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 Hilary 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.

Idol Words?

Hamit Coskun appealed from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, which quashed his conviction. Keir Starmer and David Lammy want to abolish that right. Tomorrow, the High Court will hear the Crown Prosecution Service's appeal to reinstate that conviction. But this is only about a blasphemy law if you worship Margaret Thatcher.

What has a blasphemy law ever achieved? There was one in England and Wales until 2008, there was one in Scotland until 2024, and there is one in Northern Ireland to this day. To what effect? Rather, the success of Coskun's first appeal was a good result against the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986? A couple of years later, her supporters wanted to use that very Act to prosecute people who had set fire to copies of The Satanic Verses. They are very recent converts to free speech, and very selective about it.

Similarly, the basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. The following year, the Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Now the authority for puberty blockers and for child castration, Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence. The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no authority that is apparent to anyone. And even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now. 

Not that we ought to hold out hope for such an outcome, any more than anyone should have done then. As the House of Commons voted last year to decriminalise abortion up to birth, so that House had voted under Thatcher to legalise abortion it for "severe fetal abnormality" that did not have to be specified, and that was in the original text of a Government Bill, not a backbench amendment.

Doomscrolling, Indeed

Far from being a dead cat, Keir Starmer's announcement about a social media ban for the under-16s serves only to draw even more attention to his travails. It could not work without digital ID, for which the Minister is Josh Simons, whose attempt to frame people for offences under the Official Secrets Act and the National Security Act is now being investigated by his own Cabinet Office. Why not by the Police?

Then again, the Police are conspiring with that same Cabinet Office, in contempt of Parliament, to block the release of files relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to Washington. As a member of the 2024 Labour intake and as a beneficiary of the 2025 Ministerial reshuffle, Simons is a double debtor of Mandelson.

The Labour Together crime syndicate was co-founded by Steve Reed of the local elections fiasco, but at least we have been spared the intended dry run for the "postponement" of the next General Election, when people will have the vote who until the day before had been deprived of any political perspective beyond the ideology purveyed by the schools and by the official media, schools in which they would still be obliged to stay another two years until they had reached the age of conscription.

Just How Far Those Alliances Extended

Adam Bienkov and Peter Jukes write:

Newly-released messages between the far-right former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and the late convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, reveal how Bannon worked with Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage to “overthrow” Theresa May at the height of the 2018 Brexit crisis in the UK.

The messages begin in the days following Boris Johnson’s resignation from May’s Government over her ‘Chequers Plan’ for Brexit and show Bannon detailing his attempt to help remove the then Conservative Prime Minister from office.

In one message on 16 July 2018, Bannon, who had established a London base in a Mayfair hotel where he met with prominent Conservative and far-right European political figures, tells Epstein that he is in “London with Boris”, while in another message three days earlier he tells him that “We are overthrowing May right now.”

Johnson strongly denied any such collaboration with Bannon or Farage at the time, with his spokesperson telling The Observer in June 2019 that “any suggestion that Boris is colluding with or taking advice from Mr Bannon or Nigel Farage is totally preposterous to the point of conspiracy.”

When questioned later by LBC about reports of his communications with Bannon, Johnson called the claims “the biggest load of codswallop I have ever heard.”

A spokesperson for Johnson did not respond to a request from Byline Times for comment following the release of the Epstein messages.

Bannon’s apparent involvement with Johnson began days after the then Foreign Secretary resigned from May’s Government, describing her Chequers plan as a “betrayal” of Brexit.

In unused footage from the 2019 documentary The Brink, Bannon is recorded telling the documentary makers that he had collaborated with Johnson “all weekend” on his resignation speech.

“Today we are going to see if Boris Johnson tries to overthrow the British Government” he is filmed saying.

“He’s going to give a speech in the Commons. I’ve been talking to him all weekend about this speech. We went back and forth over the text”.

Bannon’s association with Johnson appears to have begun after Trump’s first election victory in 2016.

“Right after we won [Trump’s first Presidency], Boris flew over,” he recalled.

“Because their victory was as unexpected as ours. I got to know him quite well in the transition period”.

Johnson appeared to return the interest, inviting Bannon’s controversial political campaigning company to two meetings at the Foreign Office’s Wilton Park base in 2017.

Previous Byline Times FOI requests for details about these meetings were refused on the grounds of US-UK intelligence and national security concerns.

Alison Klayman, who made The Brink, said that Bannon had been “unequivocal” about his ongoing communications with Johnson.

Other journalists picked up on the relationship. When Bannon was Chief of Staff in the White House, Johnson reportedly developed a natural affinity with him.

Anthony Seldon’s Johnson at 10 book reported unnamed FCO officials describing Johnson and Bannon as “hitting it off” during this period — finding him both “intriguing” and “distasteful”— while ignoring repeated official warnings about Bannon’s far-right European connections.

“Johnson was reminded by officials [that] Bannon had extensive contacts with the far right in Europe, but ‘it didn’t seem to concern him’ Seldon reported.

After Bannon was fired by Trump in 2017 the Mirror reported that Johnson remained in regular contact with him.

The ‘Movement’

This association continued, even as he befriended Epstein and used his connections and financial acumen to set up his European far right ‘Movement’ with Nigel Farage.

Bannon maintained the association with the then UKIP leader, the Epstein messages suggest.

On 15 July 2018, both men appeared jointly on the radio station LBC, during which they attacked May’s leadership.

Following their appearance, Epstein texted Bannon “Good work on LBC.”

Bannon continued to press for May’s resignation in the months that followed.

On 14 November 2018 then then Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg MP submitted a letter of no confidence to the 1922 Committee chairman in May’s leadership, amid a wave of Cabinet resignations over May’s Chequers plan.

Bannon texted Epstein describing the UK as a “hot mess” and explained: “I’ve gotten pulled into the Brexit thing this morning with Nigel, Boris and Rees Mogg.” Epstein replied, asking if May would survive; Bannon responded, “I don’t see how… Boris; Gove; Rees Mogg; David Davis – somebody has to step up.”

Messages between Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein

The next day the Daily Mirror published a photo of Johnson and Farage sharing what was described as a “cosy chat” at a Belgravia restaurant alongside Johnson’s father Stanley, fueling speculation of a hard-Brexit pact.

A spokesperson for Nigel Farage was contacted for comment.

Bannon continued to claim to be working on May’s removal.

On November 16, Bannon told Epstein that he was still in London because “the guys are trying to move on May today / tomorrow and I’m having a meeting right now”.

Epstein informed the prominent Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen that Bannon would not be able to meet up in Abu Dhabi because he was staying on in London “at the request of Boris Johnson”.

Bannon agreed with Epstein that he should stay as long as possible in the UK “so people get the commitment of your follow through”.

Journalist Michael Wolff separately emailed Epstein, positioning himself as an “intermediary with leadership challenger Boris Johnson.”

A month later, in mid December, Bannon appeared to still be involved, texting Epstein that May was struggling and that he could “get Boris across the finish line”.

Bannon texted Epstein that May was struggling and that he would soon “get Boris across the finish line”.

Email between the journalist Michael Wolff and Jeffrey Epstein

May would finally resign the following July, paving the way for Johnson’s elevation to Prime Minister.

The Epstein messages reveal a shared long term interest with Epstein in the long term project of securing a hardline form of Brexit, which May was perceived as being a barrier to.

In the days following the 2016 EU referendum, Epstein had emailed another associate, Palantir founder Peter Thiel, describing Brexit as “just the beginning” of “a return to tribalism, counter to globalisation, amazing new alliances.”

The Epstein files reveal in clearer terms than ever before, just how far those alliances extended.

Cannon Fire

I apologise unreservedly if I am mistaken, but I can find no defence of Gabriel Pogrund by the Israeli Embassy, the Chief Rabbinate, the Senior Rabbinate, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Community Security Trust, the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel, The Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Telegraph, or the Jewish News. But outside parliamentary privilege, Josh Simons has said that APCO had gone beyond its brief, which it could undoubtedly disprove in court, so let it sue him. If Steve Reed did not have to resign for the cancelled and uncancelled local elections, then there would be no rules at all anymore, and we should all behave accordingly. And there are those who have always done so, as Paul Knaggs writes:

What does a political movement do when it has run out of arguments? When the facts are against it, when the documents are damning, when the money trail leads exactly where its enemies said it would? It does what every cornered power has done since the invention of the state: it turns on the people asking the questions.

The story of Labour Together, Morgan McSweeney, and “Operation Cannon” is not merely another Westminster scandal to be consumed over morning coffee and forgotten by lunch. It is a case study in the corruption of democratic principles by men who speak the language of democracy while gutting its substance. It is a story about what happens when a political faction treats investigative journalism not as a pillar of free society but as a threat to be neutralised through surveillance, smear, and manufactured conspiracy.

And it arrives at a moment of exquisite irony. McSweeney, the architect of Starmer’s rise, resigned on 8 February 2026 as Downing Street Chief of Staff, brought down not by the journalists he tried to silence but by the very patron whose friendship he cultivated: Peter Mandelson, now under criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police for misconduct in public office over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The spider has been caught in his own web. But the web itself remains intact, and it is the web we must examine.

The Fraudulent Pitch 

To understand Operation Cannon, you must first understand the alleged fraud that preceded it. Between 2017 and 2020, Labour Together, the organisation McSweeney founded in 2017 during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, ran an undisclosed project funded by £730,000 in donations that were not reported to the Electoral Commission within the legal timeframe. The Commission eventually fined the organisation £14,250 for over twenty breaches of electoral law, a penalty it described as being “towards the high end of the scale.”

The purpose of this dark money operation was precise and ruthless: to dismantle the left-wing leadership of the Labour Party and replace it with a candidate engineered to win. McSweeney conducted extensive polling of Labour’s membership to determine what they wanted to hear. He then crafted Keir Starmer’s leadership pitch accordingly: Starmer would be presented as a radical eco-socialist, an inheritor of the Corbyn tradition, a unifier who would end factionalism. Every word of it was calculated. Every promise was expendable.

As investigative journalist Paul Holden has documented in his book The Fraud, this was a leadership campaign built on market research rather than conviction. The membership was polled not to be represented but to be manipulated. They were told what McSweeney’s data said they needed to hear in order to vote for a leader who would subsequently abandon every commitment that secured their support. The board of Labour Together during this period included Trevor Chinn, a businessman who funded anti-Corbyn MPs, and Martin Taylor, a hedge fund manager. This was not a grassroots movement. It was an astroturf operation with a hedge fund floor.

When the Sunday Times published a front-page story in November 2023 exposing these undeclared donations, the Labour Together operation faced a choice that defines the character of any political movement: would it address the substance of the reporting, or would it attack the reporters? The answer tells you everything you need to know about the people who now govern Britain.

Starmer sits comfortably in the centre of the web, yet remains just one strategic layer of plausible deniability away from the tinted hands of his own enforcers.

Operation Cannon: The Anatomy of a Smear 

In November 2023, with a general election approaching and their man Starmer a near-certainty for prime minister, Labour Together hired APCO Worldwide, a Washington DC-based corporate intelligence firm whose previous clients include big tobacco companies and Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems. The contract, addressed to Josh Simons, then director of Labour Together, was explicit: APCO would “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.” The fee was at least £30,000.

The contract went further. APCO’s “approach should provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up for us in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together.” Read that sentence again. Not to establish truth. Not to correct inaccuracies. To “create narratives” that would “undermine” journalism. This is the language of counter-intelligence, not democratic politics.

The resulting 58-page report, codenamed “Operation Cannon,” is a document that should make every citizen of this country uneasy. It designated Sunday Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, The Guardian’s Henry Dyer, Paul Holden, and journalists from other outlets as “significant persons of interest” and discussed potential “leverage” over reporters. APCO’s briefings speculated, without providing a shred of evidence, that the stories about Labour Together’s funding originated from a Russian or Chinese hack of the Electoral Commission.

But here is where the operation descends from the merely cynical into something genuinely sinister. The report contained almost ten pages of deeply personal and false claims about Gabriel Pogrund. It referenced his Jewish beliefs and made fabricated claims about his personal and professional relationships. It suggested that his previous reporting, including stories about the royal family, “could be seen as destabilising to the UK and also in the interests of Russia’s strategic foreign policy objectives.”

There is a bitter irony here that will not be lost on those of us who experienced the other end of the Sunday Times’s journalism during the Corbyn years.

Pogrund himself was part of the machinery that weaponised antisemitism accusations to destroy left-wing candidates and activists. In 2019, while standing as a Labour councillor in Chesterfield, I received a WhatsApp message from the Sunday Times. Pogrund and his colleague Richard Kerbaj were preparing another “exclusive” on antisemitism in Labour. Remarks I had made about religious interference in politics, directed at all faiths equally, were stripped of context and repackaged as anti-Jewish hatred. I was suspended mid-campaign on the basis of their reporting. I was never found guilty of any wrongdoing. But the punishment was the process, and that was always the intention. The timing, weeks before local elections, was not accidental. It never was.

This was the pattern across the country: week after week, the Sunday Times and others churned out stories designed to hammer the same message home, that Labour was institutionally antisemitic and Corbyn personally tainted. Individual cases were weaponised to tar an entire movement. Careers were destroyed, candidacies torpedoed, and a democratic socialist project systematically undermined, all through the pages of newspapers that are now, quite rightly, outraged at being targeted themselves.

So let us be precise about the irony. It is not that Pogrund and Yorke deserved what Labour Together did to them. They did not. No journalist deserves to have their faith, their family, and their personal relationships catalogued in a smear dossier by a foreign intelligence firm. What Operation Cannon did was wrong, full stop. But the irony is that the same factional apparatus that once used the Sunday Times as a willing instrument to destroy left-wing activists on the basis of distorted allegations has now turned its techniques on the very journalists it once weaponised. The machine does not distinguish between its former allies and its current enemies. It consumes everyone who becomes inconvenient.

A political organisation that spent years weaponising accusations of antisemitism to destroy the Labour left hired a foreign intelligence firm that then targeted a Jewish journalist’s faith as material for a smear dossier. The same people who insisted that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour was an existential threat to British Jews commissioned a report that treated a Jewish reporter’s identity as a data point to be exploited. Orwell would have recognised this technique instantly. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party’s slogans were built on precisely this kind of inversion: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. And, it seems, fighting antisemitism means investigating the Jewish backgrounds of inconvenient journalists.

The Russian Ghost in the Machine

The most insidious element of Operation Cannon was the manufacture of a Russian conspiracy theory. Having failed to find any errors in the Sunday Times reporting (because there were none), Labour Together and APCO constructed a narrative that the journalists’ sources must have been Russian intelligence. A December 2023 APCO memo, marked “strictly private and confidential,” stated that “the likeliest culprit is the Russian state, or proxies of the Russian state.”

This fabricated narrative was then laundered through official channels. Labour Together, with Simons’s direct knowledge, reported to the National Cyber Security Centre that it had been the victim of a hack, presenting APCO’s report as evidence. The NCSC declined to launch a full investigation. But the mere fact of having made the referral gave Labour Together material to brief to other journalists, effectively poisoning Fleet Street against the original reporting.

On 8 February 2024, Pippa Crerar, then deputy political editor of The Guardian, contacted Paul Holden with an extraordinary claim: The Guardian was 24 hours away from publishing a story alleging he was under investigation by UK security services for receiving information stolen by Russia. The story was, in Holden’s words, “nonsense.” He had never received a single document from Russia. When he threatened to sue for defamation, the story vanished.

But consider what this smear would have achieved had it succeeded. Holden is not some obscure blogger. He is a veteran anti-corruption investigative journalist who has spent fifteen years investigating grand corruption in South Africa. His work with the National Prosecuting Authority and multiple international law enforcement agencies led to the recovery of nearly one billion dollars in stolen assets from the corrupt Gupta family. He has been sued by a Russian oligarch. He is on the right side of this fight by any measure.

Had the Russian spy smear landed, it would have been a gift not just to Labour Together but to every criminal actor Holden has pursued across continents. As Holden himself has observed, those criminals would have seized on such an allegation to undermine ongoing prosecutions and investigations. A political faction’s desire to avoid embarrassment over undeclared donations would have fatally compromised international anti-corruption efforts and let some of South Africa’s worst criminals off the hook. That is the collateral damage of Operation Cannon.

The Apparatus: From CCDH to APCO to the Online Safety Act

Operation Cannon did not emerge from nowhere. It is the latest manifestation of an apparatus that Morgan McSweeney has been building for the better part of a decade: a network of organisations that use the language of accountability and counter-disinformation to silence dissent and control political narratives.

In 2018, McSweeney co-founded the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British-American nonprofit that campaigns to deplatform individuals and organisations it labels as spreaders of “hate and disinformation.” The CCDH’s early targets were revealing. It focused not on genuine far-right extremists but on left-wing pro-Corbyn media outlets, particularly The Canary. It also amplified antisemitism accusations against Corbyn himself. As Holden’s book documents, CCDH was “incubated using resources from Labour Together.” McSweeney used his factional think tank to launch what amounted to a censorship operation targeting the media outlets that supported his political opponents.

This is the pattern: create organisations that sound like they serve the public interest (who could oppose countering digital hate?) and then deploy them as weapons against political enemies. When that proves insufficient, hire corporate intelligence firms to investigate journalists. When their reports prove thin, launder their speculation through security services. When that fails, brief other journalists against the original reporters. Each layer of the operation provides deniability for the last.

And the pattern is accelerating. On the very day this article is published, Starmer has announced plans to seek sweeping new powers to regulate the internet, including social media restrictions, controls on AI chatbots, and the ability to bypass parliamentary scrutiny in implementing future curbs. Framed as child protection (and who could oppose that?), the proposals would grant ministers authority to act “within months rather than waiting years for new primary legislation every time technology evolves.” Note the language: reduced parliamentary scrutiny, ministerial discretion, speed over deliberation. These are not the instincts of a government that trusts democratic debate. These are the instincts of a government that has already demonstrated, through the CCDH, through APCO, through Operation Cannon, that its preferred response to uncomfortable speech is to control it. Orwell warned that “freedom of speech and of the Press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about.” Child safety is always the Trojan Horse. The walls it breaches belong to everyone.

It is also essential to understand who the real targets of Operation Cannon were. The Sunday Times and The Guardian are now, quite properly, outraged at having their journalists investigated. But the primary targets of APCO’s dossier were not the staff reporters of Fleet Street broadsheets. They were Paul Holden and Andrew Feinstein, the South African investigative journalists who run Shadow World Investigations, a small independent outlet dedicated to exposing corruption, the arms trade, and elite malfeasance. Feinstein, the son of a Viennese Holocaust survivor, is a former ANC member of parliament who resigned in protest against corruption under Jacob Zuma. He later stood against Starmer himself in Holborn and St Pancras in the 2024 general election, winning over seven thousand votes. The APCO dossier played up Feinstein’s support for Corbyn and his appearances on Russia Today, while treating his investigative work as evidence of political campaigning rather than journalism.

This distinction matters. The Sunday Times and The Guardian will fight for their own. But where were these newspapers when Julian Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy and subjected to years of detention for the crime of publishing information the powerful did not want published? The Guardian, which profited handsomely from Assange’s leaked material, was notably relaxed about his persecution. The Sunday Times did not lead any campaigns for his freedom. When the target was an independent publisher operating outside the established media ecosystem, Fleet Street was content to let him rot. Now that the surveillance state has turned its attention to their own correspondents, they discover a passion for press freedom that was curiously absent when Assange needed it most.

The lesson is clear: established media will defend itself, but it will not defend the independent outlets that are doing the most dangerous work. Holden and Feinstein were targeted precisely because they operate outside the protection of major media groups. They do not have legal departments on retainer. They do not have proprietors who lunch with cabinet ministers. They are vulnerable in exactly the ways that make them dangerous to power, and it is the independent media, the small outlets, the citizen journalists, the Substacks and the podcasters, who will bear the brunt of whatever online censorship regime Starmer’s government constructs next.

Simons, who commissioned the APCO contract, now sits as a Labour MP and Cabinet Office minister. He has claimed that APCO was hired merely to investigate a suspected hack, and that the targeting of journalists was not his intention. This defence is difficult to reconcile with the contract itself, which explicitly names the journalists and their work as targets. Simons says he was “surprised and shocked” that the report went beyond the brief. One struggles to understand how a man who commissioned an investigation into journalists could be surprised when the firm investigated journalists.

The Mandelson Convergence: Where All Roads Meet 

The timing of these revelations is not coincidental. McSweeney resigned as Chief of Staff on 8 February 2026 because his personal loyalty to Peter Mandelson proved to be his undoing. He was, by all accounts, a “keen advocate” for Mandelson’s appointment as Ambassador to the United States, championing the nomination despite warnings from security services, despite a Cabinet Office due diligence report flagging the Epstein connection, and despite Maurice Glasman’s explicit warning about photographic evidence circulating in Washington.

Mandelson was dismissed from the ambassadorship in September 2025 after emails between him and Epstein were made public. He resigned from the Labour Party on 1 February 2026 and from the House of Lords shortly after. On 3 February, the Metropolitan Police launched a criminal investigation into misconduct in public office, and police subsequently raided two of his properties. The documents show that while serving as Business Secretary, Mandelson gave Epstein advance notice of a 500 billion euro EU bailout, shared internal economic briefings, and appeared to lobby against banking restrictions on Epstein’s behalf.

McSweeney learned his politics from Mandelson. This is not speculation; it is the documented history of his career. He worked closely with Mandelson from 2001 onwards. The McSweeney-Mandelson relationship is the thread that connects Labour Together’s dark money to Starmer’s leadership, and Starmer’s leadership to the Epstein scandal. The architect of Starmer’s rise was the protege of a man now under criminal investigation for sharing state secrets with a convicted sex offender. The man who hired intelligence firms to spy on journalists was the devoted apprentice of a politician who shared market-sensitive government information with a paedophile’s financial network.

When Josh Simons appears on television talking about how “trust in elected politicians is so completely broken,” one searches for a category beyond irony. The people who engineered a leadership campaign on false promises, who failed to declare three quarters of a million pounds in donations, who hired foreign intelligence firms to spy on British journalists, who manufactured a Russian conspiracy to discredit the free press, and who championed the appointment of Jeffrey Epstein’s friend as Britain’s most important diplomat: these are the people lamenting the collapse of public trust.

The Structural Question 

The defenders of these tactics will argue that every political party plays hardball, that opposition research is a normal feature of democratic politics, and that Labour Together was merely protecting itself from unfair attacks. This argument collapses under the slightest scrutiny.

There is a world of difference between opposition research and hiring a foreign intelligence firm to compile dossiers on journalists’ personal lives, religious backgrounds, and family connections. There is a canyon between defending your record and manufacturing a fake Russian conspiracy to discredit the press. There is an abyss between political spin and attempting to frame an internationally respected anti-corruption journalist as a Kremlin agent.

Normal democratic politics does not involve codenamed operations. Normal democratic politics does not require the identification of journalists’ faith backgrounds as potential “leverage.” Normal democratic politics does not involve briefing fabricated security concerns to GCHQ in an attempt to trigger investigations into reporters. If these are the methods Labour Together employed while in opposition, what will they deploy with the full machinery of the state behind them? That is not a rhetorical question. It is the most urgent political question in Britain today.

Orwell understood this with a clarity that has only sharpened with time. “What is needed,” he wrote, “is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Operation Cannon is bullying and blackmail dressed in the language of national security. It is the deliberate corruption of public discourse by people who cannot win the argument on its merits.

The Electoral Commission must publish in full its investigation into Labour Together’s funding. The Public Relations and Communications Association’s investigation into APCO must be conducted with genuine independence and its findings made public. The Cabinet Office must explain how a minister who commissioned intelligence operations against British journalists can remain in a position of public trust. And Parliament must examine whether the use of dark money groups to fund private investigations into the media requires new legislative safeguards.

The Windows Must Be Opened 

The Labour Party was founded to give voice to those who had none: the workers, the dispossessed, the people whose interests were systematically ignored by the machinery of wealth and privilege. It was not founded to operate like a corporate security department, deploying private intelligence against anyone who threatens the brand.

George Orwell saw this coming. He warned that “the freedom of the Press in Britain was always something of a fake, because in the last resort, money controls opinion.” Labour Together is the proof of that warning made flesh. Dark money funded a fraudulent leadership campaign. When journalists exposed the dark money, more money was spent on silencing the journalists. The circle is vicious and complete.

One of the things that the investigation into Labour Together has demonstrated beyond doubt is that there is one thing the Labour right wing absolutely cannot tolerate: independent media holding them to account. Their response to scrutiny is not transparency but counter-intelligence. Their response to investigation is not explanation but surveillance. Their response to truth is not correction but conspiracy. Jon Cruddas, who helped found Labour Together in 2015 as a vehicle for pluralism within the party, has described what it became as “dark shit.” He has never heard of anything like it. Neither have we.

Sunlight, as Justice Brandeis observed, is the best disinfectant. It is time we opened the windows on Labour Together and let the air back into our democracy. Because if the people who govern us believe they have the right to spy on the press, manufacture conspiracies against journalists, and weaponise the security state against democratic accountability, then we do not live in the democracy they claim to defend. We live in the one Orwell warned us about.

But when all is said and done, we are left not with answers but with questions, and that should trouble us most of all.

Morgan McSweeney did not act alone. He was not a rogue operative pursuing a private vendetta. He was the chief strategist of a political project that involved hundreds of thousands of pounds in undeclared donations, a network of think tanks and censorship outfits, corporate intelligence operations against the press, and the deliberate cultivation of a man now under criminal investigation for sharing state secrets with a convicted sex offender. McSweeney has resigned. Mandelson has resigned. But the project has not resigned. Keir Starmer remains Prime Minister. The tools of censorship and control that McSweeney’s apparatus constructed, from the CCDH to the Online Safety Act to the sweeping new internet powers announced this very week, are not being dismantled. They are being legislated. The infrastructure of narrative control is not retreating; it is being hardened into law.

This darkness runs deep, and this plot is still in the making. Josh Simons still sits in the Cabinet Office. The donors who funded Labour Together’s dark money operation still have access to the levers of power. The APCO dossiers may have been exposed, but the instinct that produced them, the belief that scrutiny is subversion and that journalism is an enemy to be neutralised, remains embedded in the culture of this government. We have seen the spider’s web. We have identified some of the spiders. But the web is intact, and there are players still in the shadows whose names we do not yet know.

Who else received the APCO briefings? Which cabinet ministers saw the smear material before it was circulated? Who authorised the approach to GCHQ? And who, ultimately, decided that the response to true reporting about illegal donations should be the surveillance of journalists rather than the admission of wrongdoing?

Until those questions are answered, the party of the workers remains the party of the wiretappers. They called it Operation Cannon. They should have called it what it was: Operation Cover-Up. And the cover-up, as it always does, continues.