Lord Kempsell said what a lot of people have been thinking.
Posting on X, he laid it out in black and white: “Donors to Labour were awarded around £138 million in govt contracts during Starmer’s first year in office. 25 Labour donors have won a staggering £796.43m in govt contracts since 2001. Labour’s donations scandals is vast. The difference is the media is broadly less interested.”
It’s a devastating post, and it’s devastating precisely because it’s true. Kempsell has done what most of the Westminster press pack seems unwilling to do: follow the money. And the money, unsurprisingly, leads straight back to the Labour Party.
The receipts
According to research published by the Autonomy Institute in October 2025, eight companies that donated a combined £580,000 to the Labour Party were rewarded with government contracts worth just under £138 million, within Starmer’s very first year in Downing Street. That’s not a coincidence dressed up as governance. That’s the going rate.
Look at who benefited. PwC UK handed Labour £236,000 and walked away with £67 million in contracts. Baringa Partners gave £30,000, pocket change by corporate standards, and came away with contracts worth £35 million. Zoom out to the full picture since 2001, and 25 Labour-donating companies have banked £796 million in taxpayer-funded contracts.
Remember the outrage?
Here’s what makes this so galling: this is the same Labour Party that spent years trying to lecture the country about Tory “sleaze” and “chumocracy.” Rachel Reeves, before she discovered what it’s like to sit on the other side of the ledger, thundered that “the British public are understandably angry that so much public money ended up with the friends and donors of the Tory party.” Labour built an entire election narrative on “Change,” remember? On the idea they were pushing that Conservative donors got rich off government contracts while ordinary people picked up the bill.
It turns out “Change” meant changing what the Labour Party cared about if the cheques were big enough.
I’ve personally seen the figures showing companies like Microsoft and PwC, who have now donated to Labour now profiteering from contracts under Labour. They are there in the public domain if anyone cares to look. If there was any sort of gravy train, Labour didn’t dismantle it. It just climbed aboard.
A pattern, not an accident — and Labour knew it
This isn’t a one-off, and it isn’t an accident of timing. It’s a pattern stretching back a quarter of a century, and as Lord Kempsell’s figures show, Labour has been just as embedded in it as anyone. £796 million to 25 donor companies since 2001 is not a rounding error. It is, in Kempsell’s own words, a “vast” scandal, and one that a supposedly forensic, scandal-hunting media has been remarkably incurious about the moment the party in question became Labour rather than the Conservatives.
Come on BBC, come on Guardian, Sky News, Channel 4. Where are you?
Even Labour’s own backbenchers can see it. MP Neil Duncan-Jordan has now tabled an amendment aimed at banning donors from winning public contracts, a tacit admission from within Labour’s own ranks that his party’s government has exactly the problem Kempsell is describing.
When your own MPs are legislating against your own donor practices, “hypocrisy” isn’t a smear. It’s a description.
The bottom line
Labour spent a decade telling voters that donor money buying government contracts was a symptom of Conservative rot. Lord Kempsell’s numbers show it’s actually alive and kicking under this Labour Government.
The only thing that’s shrunk since July 2024 is the media’s appetite for asking Labour the same questions it once asked the Tories.
By Jack Lions
