Greg Hadfield writes:
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.
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.
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