Out of the Ashes

There is no arguing with people who think that Pancake Day must be in the Bible. But Muslims really do say "Ramadan Mubarak", whereas no one says anything like "Happy Lent". Those who are complaining that politicians had done the former but not the latter would know that if they were practising Christians. Still, it is useful for those of us who observe Lent that it and Ramadan start on the same day this year.

As we rebuild our civilisation from scratch after what has been exemplified by the Epstein Files, we need to re-learn structured daily prayer, setting aside one day in seven, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, the lesser outward and greater inward struggle, the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique of both capitalism and Marxism, the coherence between faith and reason, and a consequent integrated view of art and science. The answer to the challenge of the Sunna is Sacred Tradition. The answer to the challenge of the Imamate is the Petrine Office. The answer to the challenge of Sufism is our own tradition of mysticism and monasticism. Liberal Catholics will be the last to see the point. Although, like everyone else, they may buy the book here.

A Moment of Clarification

Professor Martin O’Neill writes:

A truism of political scandals is that the cover-up is often more damaging than the original offence. It was not the break-in at the Watergate building but the obstruction, misdirection, and weaponisation of federal agencies that forced Nixon from office. This pattern, in which the response to wrongdoing reveals as much as the wrongdoing itself, is worth keeping in mind as the story of Josh Simons and Labour Together continues to unfold.

Labour Together was established in 2015 by Labour MP Jon Cruddas, ostensibly to help bridge the divide between the party’s competing factions during the Jeremy Corbyn period. From 2017, however, it fell under the control of the now recently departed Morgan McSweeney. McSweeney had reportedly reacted in horror to Labour’s impressive performance at the 2017 general election, which had punctured the dogma that a left programme could not appeal to the British electorate, and was determined to defeat Corbyn and the left within the party.

In his project to remake the Labour Party, McSweeney encountered little difficulty in finding wealthy donors. Funding flowed in from figures including City financier and hedge-fund manager Martin Taylor and businessman Sir Trevor Chinn, who, as Declassified UK has reported, has funded both Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel since the 1980s. (In 2024, Chinn received the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honor for service to the state of Israel.) For McSweeney, it was essential to defeat the left, but his method for doing so was not to engage in public debate about ideas. Instead, he preferred methods that avoided public scrutiny — with the result that both the true aims of the Labour Together project and the identity of its funders were not publicly disclosed.

Whatever one’s view of battles between left and right wings of the Labour Party, transparency in political finance is a fundamental requirement of democratic politics. Citizens are entitled to know who finances organised political activity and draw their own conclusions about the interests at play. This does not seem to have been a principle that McSweeney was keen to honour.

It took several years for Labour Together’s opaque funding to come to light. Inquiries from the Electoral Commission to McSweeney eventually exposed £730,000 in unreported donations. The matter only entered the public domain in November 2023 after investigative journalist Paul Holden — willing to pursue stories about which Westminster lobby journalists were strikingly incurious — shared his findings with Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke of The Sunday Times. Holden had uncovered the irregularities while researching his book, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy, a work that the establishment press has been trying hard to ignore.

Labour Together had been largely quiescent since 2020, when Keir Starmer ascended to the party leadership, and McSweeney took up his role of Starmer’s Chief of Staff in opposition. In 2022, however, McSweeney handed the directorship to Simons, an ambitious young researcher. The New Statesman described Simons’s incarnation of Labour Together as ‘the provisional wing of Starmerism’, while a Financial Times labelled it, more ominously, ‘Morgan McSweeney’s Wagner group.’

Silencing Scrutiny

What followed, when questions arose in the press over Labour Together’s financial reporting to the Electoral Commission, was both shocking and revealing. Rather than addressing the statutory failures publicly and apologising, Simons hired APCO, a ‘reputation management company’, to conduct a private investigation into the lives, connections, and backgrounds of the journalists scrutinising the organisation. APCO is reported to have been paid £36,000 to produce and deliver to Simons a dossier scrutinising not only Holden, Pogrund, and Yorke, but also other journalists who had taken an interest in Labour Together’s activities, including US journalist Matt Taibbi, Guardian writer Henry Dyer, Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone, and John McAvoy of Declassified UK.

The affair took a more troubling turn when Simons, by his own admission, forwarded a version of the dossier to Britain’s security services, sending the material to the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre). The document reportedly contained unsubstantiated allegations seeking to link the journalists in question to Russian intelligence.

Subsequently, information that these reporters were ‘under investigation’ by the NCSC was then passed on by a law firm, acting on Simons’s instructions, to journalists at national newspapers. Holden has stated publicly that in February 2024, he received an email from Pippa Crerar of The Guardian, informing him that the paper had seen information that he was being investigated by the security services and that The Guardian intended to run the story. Holden stood firm and told Crerar that the claim was defamatory and warned that he would sue if it were published. The story then evaporated, and Holden heard nothing whatever from the NCSC. One can only speculate how the security services regarded these attempts to draw them into political disputes.

The Chilling Effect

This sequence of events demands close attention. The threat that national security bodies might be drawn, even indirectly, into a dispute about party funding casts a long shadow. It suggests a marked escalation in the tactics party operatives may be prepared to deploy. Democratic politics depends on investigative journalism. Reporters must be able to examine the financial and organisational practices of powerful actors without being subjected to reputational contamination through insinuation. It may seem easy to silence inconvenient scrutiny or opposition by whispering that critics are a ‘security risk’, but once such a tactic is permissible, democratic standards are deeply degraded.

Simons and Labour Together were engaged in a smear operation to deter and discredit journalists asking questions about the £730,000 in unreported donations. It is to the credit of journalists such as Holden that they were not cowed by these tactics.

Following The Sunday Times story of 15 February 2026, this sordid story is now finally receiving broader public attention. The controversy around Simons and Labour Together is serious enough in its own right. Yet its full significance lies in what it reveals about the political culture that has taken shape inside the Labour Party during the Starmer era. 

Remaking Politics

The factional campaign waged by Labour Together and other opponents of Corbyn achieved a tactical victory against the party’s left, ensuring that his successor would pose no comparable challenge to the interests of the donor class. In doing so, however, it profoundly reshaped the party’s methods, allegiances, and instincts. The methods used to destroy Corbyn’s leadership — from coordinated smears and donor pressure to weaponised leaks — did not disappear after the 2019 election or with Starmer’s accession in 2020. Instead, this way of doing politics became standard operating procedure.

Figures such as McSweeney and Simons cut their teeth in a no-holds-barred factional war against Labour’s left. Now in government, they appear to have carried those methods with them. When journalists scrutinised their activities, they faced the same tactics once honed against internal party opponents. What is now unfolding in the Simons scandal looks less like an isolated controversy and more like the afterlife of that baleful cultural transformation within Labour.

To understand how such a situation could arise, it is worth recalling the climate inside Labour after 2015. Corbyn’s leadership prompted a determined effort by sections of the parliamentary party, donors and external advisers to reassert control and ensure that the party would never again threaten established economic interests. Labour Together was a central vehicle for that effort, coordinating funding and strategy in support of what its supporters viewed as a necessary correction.

This campaign was framed as a return to ‘seriousness’ and electoral ‘realism’. But in reality it fostered habits that transgressed Labour’s democratic traditions. Internal dissent was managed rather than engaged. Thoughtful left-wing MPs and parliamentary candidates, such as Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Faiza Shaheen, were defenestrated at the last moment before the 2024 election, replaced by pliant loyalists. There have been widespread reports, since the fall of Peter Mandelson, of his role working with McSweeney in vetting the party’s 2024 candidate list, to ensure that the left would be locked out of the Parliamentary Labour Party for a generation. Meanwhile party members who had joined in large numbers during the Corbyn period were often treated with contempt: Starmer invited them to leave the party, while another party source spoke of ‘shaking off the fleas’.

Political cultures rarely remain confined to the battles that produce them. Techniques developed for internal factional struggles have become a settled way of doing things. When the individuals and networks formed during that period moved into government, they carried those habits with them. It wasn’t only that Labour moved to the right under Starmer, it also normalised tactics that treat scrutiny and opposition as a security threat. One has only to think here of Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action, which reveals the same anti-democratic and authoritarian instincts. Cooper’s actions were held to have been unlawful by the High Court in its judgment of 13 February 2026 (a judgment now being appealed by her successor as Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood), on grounds of its violation of basic democratic rights of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. The cavalier attitude towards basic democratic rights and protections is all of a piece with the broader degeneration of values within the Labour Party.

Democracy and Its Enemies

The present controversy sits alongside broader questions about the current Labour Party’s relationship with wealth and corporate power. These issues raise even more troubling concerns about the worrying state of British democracy, and what may lie ahead of us. Observing the career of Simons since his time at Labour Together is one way of bringing these issues vividly to light.

As a reward for his work fighting against the party’s left, Simons was parachuted into the hitherto safe Labour seat of Makerfield just before the 2024 election. Given his reputation as an effective operator on the Labour right, and his connection to figures such as McSweeney, he was rapidly promoted to a ministerial role in the Cabinet Office. Simons’s current responsibilities in the Cabinet Office include work connected to Digital ID proposals — measures absent from Labour’s 2024 manifesto but closely aligned with a June 2025 Labour Together report titled BritCard: A Progressive Digital Identity for Britain. Digital identity infrastructure has long been advocated by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and is a central project of his Tony Blair Institute, which has received at least £250 million from technology billionaire Larry Ellison (who is also a major donor to the Friends of the IDF).

The Palantir State

Meanwhile, the government’s close alignment with the interests of Big Tech has even more troubling manifestations. It has entered into major contracts with Palantir, a CIA-linked data analytics firm founded by libertarian Peter Thiel, who once wrote that ‘freedom and democracy are no longer compatible’. Palantir has secured a £240 million contract with the Ministry of Defence and is being woven into NHS infrastructure.

The connection to Labour’s internal transformation runs deeper still. Palantir was a client of Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel, during a period when it was cultivating a relationship with Labour ministers. (For his part Simons previously worked at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta/Facebook.). The Palantir connection goes well beyond routine government contracting. It places sensitive public infrastructure in the hands of a company whose record has generated sustained human rights concern. Palantir has provided data infrastructure for ICE’s targeting of migrants in the United States, using medical records to identify people for deportation. It has provided systems for the IDF’s targeting operations in Gaza, raising concerns that have been documented by human rights organisations about possible complicity in violations of international law. Yet this is the firm now being entrusted with Britain’s health data and defence infrastructure.

A faction that made use of generous funding from wealthy donors to destroy its own party’s left wing now governs in partnership with a company whose founder declares democracy and freedom incompatible. The very people who will invoke ‘security concerns’ when they are confronted by inconvenient investigative journalists or octogenarian priests holding cardboard signs are at the same time content to put vital national infrastructure in the hands of a company that has no loyalty to the United Kingdom, and whose founder is on the record in saying that democracy itself should be abandoned.

Labour’s Future

The funding questions surrounding Labour Together, the attempt to discredit journalists through security-linked allegations, and the deepening entanglement between the state and major technology contractors are distinct issues. But they all point in a similar direction. In each case, significant power operates at some distance from public scrutiny. Decisions that shape the country’s direction become harder to see clearly. Democratic politics begins to look managed and controlled.

Treating the ‘Josh Simons Scandal’ as an isolated incident would miss that wider context. The Cabinet Office inquiry announced by Starmer on Monday 16 February may bring more of the facts of Labour Together’s modus operandi under McSweeney and Simons into the public domain. That Simons remains as a Cabinet Office minister, effectively presiding over scrutiny of his own conduct, suggests not. But the more troubling issue concerns the political environment that has developed within the Labour Party under Starmer’s leadership. The anti-left settlement for which Mandelson, McSweeney, and Simons worked so hard altered more than personnel. It reshaped Labour’s internal balance of power and its external alliances. Control, discipline and reassurance to influential economic actors became organising principles. Those priorities have inevitably left their mark on how this party has then behaved in government.

A functioning democracy rests on certain shared expectations: that political finance is transparent; that journalists can investigate without being tainted by insinuation; that public authority is exercised visibly and accountably; that powerful private actors do not acquire disproportionate influence over public infrastructure. When those requirements are undermined, it is wholly understandable that people would then lose faith in politics. People can see how Labour has governed under Starmer, and it is for good reason that they are now turning away from the party.

At a bare minimum, addressing the current scandal requires that Simons be immediately removed from ministerial office. His presence as a Cabinet Office minister completely undermines Starmer’s claims to have achieved a ‘reset’ since the departure of McSweeney and the expulsion of Mandelson from the party. But the questions facing Labour extend far beyond the immediate status of any individual minister. The central question is whether the internal damage done by the vicious factional reaction of Labour Together and its allies, in their tactical campaign to wrest control over the party, has so damaged Labour that its decline could now be near terminal. One may worry that there is no way back when one realises how many of the 2024 parliamentary intake were hand-picked by Mandelson and McSweeney, and generously supported by Labour Together and its donors, precisely for their acquiescence in this kind of politics. But what is the point of a Labour Party that has scorn for democracy, and puts itself at the service of the wealthy?

The case of Simons and Labour Together offers a moment of clarification. Has Labour fully capitulated to authoritarianism, secrecy, and promotion of the interests of the wealthy, or does it have the capacity to renew itself and re-engage with its own richer democratic traditions? Starmer was in many ways the creature of McSweeney’s grand project at Labour Together. He acted to remove Mandelson and McSweeney only when forced by pressure of circumstances. Removing Simons would be just a small first step in the deep structural changes that Labour now needs if it is to have any reason to survive.

Community and Cohesion?

Anoosh Chakelian writes:

Charity leaders and former aides have expressed their “dismay” at the close working relationship that has developed between No 10 and Brendan Cox, the widowed husband of the murdered MP Jo Cox who has in the past resigned from three charities after claims of sexual misconduct.

Cox, who advised Gordon Brown in Downing Street, is close to many senior Labour figures and is being “informally consulted” on the government’s social cohesion strategy, according to sources familiar with the relationship (a characterisation recognised neither by Cox nor No 10).

Cox is head of strategy at the Together Initiative, the charity behind the Together Coalition, which aims to foster community spirit by bringing different groups together in shared endeavours – for example, the VE Day 80th anniversary celebrations, and the “Big Help Out” volunteering effort coinciding with the King’s coronation.

The Together Coalition convenes the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion, which a number of well-placed sources have told the New Statesman the government is informally using to shape its strategy to improve social cohesion in Britain. Cox is the “driving force” behind the commission, according to one figure familiar with the commission’s work. But the New Statesman understands Cox does not believe its work has been explicitly adopted by No 10, which also denies preferential treatment of Cox.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing in his current role. The New Statesman understands that he speaks to many political parties and government departments about his work, and has done so under previous governments, making no claim to a special relationship with Keir Starmer’s Downing Street. No 10’s position is that it engages with Cox and his charity the same way it does all other organisations in this field, and that he has no exclusive influence. Cox argues he has dedicated his life to building a more cohesive society following his late wife’s murder in 2016 and is frustrated that mistakes from his past risk undermining his work today.

Cox was accused of inappropriate behaviour in 2015 when working as chief strategist at Save the Children, where he was a subject of a sexual harassment complaint. He strenuously denied wrongdoing at the time, but stood down from his post. Three years later, he apologised “deeply and unreservedly” for his behaviour “and for the hurt and offence that I have caused”, as he put it in a 2018 statement. “I do acknowledge and understand that during my time at Save the Children I made mistakes.”

In 2018, he stood down from two further charities, More in Common and the Jo Cox Foundation, when details emerged of a claim that he assaulted a 30-something woman at a Harvard University bar in 2015. A police complaint was reportedly filed for indecent assault and battery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but later dropped. His lawyers denied what they called “spurious allegations” and said no sexual assault took place.

At the time, Labour MPs including Yvette Cooper and Jess Phillips (now the Foreign Secretary and parliamentary under-secretary for violence against women and girls, respectively) said that he had made the right decision to resign his posts, and Labour’s now deputy leader Lucy Powell praised him for “reflecting and taking responsibility for past actions”.

However, there is serious and high-level concern about Cox’s relationship with the Starmer government, according to four sources who spoke to the New Statesman. One figure familiar with the government’s social cohesion work described “discomfort and bewilderment” over his involvement because of the historic allegations. “It’s nuts that they’re still consulting him.” Another described unhappiness and surprise within the sector at Cox’s access to No 10. “What the fuck are they doing?” asked another.

“The fall-out [of the allegations] was across newspapers,” says a former colleague of Cox who worked with him at Save the Children and knew of the allegations made by women against him. “No 10 cannot pretend that they did not know about it or that it did not come up in their due diligence checks. They know it and they have decided that it doesn’t matter because he is useful to them.”

While Cox and No 10 deny that he is being formally or informally consulted about policy, on 9 February Cox briefed senior charity leaders in the sector on cohesion in a private Zoom call, to what has been described to the New Statesman as the “dismay” of one present, who was left with the impression that he was briefing on the government’s behalf. Cox denies this is the case.

The invitation (seen by the New Statesman) sent to attendees featured a headshot of Starmer’s then deputy chief of staff Vidhya Alakeson (now chief of staff) and promised a “high-level briefing” on cohesion and “an opportunity to hear more about the government’s priorities”. It was sent by the Together Coalition and included its logo, and the invitation was sent in the name of Emeka Forbes, who works on the project with Cox. In the event, Alakeson did not join the call and a No 10 special adviser spoke instead.

Cox also recently spoke at a closed-door event at Downing College, Cambridge. The event was attended by Alakeson, who had been across the cohesion brief in No 10.

Cox has dedicated his career since 2016 to countering extremism and addressing community tensions, and is an expert in this space, lobbying this government, past governments and various parties on it. This June will mark the ten-year anniversary of Jo Cox’s murder by a man who held far-right views, and comes after two summers in a row of protests and rioting over asylum seekers across the country.

That Brendan Cox’s role advising No 10 on this work has been kept “informal” – in the words of some party to the relationship – has fuelled suspicion that No 10 knows it may not be a good look to publicly consult him. Concern has also been expressed to the New Statesman that addressing social cohesion problems in Britain should be a priority, but that a policy vacuum has opened up for outside influences to fill. No 10’s position is that it is neither boycotting nor delegating government work to the Together Coalition.

This news comes at a time when Starmer is being questioned over his judgement, regarding the appointment of Peter Mandelson to US ambassador and the ennoblement of ex-communications chief Matthew Doyle, who campaigned for a known sex offender. The disquiet over Cox’s role adds to frustration building about Starmer operating a closed shop run by a so-called “boys’ club”, a feeling held among some Labour women, as reported recently in the New Statesman.

No 10 and Cox have been approached for comment.

A Kyle of Coincidences

Greg Hadfield writes:

In her 1922 crime novel The Secret Adversary, Agatha Christie had a character observe: “I’ve often noticed that once coincidences start happening they go on happening in the most extraordinary way.”

The Queen of Crime also inspired — but probably did not coin — the aphorism: “One coincidence is just a coincidence, two coincidences are a clue, three coincidences are a proof.”

In the mysterious case of Peter Kyle, the Labour MP for Hove and former vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, it does not take Hercule Poirot to discover the truth behind a myriad coincidences.

Enough has been written by me about Kyle’s best friend and former near-neighbour Ivor Caplin, arrested — but not [yet?] charged — with allegedly engaging in sexual communication with a child. This arrest came after the former chair of the Jewish Labour Movement was confronted by an anti-paedophile vigilante group on January 11 2025.

Caplin and Kyle, former vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, were best friends

After nine months on bail, Sussex Police released him “under investigation” in October last year; an application for a further extension of bail was rejected. [At the time of writing, it is not known if Caplin — who has recently moved to Haywards Heath — is still under investigation.]

It was not the first time Caplin had been arrested by Sussex Police. After he allegedly sexually assaulted a young homeless person in a hostel in Brighton on March 7 2024, police decided a couple of months later that they would take no further action.

Meanwhile, Caplin continued to “like” and post increasingly vile pornographic images and videos of young people on X.

Coincidentally, his X account was followed by countless senior Labour Party figures, both locally and nationally:

Caplin’s X/Twitter account had countless Labour Party figures, Zionist activists, and journalists

After a 20-month campaign to highlight Caplin’s online activities, I was prosecuted for posting on X a single screenshot of a Caplin reply to a post by an OnlyFans pornographic model. I was acquitted last November after a judge ruled Sussex Police and/or the Crown Prosecution had “doctored” the single piece of evidence they submitted.

Kyle has long been a close friend and protegée of [Lord] Peter Mandelson — from many years before he became an MP and during his promotion by Progress, the “New Labour” vehicle set up and funded by billionaire Lord Sainsbury.

This “party-within-a-party” was the breeding ground and kindergarten of many of the leaders in today’s Labour Party. Kyle was a primary beneficiary before — and after — he became MP for Hove in 2015.

Much more will, I hope, be revealed if/when Kyle’s communications with Mandelson are published in full. Of particular interest will be their contact during the crucial years of 2009 and 2010, when — as Kyle’s tweets show — he was one of Mandelson’s biggest fanboys.

Kyle’s posts glorifying Mandelson

Coincidentally, the two men regularly “bumped into” each other, including when Kyle interviewed Mandelson at a Progress conference (below right) or — much later , in 2025— when Kyle, then Technology Secretary, shared a Waymo driverless car with Mandelson, then UK ambassador to Washington. Throughout, Kyle remained a fanboy; Mandelson was “worth the risk”, Kyle repeatedly said.

Kyle has been one of the biggest of Mandelson’s fanboys, interviewing him at a Progress conference (above right) and sharing a Waymo driverless car in 2025 (bottom centre)

In this article, I will not go into detail about timelines — and all the coincidences they highlight — except to note:

• Jeffrey Epstein was first investigated by police in Florida in 2005; he was convicted for child prostitution and soliciting a prostitute in 2008, serving 13 months in prison under a plea deal;
• He was released, under house arrest for a year, on July 22 2009;
• He was arrested again on July 6, 2019, on federal charges for sex-trafficking of minors in Florida and New York.
• He died in jail on August 10, 2019.

Emails suggest Mandelson knew Epstein from about 1999 or 2000. 

Kyle’s political career began in earnest in about 2006 — after working with vulnerable Romanian orphans for Anita Roddick — when he was appointed as a special adviser to his next mentor, Hilary Armstrong (now Baroness Armstrong), who was then a Cabinet Office minister.

Anita Roddick gave Kyle a job working with vulnerable orphans in Romania

Armstrong was Labour chief whip when Caplin was also a whip (June 12 2001 to June 13 2003).

Chris Henry (left) and Peter Kyle, with Baroness [Hilary] Armstrong and Ivor Caplin (extreme right) campaigned together in Hove

Coincidentally, Caplin was a whip at exactly the same time and for exactly the same period as Dan Norris, who is currently facing allegations of sex offences too numerous to mention here.

Caplin congratulated on X his friend Dan Norris on his re-election as a Labour MP in 2024

After Caplin suddenly announced in November 2004 he would not be standing again as Labour MP for Hove, he started “a new career” when he joined Foresight Communications, a firm of political lobbyists, in December 2005. The former defence minister under Tony Blair during the invasion of Iraq also joined MBDA Missile Systems; Caplin was criticised for not breaching the ministerial code, by not first seeking advice from Whitehall’s advisory committee.

I understand his decision to stand down as an MP related to inquiries into his private life by the News of the World, resulting — eventually, in August 2006 — this article, whose publication had been delayed by the Blair-supporting newspaper until after the May 2005 general election:

And who, you may ask, founded Foresight Communications and recruited Caplin?

Mark Adams, a former aide to Tony Blair for nearly six years from 1992, worked for Foresight Communications from 2001 to 2010, during which time his clients included not only £20 billion Eurofighter project, but also the Police Federation.

Coincidentally, Mark Adams is a rapist:

In 2019, Adams was sentenced to 14 years in prison for multiple counts of rape and sexual assault in London (2015), Edinburgh (2017), and Wales (2018).

Although Caplin worked for Foresight Communications from 2005 to 2007, there is no evidence that Adams, his boss, met Kyle during his year in the Cabinet Office with Armstrong.

The trigger, however, for me writing this article is the scandal surrounding Lord Matthew Doyle, elevated (briefly) to a peerage by Sir Keir Starmer, despite the fact that Starmer knew his long-term colleague had campaigned for friend and former Labour councillor Sean Morton — even after Morton had been charged with serious sex offences.

The front page of The Sunday Times, which exposed the Doyle scandal on December 27/28 2025

I will let Google AI summarise the scandal:

Google AI summarises the background to the Doyle scandal

It was at this point that the number of coincidences rose exponentially. Taken together, they quickly amounted to a veritable confluence of concurrences.

The Doyle-Morton scandal resulted in one of my sources in Hove alerting me to how often Matthew Doyle had campaigned in Hove, especially in 2017 and 2018.

It was the same source who reported how, during the 2017 general election campaign, one Labour Party figure involved was particularly keen to meet teenagers:

Separately, the source alerted me to Doyle’s regular presence in Hove:

I began to investigate, trawling through all the emails, documents, and screenshots I have amassed ever since Kyle’s pivotal role in hounding Jeremy Corbyn and overturning the results of Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party (“City Party”) in July 2016.

On September 19 2016, Kyle appeared in a BBC Panorama programme — in which I also appeared — about the anti-Corbyn machinations. He stayed up late afterwards to thank his online fans and followers.

Coincidentally, at 2.01am the following day, he thanked a young man called Liron: Liron Velleman, a long-time activist in the Israel lobby and former policy officer for the Jewish Labour Movement.

This Liron Velleman:

Velleman seems also to have been admired by Caplin, Kyle’s best friend, according to X/Twitter posts in 2019 to 2021:

As soon as I looked into disgraced Matthew Doyle’s connection to and Hove, I was astonished by what I found — going back as far as early 2014, before Kyle was elected for the first time as Labour MP for Hove on May 7 2015.

Here are Doyle and Kyle campaigning in Hove - with the notorious Luke Stanger, shortly after his 18th birthday — on July 5 2014.

Campaigning in Hove in July 2014 (from left to right): Luke Stanger, Matthew Doyle, Peter Atkinson, and Peter Kyle

Let us begin first with Doyle’s CV on LinkedIn:

Then I focused on his political communications company, MLD Advisory Ltd, of which he was sole director, sole shareholder, and sole employee (2012 to 2021). In 2015, the company gave a single-bedroom leasehold flat in Wandsworth as its business address.

It is fair to say MLD Advisory appears never to have been a financial success. According to the latest accounts, Doyle’s company had — at the end of 2024 — net assets of £5,125 and just £223 in the bank.

What interested me the most was a striking coincidence: MLD Advisory Ltd shared the same registered address as a company set up in 2015 by Peter Kyle — along with Professor Paul Corrigan, a Blairite health adviser who has supported privatisation of NHS hospitals. [Kyle first used the registered address — accountants Lucraft Hodges Dawes in New Road, Brighton —as long ago as 2005.]

Prof Corrigan is husband of Baroness Hilary Armstrong.

At 2.38pm on January 12 2026, Lord Doyle of Great Barford was formally introduced to the House of Lords.

By Baroness Armstrong!

It was easy to see the online interactions between Kyle and Doyle on X/Twitter, starting as far back as October 2010, when Doyle ran the “White Night” Midnight Half-marathon in Brighton:

Kyle mentioned Doyle for the first time on Twitter/X on October 30 2010, on the eve of Doyle running in a midnight half-marathon in Brighton

In February 2016, Kyle was there to greet his friend at the finish of the Brighton Half-marathon, which Doyle completed — not for the first time — in an impressive 1 hour 49 minutes (and nine seconds). [Which was some seven minutes faster than he recorded in 2014.]

Peter Kyle embraces his friend Matthew Doyle at the end of the 2016 Brighton Half-marathon

It is worth mentioning Doyle — a member of the Labour Party’s LGBT caucus — is, of course, a longtime supporter of Israel.

In May 2011, he spoke at the “We Believe in Israel” conference organised by BICOM (Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre), only weeks before Luke Akehurst, the leading Zionist activist (and now Labour MP), formally took over as its director.

Doyle was described as “political director to Middle East Quartet envoy Tony Blair”.

Doyle spoke at BICOM’s “We Believe in Israel” conference

Before we come to the biggest coincidence of the Epstein-Mandelson-Doyle-Kyle connections, let me summarise the timeline of the paedophile Sean Morton, from November 2013. That was the date of the indecent images police found on his computer:

• four photographs of two girls, estimated to be between 10 and 15, engaged in “sexual activity” with each other;
• three photographs depicting men and women having penetrative sexual activity with dogs.

It was only in June 2016 that “a new acquaintance” of Morton’s reported him to the police. (By that time, he had already failed to become Labour MP for Moray at the May 5 2015 general election).

It is not clear when — or how — Doyle became close to Morton. What is known is that, on February 8 2016, the two men were photographed in the United States taking a “selfie” with Hillary Clinton, at a rally at Alverne High School on the eve of the New Hampshire Democratic primary. [Clinton lost the primary to Bernie Sanders.]

Doyle and Morton grab a “selfie” with Hillary Clinton in February 2016

The next part of the Morton-Doyle timeline is significant, coinciding as it does with a period when Doyle had many opportunities to tell Kyle in person about the terrible turn of events for Doyle’s friend in Scotland:

• December 2016: Morton charged and appears in court on Christmas Eve;
• May 2017: Doyle accompanied Morton to the election count after campaigning for his friend — suspended by the Labour Party — when he stood (unsuccessfully) as an independent candidate in the local elections;

The Sunday Times published this photograph of Doyle and Morton

• August 2017: A photograph of Doyle and Morton posing outside a Glasgow café was uploaded to Facebook;
• November 28 2017: Morton admitted having images of naked children;

• February 20 2018: Morton sentenced to a community payback order requiring 140 hours of unpaid work, a three-year supervision order, and placement on the sex offenders register.

Three days before Morton pleaded guilty, Kyle was campaigning with Doyle and his partner, Philip Normal, frequently described as the United Kingdom’s first openly HIV-positive Mayor; he was Mayor of Lambeth for a year from April 2020, having been elected a councillor in 2018.

Kyle and Doyle campaigning together for Doyle’s partner, Philip Normal, on November 25 2017

Ivor Caplin posted congratulations to Normal — copying-in Doyle — as soon as the results were known on May 4 2018. Caplin also included Jack Hopkins, who was elected with Normal.

Coincidentally, Hopkins — who became Labour leader of Lambeth — quit in 2021 as it was reported he faced a party inquiry over a woman’s allegations of sexual harassment. Hopkins “vehemently denied” the allegations.

Caplin congratulated Normal and Hopkins

Normal also had to resign — in January 2022 — after the Labour Party accused him of not disclosing “offensive and discriminatory” posts on X/Twitter when he was selected for the safe seat in Oval ward in 2017. The party said none of its officials had bothered to check Normal’s posts, which dated to 2011–2014 and were revealed by Brixton Buzz and Inside Croydon.

Kyle had also supported Normal when he tried to become the Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Vauxhall before the 2019 general election:

In October 2019, it emerged Normal had failed even to make the seven-person long list of potential candidates. [It is worth noting that Kyle once said Labour MPs should choose the leader of the Labour Party, because they were “connoisseurs” who were good character judges when it came to parliamentary colleagues.]

It is in this context and within this timeframe that another shocking coincidence occurs. This time involving not only Doyle and Kyle, but also Matt Faulding. Faulding was to become a highly-influential, but little-known, member of the Sir Keir Starmer’s team. He was the “elections supremo” who fixed it so that Labour’s parliamentary candidates would be favourites and footsoldiers in the Morgan McSweeney/Mandelson/Starmer project.

As secretary of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) from August 2023 to October 2025, he continued to be a key lieutenant to McSweeney, Starmer’s former chief of staff.

By coincidence, Faulding — now 36 — studied at Sussex University and was a member of Brighton Hove Constituency Labour Party in 2009/10 when I was membership secretary. Insofar as I recall, I never knew him, met him, or even saw him.

After quitting as PLP secretary, Faulding — as so often in the way of these creatures — immediately joined Anacta, which describes itself as “the leading Labour-specialist advisory firm”.

Anacta’s managing director is Teddy Ryan, a former Labour Party regional director in the southeast and married to the party’s general secretary Hollie Ridley. The firm is a lobbyist for Pearson Engineering — part of Rafael, Israel’s state-owned arms giant.

Ryan used to work with Doyle in a very short-lived organisation called “Join in Local Sport” following the 2012 London Olympics; he was also a director of Lowick Group (2018–2021), with Kevin McKeever, an anti-Corbyn lobbyist.

Back to coincidences. And back to Hove.

In 2018, after pro-Corbyn activists had won control of the three Constituency Labour Parties that had been set up in the wake of the anti-democratic annulment of the 2016 “City Party” elections.

The continued huge support for pro-Corbyn representatives across Brighton and Hove had annoyed the likes of Kyle, Caplin, and their clique of anti-democrats.

Kyle and Caplin’s gang were particularly furious about the remarkable result of Corbyn’s general election campaign in June 2017. Even though Corbyn’s popularity had meant Kyle increased his majority in Hove from 1,236 (with a 42.3 per cent share) to 18,757 (a 64.1 per cent share).

Kyle and Caplin were determined to ensure their own factional candidates were chosen — especially in Hove — when local ward members met in the run-up to the May 2019 elections to Brighton and Hove City Council.

Brighton and Hove Momentum, in which I was active at the time, was well-organised and attracted nearly a 100 would-be candidates. When selection meetings were scheduled, it promoted its favoured candidates in each of the 21 wards.

Along with local activists, I did my best to ensure it was known when and where candidates would be selected.

It came as no surprise when we learned Kyle and his cronies — including his bag-carrier Chris Henry, the constituency manager who is now Kyle’s grandly-titled “Director of Operations” — were tutoring their own candidates.

When Henry sent a private email to some of Kyle’s favoured candidates on June 28 2018, he cackhandedly confused two people with the same surname: Hewitt.

One was a Kyle loyalist and the other was a Momentum supporter. The email leaked. I remember it well:

As a result of this meeting, would-be candidates produced glossy leaflets for distribution to members of Labour Party branches in Hove. Here is one for Josh Cliff in Wish ward — with prominent endorsements by … Kyle and his bag-carrier:

Unfortunately, Josh Cliff failed in his attempt to put his foot on the first rung of the Labour gravy train. Instead, he went on to be a trainee manager with Enterprise Vehicle Hire.

Cliff lost out to Alex Braithwaite, a black socialist Momentum-supporting woman, who would have made a fine councillor — but she was suspended mid-campaign after fake accusations of “anti-semitism”.

Despite Kyle’s best endeavours, things did not turn out too well — in the short term at least — for the favoured candidates in the email:

• Kevin Thomas: Former civil servant and chair of Hove-based childcare organisation Starfish Kids Club, failed to be elected in Hangleton and Knoll;
• John Hewitt: Failed to be elected in Hangleton and Knoll;
• Joy Robinson: Failed to be elected in Brunswick and Adelaide in 2019, stood successfully in 2023;
• Carmen Appich: Elected in same Westbourne ward as Chris Henry, stood down as chair of equalities committee after calling a female party colleague “bitch” in a Zoom meeting in 2020, did not stand in 2023;
• Peter Atkinson: Elected for North Portslade in 2019, resigned from Labour two years later in August 2021, falsely claiming a Labour colleague had posted “anti-semitic” material;
• Jackie O’Quinn: Re-elected for Goldsmid in 2019, quit Labour this month (February 2026) after 50 years: “I’ve been greatly troubled by various decisions and policies of the present Labour government since they came to power and my disenchantment is now overwhelming.”

In Brighton and Hove — but especially Hove — Labour right-wingers already led the country in abusing and lying about pro-Corbyn opponents, then trying to fix candidate selections, and then making fake accusations of “anti-semitism”. 

What I did not remember, I confess, about the June 28 2018 email, was who else was copied-in to the message about a private meeting at Kyle’s constituency office: Matthew Doyle and Matt Faulding, who was deputy director of Progress from January 2015 to October 2017. He joined Lowick Group on August 31 2018.

I do not currently know if Doyle and Faulding actually attended in person the meeting arranged for June 30 2018; Doyle was a studio guest on Sky’s All Out Politics on July 2:

Kyle praises Doyle’s TV appearance on Sky, two days after the candidates’ meeting in Hove

Regardless, why were Doyle and Faulding copied-in? By a sitting MP, about a meeting in his constituency office. About the selection of council candidates. Why?

More importantly, had Doyle by then told Kyle about his Scottish friend’s conviction for child pornography and images of penetrative sex with dogs barely four months earlier?

Was Doyle still in contact with Morton? He has never disclosed when such contact ceased.

Was it Doyle — with or without Kyle — who decided in the summer of 2022 to adopt a new tactic in candidate selections: to remove them entirely from the hands of local party members? Was it Doyle — with or without Kyle — who knew just the man who should be responsible for imposing their right-wing cronies not only across Brighton and Hove, but also across the southeast?

Who was that man? It was Ivor Caplin — who had been put on the Labour Party South East Regional Committee in November 2021, at a regional conference attended by Kyle and overseen by new regional director Teddy Ryan.

Caplin explains why party members could not be trusted and candidates had to be “properly selected”

Caplin (bottom left) and Kyle (top left) keep an eye on their personally-approved councillors at count for the May 2023 elections to Brighton and Hove City Council

Did Starmer know about any of these coincidences in Kyle’s ill-chosen liaisons — intimate companion of Caplin, longstanding friend of Mandelson, personal closeness to Doyle — when he appointed Kyle to his first Cabinet in July 2024?

He should have done.

As Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology, Kyle was responsible for steering the Online Safety Bill into law.

Kyle wrote this article in The Guardian on December 16 2024 — less than four weeks before his best friend Caplin was arrested for allegedly engaging in online sexual communications with a child

What sort of vetting did Kyle undergo? Was he asked about him and Caplin? Was he asked about Mandelson and Epstein? Was he asked about Doyle and Morton?

Perhaps we will find out more if/when Kyle (along with all other ministers) hands over details of his texts and contacts with Mandelson, as Starmer has promised.

Perhaps we will find out more if Caplin is ever charged; all his devices were removed for investigation during a three-hour visit to his flat in Hove on January 11 last year.

As always, a key question is: Who knew what and when?

So far, Sussex Police have been strangely reluctant to exercise “ze little grey cells”.

I wonder why.

There is no collective noun for a spate or string of coincidences. I have a suggestion: A Kyle of Coincidences.

It sounds like the title of an intriguing Agatha Christie mystery.

Postal Order

Amid the chaos at the Royal Mail, remember that it was privatised by the under-scrutinised Liberal Democrats. The Business Secretary on every day of the Coalition was Vince Cable, and the Postal Affairs Minister under him at the point of privatisation was Ed Davey. Oh, the comments that I used to have to reject when I mentioned that the Post Office had had to be cut out of the Royal Mail in 2011 so that the Royal Mail could be privatised, because the City had known, even then, about Horizon, and would have refused to have handled the sale, much less bought the shares. On 24 May 2024, that was confirmed in open court.

Tony Blair knew about Horizon in 1998, but Peter Mandelson made him go through with it. In 2009, 10 years into Horizon, Mandelson tried to offload 30 per cent of the undivided Royal Mail. The eventual privatisation made vast profits for the 16 priority investors, which had been chosen because they were seen as stable and long-term. 12 sold out within weeks. One such, which secured £36 million in six months, was Lansdowne Partners, and one of those Partners was Peter Davies, who had been best man at the first, and then only, wedding of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.

Osborne and Mandelson were both shortlisted for the position of Ambassador to the United States, but it was on his way home from Osborne's residence that Mandelson was photographed in November urinating in the street. Mandelson's clearly close friend, Osborne, married again in 2023, and the guests included his close friend and podcast partner, Ed Balls, with Balls's wife, Yvette Cooper. Cooper's candidate at Gorton and Denton has been endorsed by Cable. A vote for that candidate would be a vote for all of this. And a whole lot more.