory body that is supposed to oversee their work. I’m not getting my hopes up.

Apco has still not given me the documents to which I’m entitled under a subject access request I submitted in February. I was told it would take months to process as it was a complex, voluminous request.

But only days ago, Democracy For Sale alleged that an Apco contractor who worked on the Labour Together investigation had been instructed by Apco’s Tom Harper to delete materials related to the investigation (although it is not clear whether the instruction was carried out). The instruction was issued even though the evidence was under a “legal hold”.

The Financial Times says it has an audio recording of the instruction, and that Harper also sought advice on how to delete an encrypted email account he had used during the investigation. Harper explained that he had used the account to send his report to the “client” to “muddy the waters of the trace, you know, the audit trail”. Apco told the FT that it had acted promptly to preserve files and has said that Harper has denied issuing the instruction.

My solicitors are on the case.

It is now two and a half years since I first went to the Sunday Times with my stories about Labour Together, McSweeney and Starmer. Then, many predicted that Starmer’s imminent victory would herald a return to a government of service and decency. Very few people wanted to hear that things were not quite so simple.

Now Starmer is beset by scandal. His polling is dire. Few people believe his government will last much longer. Many fret that the McSweeney and Starmer project has mortally wounded the Labour party.

There is a tendency on the left to seek comfort in schadenfreude: to enjoy a rare moment of “I told you so”. I feel little appetite to join in. Starmer might soon be out, along with McSweeney, but the Labour Together project is not so easily dismantled.

For years, McSweeney and his allies transformed the DNA of the Labour party. They exercised an iron grip over the bureaucracy, filling it with their factional lieutenants. Parliament is stacked with hundreds of uber-loyal MPs handpicked by McSweeney. Many have been funded by Labour Together or its associated donors; many have dutifully voted with the party leadership to proscribe Palestine Action, cut back jury trials and reduce disability benefits.

Temporary humiliations aside, this is still McSweeney’s Labour party, filled with his friends, his associates, and even his MP wife, who is now an assistant chief whip. Any leader who replaces Starmer will confront a party radically remade in McSweeney’s image, comporting itself with Mandelson’s mien.

The infuriating story of Labour Together strongly suggests that our democratic institutions and regulators will do little to curb the excesses of this political project, either now or in the future. Justice of the legal or regulatory variety seems far from reach.

But there might be a more brutal, honest and undeniable sort of justice: the disdain of voters, who have come to despise this group the more they have learned about it. The public is finally clocking a political project that I have been trying to expose for years, and the threat it poses to our teetering, unhappy and febrile democracy.

For my part, I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you all sooner.