The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy

by Paul Holden

Based on Labour Party files, including some never publicly seen before, this explosive investigation lays bare the intrigues, stratagems, and deceits that helped deliver Sir Keir Starmer to Downing Street.

Paul Holden shows how Starmer has been the frontman for a ruthless, right-wing political project headed by Morgan McSweeney, now chief of staff in Number 10 and arguably the most powerful man in Britain.

McSweeney’s clique often employed dirty tricks to undermine the left-wing Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, fuelling a moral panic over antisemitism and establishing front groups that hobbled prominent independent media outlets in the name of fighting ‘misinformation’.

McSweeney then guided Starmer to the Labour leadership on a platform that Starmer, once in office, almost instantly betrayed. Having conquered the party on false pretences, McSweeney and his allies set about purging opponents, marginalising the membership, and dragging party policy to the right.

These machinations were made possible by financial donations that McSweeney did not disclose—a violation of the law that arguably subverted Britain’s democratic system. But was McSweeney’s unlawful failure to report donations a mistake—or was it deliberate?

This is a sordid tale that includes hacked emails, anonymous smears, dodgy dossiers, cynical stitch-ups, and staggering hypocrisy. It traces the Labour Party’s transformation into a censorial, authoritarian machine, and sounds the alarm about the possible corruption of British politics by dark money.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Current Affairs, History

542 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2024

About the author

Paul Holden is an investigative journalist and author with 15 years experience investigating corruption. He was senior researcher on the book and documentarry Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. His book, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Labour Together and the Crisis of British Democracy was published by OR Books in November 2025.

Reviews

[T.A. Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A somewhat depressing and anger-inducing read.
I honestly didn't think my opinion of Starmer and the current iteration of the Labour Party could drop even lower, but... wow.
Definitely worth a read.

[Caitlin Hanrahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Fraud is a meticulously researched study of Labour’s right-wing filthy campaign to oust members and MPs on the left. It’s a sordid tale with shady characters and dirty tricks that will surely end Keir Starmer’s career just as he and his corrupt crony pals nearly ended Jeremy Corbin’s. Let’s hope.

[Al No · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense and damning. The dead-eyed clique of right-wing soul-vacuums fronting the Nu New Labour project seem to have only one actual policy they aren’t lobbied/paid to believe in: “fuck the peasants and livestock”.

Hopefully, this book’ll give karma a nudge…

#ItWasAStitchUp

[Marsilla Dewi-Baruch · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Malaysian, I wish UK voters can elect a more calibre leader than any politicians they had now and in the past. Tory and Labour politicians are building highway to UK’s destruction, which pretty soon will plunge the country into the deepest abyss. Keir Starmer is one of many leaders that have ruined the country, none is serious about taking the administration at heart. His cheeky political manoeuvre murders the very transparency UK people wish to reinstate, either domestic or notoriously enforced on other nations they terrorise under the guise of exporting democracy.

This book unveils everything needed to understand the multitude factors that contribute to taking down Britain. Paul Holder is the master of journalistic investigation and undoubtedly his work sends the people adversely named in this book tossing and turning every night.

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely thorough, forensic examination of the right wing faction of the Labour Party that a) worked in the shadows to prevent the party from winning General Elections in 2017 and 2019, thereby condemning the country to incompetent, venal, right wing governments under four Tory Prime Ministers and a hard Brexit, b) worked in secret to build a leadership campaign for Keir Starmer months before the 2019 election, sourcing donations from Israel supporting plutocrats that were illegally undeclared under British electoral law, and by presenting Starmer as a left wing inheritor of the wildly popular Corbyn programme, but with added professionalism, only to pivot after the election to becoming the most right wing Labour Party in history, and c) got elected to national government in a 'Loveless Landslide' by shadowing the Tories on all their policies, lying just enough to the Labour base and trade unions about their intentions to garner enough support, and lie back and wait for the Tory vote share to be consumed by Reform.

This book was buried under media Omerta after being published last October, receiving no notice whatsoever from The Guardian or the BBC. However it's all spilling out into the open now as Peter Mandelson has resigned in disgrace after his well known relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has finally become seen as beyond the pale, and subsequently Morgan McSweeney has been forced to resign to try to save Starmer.

All of the information in this book was easily available to the media if they cared to investigate at all, but they all colluded in this in order to destroy the Corbyn project and any chance of Socialism in this country, and then colluded to get the Tories out of power after too many years of incompetence and corruption. And now it looks likely that the players in this book have created the conditions to hand over the reigns of power to a Neofascist Government. Once again, showing that Liberals would rather we have Fascism than Socialism.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

unmasking the British Labour Party in detail

Living abroad in Europe, some might ask if only the current leader represents deep dishonesty and cynical politics or is the secretive party machine infected with delusions of past power and greed?
Sadly, the UK has moved further down since the publication date, with a second damaging economic budget to bring the UK closer to the fall of France and the collapse of German car manufacturing.
New update is urgently needed…

[Ben Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times this went HEAVY on the dates and names, etc, which of course is what is needed but also sometimes made it feel like a bit of a beast to get through. That being said, excellent journalism highlighting a number of issues that you really would struggle to find in any mainstream media from the bbc to the guardian. This book really outlines the sinister plans of Starmer to wrestle the Labour Party out of the hands of the left and firmly into the right. A really interesting exploration of the current political landscape.

[Phil Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the rifts within the elites widen a little – a former Prince thrown to the wolves, Trump losing control of a Supreme Court he mostly appointed, and even with only about 2% of the Epstein files released swathes of the corporate hierarchies are compromised – there has been very little accountability in the courts, and very little detail on how the abuses, self-enrichment, cover-up and entitlement we can all now see actually operates. ‘The Fraud’ is a stand-out exception to that.
In forensic detail, Paul Holden has examined one tiny operation of the elites, at work in the UK’s Labour Party (though often serving transnational interests), which has had a profound and anti-democratic effect on the UK’s politics and fuelled dangerous events around the world. Holden does this by exposing the covert operations of a small group of media manipulators and bureaucratic insiders.
But first; what was the narrative of all this as presented to (and by) almost everyone else. It begins with the surprise 2015 election to leader of the Labour Party, by its members, of the left wing MP Jeremy Corbyn. Who, despite the universal hostility of all mainstream media (and, it seems, internal sabotage) won 40% of the popular vote in the 2019 General Election; compared with Keir Starmer’s less than 34% in 2024. In 2019, still under Corbyn (the mainstream media hostility continuing, the internal sabotage intensified, ravaged by Brexit uncertainty), Labour’s vote slips to 32%. In the ensuing leadership election, Kier Starmer (now UK Pime Minister) stands on a left-wing platform of nationalisation and other radical policies, either mirroring or to the left of the Corbynite candidate; he wins and immediately backtracks on every promise made to his membership, until in 2024 he leads the Labour Party and then, after victory, the government (thanks to Reform UK splitting the right wing vote) with policies largely borrowed from the Conservative Party but under the banner of “Change”.
The exposure of Labour’s duplicity in office from 2024 to now, the revelation that Starmer had accepted ‘freebies’ from powerful individuals (destroying the perceived difference between him and the openly corrupt Tories), and the exposure of the ongoing links of Starmer-supporting Labour fixer and Starmer-appointed Ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, to paedophile and fixer to the elites Jeffery Epstein, reduced the Government to never before plumbed depths of unpopularity.
But what really happened?
‘The Fraud’ tell us.
In the wake of Corbyn’s excellent showing in the 2017 General Election (much to the horror of Labour party right wingers), a Mandelson protégé called Morgan McSweeney and the Labour MP Steve Reed took over a small internal party pressure group called Labour Together. Even within the tiny Labour Together not everyone seems to have known what Reed and McSweeney were up to. Among those who were part of the organisation were individuals now in high office; including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Health Secretary and the Lord High Chancellor (Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood). Presenting itself as a promoter of party unity, the inner group within Labour Together did everything it could to sabotage Corbyn in particular, and the Labour Party in general, with a view to imposing its own candidate in the wake of Corbyn’s failure (which they were a part in engineering). Their most effective campaigns were to magnify the ‘antisemitism crisis’ of 2018 onwards – they “worked closely with national media to place arguably alarmist stories that painted the Corbyn project as irredeemably tainted with antisemitism” – and setting up an ‘astroturf campaign’ (posing as grassroots activists) called Stop Funding Fake News which was used to “eviscerate” (Labour Together’s own word) left-wing online media outlets including The Canary by pressurising advertisers to withdraw advertising. All the time they were working with anti-Corbyn bureaucrats in the Labour Party headquarters to undermine Corbyn and the Labour Party. The clearest example of this is the ‘Ergon House’ scheme whereby the bureaucrats diverted party funds away from left wing candidates in marginal seats during the 2017 General Election to support their own (most unthreatened) factional allies (begging the question as to whether with those funds properly allocated Labour might actually have won in 2017).
All this conniving was generously funded, between 2017 and 2020 by “a hedge fund manager with interests in private healthcare” to the tune of “£585,992 in cash and non-cash donations”, while another £175,500 during the same time came from “a wealthy entrepreneur with a long history of funding figures on the Labour right” and pro-Israel lobbying. A lot of this money was spent on extensive polling of Labour Party members, so that when Starmer came to stand for the Labour leadership he knew exactly what to say, even though he seems to have meant very little of it.
In 2023, with Starmer safely in post as leader, Steve Read described how “in 2017, Labour together developed a strategy for defeating the Hard Left”. As Paul Holden admits, the details of this “strategy” remain secret, but in evident practice it meant that the insiders at Labour together inserted themselves into the ‘antisemitism crisis’, submitting highly questionable complaints about left wing party members, many of them non-Zionist Jews with honourable records in anti-racist campaigning. The term “strategy” is important here, even if we do not have the details, for Labour Together (considering itself at war with an enemy, not in a policy dispute with fellow comrades) deployed with some aplomb key elements of military strategy. Firstly, they attacked and undermined Corbyn and the left where they were strongest (anti-racism), noticing a “culminating point” in which left-wingers’ anti-racist activity had peaked, worn down by defeats (particularly in the US, but also by Tory anti-migrant rhetoric that was fuelling the rise of UKIP, Brexit and the Brexit Party, and eventually Reform UK). The attacks were ruthless and unprincipled; a Labour Together-adjacent activist in Labour Against Antisemitism created a fake persona with a ‘Jewish-sounding’ name (“David Gordstein”) to make complaints about various left-wing figures, including Miriam Margolyes. Although many of these complaints turned out to be vexatious if not absurd, the sheer volume created the impression of a very serious problem in Labour (when, in reality, the problem is far greater in parties of the right, and probably in society in general) and this hugely demoralised, if not intimidated, Labour activists.
Two very sinister elements exacerbate all this underhand and wholly undemocratic dealing: firstly, Labour Together seems to have knowingly broken the law by failing to declare its funding to the Electoral Commission (despite being told by an officer of the Commission that it should do so); and, secondly, in order to keep its operations secret it acted to defund and destroy alternative news outlets. Given that Labour Together was always intended as a conduit to government, law-breaking and the subversion of independent media are very sinister precedents to set yourself.
So, everything worked for Labour Together: Corbyn resigned after the 2019 defeat. Starmer stood on the Labour Together confected platform, won, and then reversed all his policies, scraped into government and its leader, Morgan McSweeney became chief of staff in Number 10 Downing Street, and arguably the most powerful unelected official in the UK. Meanwhile, on the world stage, Israel responded to the cowardly slaughter of citizens on October 7th 2023 by Hamas with genocidal assaults on the Palestinian civilian population, leaving 75,000 dead, 80% of whom were civilians, with over 21,000 children killed, leaving barely a wall standing in Gaza City. The Labour Government supported and continued to arm the Israeli state. In domestic politics, anything that might have reduced the powers of private business has been ignored, nationalisation has been dropped, benefits increases shelved (then reinstated after internal revolts by Labour MPs).
All this has come to a shuddering halt in the last week, with the revelation that Labour Prime Minister Kier Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the US knowing of Mandelson’s ongoing links with Jeffrey Epstein (made plain to the world through the release of the Epstein files). In the wake of this, as a protégé of Mandelson’s Morgan McSweeney has been forced to resign (although other co-conspirators remain in place), and although the contents of ‘The Fraud’ were available to everybody to read last year, they are finally finding their way extensively onto alternative media and in dribs and drabs even into mainstream discourse.
So, what was the ‘fraud’? Mandelson is probably the hinge point for understanding the machinations, because in 2017 he was working (as he himself said) ‘everyday to bring down the Corbyn leadership’. As such he was a communication point between members of the global elite (CEOs, media moguls, lobbyists, etc.) and the saboteurs inside the Labour Party, promoting Morgan McSweeney and his project. Most of such interaction requires little in the way of ‘conspiracy’ at the top end; nothing more organised than a word here, a word there. The shared interests – enormous personal enrichment, democracy only so far as it serves private and business interests, unaccountability in pursuit of personal gratification through cruelty against less powerful others, a worldview with snobbery at one end and eugenics at the other – are commonly understood among the elite. Only the locally-based bad actors like Morgan McSweeney require organisations; and even he needed only three or four very small ones, because much bigger organisations – of mainstream media, advertisers connected to corporations, lobbying interests – were already predisposed to be (mis)led by a careful placed poke here and there.
What Paul Holden provides here is a hyper-detailed, extremely well-sourced and evidenced, account of a very small, but influential local office of the global elite, operating in the UK. This is very unusual, for these activities almost always remain secret, leaving behind only a lurking suspicion; so, perhaps it is Paul Holden’s background in exposing ‘state capture’ in South Africa (the looting of the South African state by the Gupta family facilitated by the government of Jacob Zuma “with the eager assistance of some of the world’s biggest multinational companies”) that has driven him to expose what is usually kept carefully hidden in the UK and elsewhere. Which is the detailed graft of deceivers working for profiteers and saboteurs of democracy promoting the interests of elites that are characterised by their entitlement, lack of accountability, grifting, hollowing out of institutions, and hollowing out of psyches (ours through banal media, and theirs in the likes of Musk, Thiel and Bezos wanting to upload consciousness to computers).
And what of Keir Starmer? Did he know of any of this, or was he always in that connected/un-noticing mode that preserves the secrecy and unaccountability of elites? His tone-deaf responses to events like the killing of George Floyd, the pulling down of the slave trader’s statue in Bristol and Israel’s genocide – not to speak of his barely believable taking of ‘freebies’ while contesting an election on the basis of the corruption of the Tories – indicates a ‘hollow man’, who now everyone ‘sees through’. Unfortunately, what most people will see, within the shell, is emptiness; which serves only as another kind of smokescreen for detailed machinations, sometimes closely co-ordinated, sometimes just a nod and a wink and an invitation to a private island. ‘The Fraud’ blows that cover with a huge range of detail; the individuals may be hollow, but they share in a machine with working parts, and, for once, Paul Holden has put a small part of them on display.

[Emma Laureano · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Frankie Eccles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Damn! Timely af lol

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A meticulous examination of the Labour right, drawing on leaked emails from inside the Starmer project and insider testimony. It reveals that undeclared funds were used by Labour Together to target left-wing media and Labour members, that right-wingers sabotaged Labour’s 2019 election campaign by withholding funds that might have swung marginal seats, and that pro-Israel pressure groups worked with the Labour right to deliberately conflate pro-Palestine activism with anti-Semitism.

Holden contrasts Labour’s anti-Semitism scandal with a thorough exposure of the party’s anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism (supported by the ignored Forde Report). Why does one racism scandal end a leader’s tenure, while another is barely reported? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the issue was never racism, but the need to remove a popular left-wing leader. But don’t take my word for it, read the book and weigh the evidence yourself.

[Lauren Carruthers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cannot understand why there is so little noise being made about this book. Meticulously researched, it shows clearly the corruption running through the current government. McSweeney has since resigned from over the Mandelson scandal (not the subject of this book), but that sleekit wee git should be in jail with Starmer not far behind him for the foundational damage they have wreaked on the labour party and the public trust.

Genuinely didn't expect a book to leave me more full of contempt for a labour government than I had for Truss or Johnson's excuses for governments.....but here we are.

[Pete Davies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forensic account of the long con Starmer, McSweeney and their allies perpetrated first on Labour Party members and second on all the rest of us. We all knew in our gut what was happening with the factional weaponisation of antisemitism under Corbyn, followed by the purging of the Labour left and the rest. But here it all is, meticulously laid out and evidenced throughout. Powerful stuff, and .... absolutely infuriating. It'll take me a while to calm down after reading this!

[Colin Chambers · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant analysis of the fraudulent Starmer Project. Reads like a thriller at times!

[Sandra Clennell · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG this is an amazing and saddening book. Well done Paul for some brilliant journalism

[Brian Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a big Holden fan, yet, a compelling well structured argument that has gone to prove beyond a doubt that there is a lot of questions to answer for.

[Des · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exposes the slimy bastards on the right wing of the former Labour Party for what they are.

[Cameron Slater · Rating 4 out of 5]

kind of cool to see that all the schizo posting i was reading on twitter for the last 5 years turned out to be true