Labour is facing another serious integrity crisis after the Conservatives released leaked legal correspondence which they claim raises serious questions about almost three quarters of a million pounds in undeclared donations linked to Keir Starmer’s rise to the leadership.
The email, sent on 3 February 2021 by solicitor Gerald Shamash to Morgan McSweeney, then a director of Labour Together, suggests the organisation failed to declare £739,492 to the Electoral Commission. According to the Conservatives, those funds bankrolled the campaign that propelled Starmer into the Labour leadership, yet were kept out of public view.
In the leaked emails, Shamash admitted: “The amounts of the late reported donations is £739,492 and there are in my view, no easy way to explain how LT finds itself in this situation.” His advice was that Labour Together should seek a quiet deal with the regulator to “minimise publicity” and, if pressed, present the matter as “admin error.”
The leaked correspondence makes clear that McSweeney himself had spoken to the Electoral Commission in early 2018 and walked away with the impression that Labour Together no longer needed to report donations. Shamash conceded this was flatly wrong: “The legislation is clear that notwithstanding LT should have reported.” In other words, Labour failed to meet its legal obligations, and Starmer’s campaign benefited.
The email also raises highly uncomfortable questions:
- Why did McSweeney report a £12,500 donation from businessman Sir Trevor Chinn in August 2018, while hundreds of thousands of pounds in other donations went undeclared?
- Why did Labour Together never appoint a legally required “responsible person” to oversee reporting, despite being told to do so since 2015?
- Why were senior Labour MPs including Steve Reed and Shabana Mahmood aware of donor transparency issues as early as 2018–2019, yet failed to act?
Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake said the scandal showed Starmer’s government had misled both regulators and the public. “It shows how authorities may have been misled over hundreds of thousands of pounds of donations used to install Starmer as Labour leader. We believe there is a strong public interest in revealing the full truth to the public about possible criminal wrongdoing. The Prime Minister was elected on a pledge to restore honesty and integrity in politics, but time and again he has deceived the public and put his party before our national interest,” he said.
Hollinrake accused Starmer of sweeping wrongdoing under the rug: “We will not let the Prime Minister cover this up like he did with the Mandelson-Epstein files. ‘Nothing-to-see-here’ Keir may be too weak to fire a Chief of Staff who tells him what to think, but Conservatives believe the public deserves the truth.”
A former Conservative MP told the Post: “Far from cleaning up politics, the leaked email shows Labour Together actively sought ways to dodge transparency rules, conceal the scale of its donations, and craft a press strategy to limit exposure.
“At the heart of the scandal is the undeniable fact that Starmer’s leadership campaign was sustained by vast undeclared sums. His chief of staff, who was then charged with running Downing Street, was directly involved in conversations with the Electoral Commission and central to decisions not to disclose funds. According to the correspondance, senior Labour figures knew what was happening, and rather than come clean, chose to keep the public in the dark.”
The Conservatives have published the correspondence in full, urging people to “read it for yourself.” The leaked email makes clear this was no accident, but a deliberate failure to declare nearly three quarters of a million pounds, money that helped deliver Keir Starmer the leadership of the Labour Party.
The MP continued: “This is not just a technical breach of reporting rules. It goes to the core of whether the Prime Minister can be trusted. He promised integrity. Instead, his inner circle is now implicated in one of the most serious political cover-ups in recent memory.”
Labour has yet to provide a convincing explanation. The silence from Starmer’s office only fuels the sense of a party desperate to hide the truth.
Find out more at: https://www.whatlaboursaid.com/the-mcsweeney-files
READ THE LEAKED EMAIL HERE:
