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

by Paul Holden

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

Paul Holden shows how Keir 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, British Literature, Current Affairs, History

589 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 18, 2025

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]

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.

[Darran Mclaughlin]

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.

[Caitlin Hanrahan]

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]

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

[Richard Riddick]

Holden documents a litany of lies and dirty tricks by the now prime minister and his button men. Nobody has reviewed Holden in the legacy media — nor has anyone attempted to sue him for libel.

[Marsilla Dewi-Baruch]

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.

[Judith Johnson]

This book is of the greatest importance to every person living in the UK – I very highly recommend everyone who cares about the state of our democracy to read it. The fact that it has not been reviewed by any of the main newspapers or magazines since its publication is truly shocking, and surely a clear indication that there is a tacit agreement to prevent the wider reading public from even knowing of its existence.

Even when I was a child, coming from a not particularly politically aware family, I recall we had excellent current affairs lessons at my primary and secondary schools, and I remember seeing Labour politicians like Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle on the telly and thinking of them as essentially decent people who were working for the wellbeing of us all.

As a young adult I spotted Dennis Healey coming down the pavement towards me on Charing Cross Road, and greeted him with a pleased and surprised “Hallo!” at which point he gave me a big warm smile and returned the greeting. I was thrilled to have seen one of the Labour greats in the flesh.

When Tony Bliar (sic) led the UK into war on Iraq I stopped voting Labour until Jeremy Corbyn became leader many years later, at which point I joined the Labour Party, and left it when Starmer took over after Corbyn’s chances of winning the next election had been destroyed. At the time, I was unaware of the machinations going on behind the scenes at Labour HQ to undermine Corbyn, but this book has given me all the gory details. I have felt huge anger and great sadness at reading it, at the hollowing out of a great British movement, which so many people of good faith (see Keir Hardie, Aneurin Bevan, Clement Atlee, Margaret Bondfield, union members, hard working members at the grassroots etc etc) had made a reality.

I am fairly certain that the scurvy crew who are featured in this book are still firmly in place, notwithstanding the election of Andy Burnham. Paul Holden posted the following this week, re the forthcoming by-election on October 8th 2026 in Starmer’s former constituency, regarding the presence of Steve Reed:

“What on earth is Sagal Abdi-Wali doing inviting this man to campaign with her? ….
… Reed was an absolute central character in the Morgan McSweeney/Labour Together war on democracy that produced Starmer. He is implicated in so much wrongdoing I don't even know where to start.
Reed is a key character in The Fraud. He was a director of Labour Together from 2016 to 2022. During this period, Labour Together broke the law by failing to report donations as required by law.
They used this money to, among other things, purposefully undermine the electoral prospects of the Labour Party. They wanted to give the Tories five more years of corruption and austerity so that they could take over the Labour Party they believed belong to their tiny, regressive faction. The strategy document setting this out was literally printed out in Steve Reed's office and handed to insiders.
I exposed the dodgy money when I took documents to the Sunday Times, and then what they did with it in the Fraud. In response, Labour Together hired a reputation management firm called APCO Worldwide to investigate me and my colleagues.
They ended up producing a disgusting dossier filled with outright lies and falsehoods about me, my family, my colleague Andrew Feinstein, and other journalists like Gabriel Pogrund at the Times, who I worked with on the story. They found my home address, in Camden where Abdi-Wali is standing, and found out the name of my partner, and then tried to dig up dirt on her family. They did this while my partner was pregnant.
Labour Together used this dossier to report me to the security services and then handed its despicable content to journalists. We now know that dossier was given to Morgan McSweeney and distributed at the very highest levels of the Labour Party and was even sent to the Cabinet Office. I had to threaten to sue the Guardian stuff defamation to stop them printing stories based on that less that would have destroyed my reputation and livelihood.
Almost exactly a year ago, Reed appeared at an event at Labour conference. The Fraud had not been published. Reed attacked me and the book, saying all sorts of things about my family, which were private. Was Reed quoting from this dossier? Maybe. We also know, for certain, that the Labour Party somehow got a PDF copy of my book as it was sent to print. How? I have no idea. Only a tiny number of people had access to it.
Why were they so scared of the book? Because it repeatedly laid bare the misconduct of Reed and his friends.”

[John Monro]

This review will be short, if you need more detail, others have provided some truly excellent summaries.

The book is meticulously detailed, to a fault, really, but Paul will need to cover his back in the way he forensically dissects the appalling cynical and probably illegal shenanigans of Morgan McSweeney (Mandelson protegé, need I say more?), ,his side kicks and Keir Starmer himself. Having been following Paul and many others in the "alternative media" for some years, not much in the book actually surprises me, but the mounting totality of the sheer nastiness of these people is dismaying. I have never liked Keir, I was a GP for nigh on fifty years and have developed a reasonable judge of character and sensitive nostrils for smelling deceit, and there was always some rancid about this man, and that's ever since he was propelled into prominence on taking over the leadership of the Labour party. Time has only gone on to prove my dislike, which is visceral.

The simple fact is that Britain seems to be in a political, social and economic death spiral of corruption, opportunism, and political machination, such that almost no-one any longer can believe a word of anything a politician says, or can be convinced that our political masters are even on "our side" This is a recipe for serious social unrest and the advance of totalitarianism.

When historians view the wreck of the nation from some future place, they will use Paul Hogan's book as one of the most important resources as to understanding what exactly went wrong. (Though as an aside, it all started to "go wrong" with Mrs Thatcher and her "neoliberal" revolution, now coming to its predictable chaotic and disastrous end -it's the desperate attempt to mount an impossible defence of this creed that is the direct cause of so much of what is described here)

Anyway, I suppose I still have to thank you Paul for your very depressing book.

[Simon]

The abject irony of Keir Starmer referring to anyone, let alone Jeremy Corbyn, as "morally bankrupt" in his resignation speech does not go unnoticed.

This four-year investigation based on leaked emails by Paul Holden is compelling.

This empirical investigation has me reeling (this only scratches the surface of the book's depth and breadth):
- Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together's fraudulent endeavours (failing to disclose £500k secret donations for factional agenda to depose Corbyn) - electoral law violations, dark money operations.
- Astroturfing with LAAS (Labour Against Antisemitism), SFFN (Stop Funding Fake News) and CCDH (Centre For Countering Digital Hate).
- LAAS actively targeted left-wing Jews in the Labour party to get them expelled.
- Steve Reed's role in purging Progressives from the Labour party, particularly non-Zionist Jews.
- Euan Philipps catfishing as 'David Gornstein' - non-Jewish figure in LAAS posing as a Jew making thousands of manufactured complaints against Labour under Corbyn.
- Starmer's legacy as DPP for the CPS on Julian Assange - directly prevented early resolution.
- Starmer's use of 'night courts' for 11-18 year olds during the Tottenham Riots.
- Starmer's notorious 'Ten Pledges' deception, with the tactic of 'shadowing' before becoming a turncoat.
- The targeted vilification of non-Zionist left-wing Jews (Jonathan Rosenhead, Jo Bird, Riva Joffe, Miriam Margoyles, David Graeber, Norman Finkelstein, Emily Apple).
- The Ergon House Scheme - attempts to sabotage 2017 and 2019 Labour general elections.
- The media whitewash to pave the way for Starmer - law of omerta.
- The Guardian acting like Starmer's unofficial rebuttal unit under Pippa Crerar.
- Toxic internal culture filled with misogyny, racism and a culture of bullying.
- McSweeney's quest to eviscerate independent media, such as The Canary, through astroturf campaigns.
- The Forde Inquiry revealed how anti-Corbynites created a hierarchy of racism - a report suppressed by Starmer and Labour Together - nearly £1 million spent trying to find who leaked the 'Leaked Report'.
- Karie Murphy's e-mails were hacked
- McSweeney's fingerprints were all over the EHRC investigation - conflict of interest
- the Panorama documentary suggested Corbyn committed 'political interference' - The Forde Inquiry analysed the Corbyn allies 'Leaked Report' and concluded that the Panorama documentary was 'entirely misleading'
- The EHRC gave a damning indictment of Corbyn on anti-Semitism, but when the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) submitted similar findings to the EHRC report, but on Islamophobia, the EHRC refused to open an investigation - the board of commissioners is coincidentally a Tory appointee.
- Ironically, the EHRC has been accused of discrimination itself - Kathrecha sued the organisation for unfair dismissal and discrimination - stated: "[The EHRC] is being used as a political weapon in a cultural race war"
- Henderson, who completed the EHRC ruling, had ironically liked anti-Semitic tweets about Soros and Hungary, and had liked tweets critical of Corbyn.
- Collusion between Starmer's Labour faction and EHRC was realised with the EHRC's refusal to engage with the Leaked Report's findings - factional and partisan bias (anti-Left/pro-Right) of EHRC.
- Labour Together's efforts to neutralise the independent journalism of Henry Dyer, Matt Taibbi, and John McAvoy.
- Josh Simons' attempting to frame Holden and fellow journalists as national security threats as a "coordinated, pro-Kremlin propaganda network".
- EHRC accused Corbyn of 'political interference', but that 'interference' was actually in support of prioritising the disciplinary process rather than blocking or ignoring it.
- Keir Starmer expelled Ken Loach, and four members of Jewish Voice For Labour based on a purge list created by Steve Reed MP.
- Simply saying Corbyn was not anti-Semitic, was deemed anti-Semitic "for the crime of denialism".
- Proscribing groups that Starmer disagreed with, became the modus operandi to silence criticism, regardless of merit.
- Starmer immediately broke his promise to stop 'political interference' on party disciplinary procedures - he committed exactly what Corbyn was accused of, except his intentions were malicious.
- Labour Together and right-wing Labour MPs celebrated the collapse of party membership as a result of Corbyn's expulsion.
- Starmer failed to declare £50k donation from Israel lobbyists until a month after the election.
- Series of increasingly authoritarian manoeuvres that were factional, particularly against left-wing Jewish members, and BAME MPs such as Nadia Whittome.
- Dangerous legislation such as Spy Cops Bill - overwhelming targeted left-wing, anti-racist and climate justice groups.
- Alienation of Muslim Labour members (59% stated they did not feel well represented, 29% directly experiencing Islamophobia in the Labour party).
- The Gilles Dossier in Newham led to the suspension of two CLPs (conspiracy theory that left-wingers and Muslims planned a coup) without due diligence (not sent to the ICO or EHRC) - whilst a request for an immediate 'Independent Inquiry' into Islamophobia was not taken seriously.
- Gilles illegally accessed personal details of so-called Core Group members through membership details - was not a CLP officer (tracked license plates, childrens' schools, tracked families moving house, in-person surveillance of Muslims and ethnic profiling of members).
- False allegations of electoral fraud waged in Newham for factional purposes.
- Gathering any evidence of wrongdoing against any councillors sympathetic to Corbyn to suspend or expel them.
- NEC blocking Corbyn as a candidate - anti-democratic party implications.
- Soft-ball treatment on Sir Trevor Phillip's Islamophobia, whilst those that leaked his discrimination were expelled from the party (suggesting a hierarchy of racism within Labour).
- Starmer ended the party's 'one member, one vote' model for choosing the leadership, choosing to give greater power to the PLP - Starmer essentially rigged parliamentary selections with a shifting of the rules - notices of investigation and suspension of left-wing delegates would be wielded.
- The Forde Report found evidence of extraordinary factionalism within Labour party democracy (particularly, Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together) - stated that non-Zionist Jews were due fair treatment and inclusion.
- Esteemed journalist, Gary Younge, lambasted Labour for failing to take the Forde Report, Al Jazeera's The Labour Files, and Black voices of authority seriously.
- Labour Together pitched Rachel Reeves' 'securonomics' policies (austerity-lite) - low-tax, pro-market, public service cuts.
- Red Shift needed to win four segments: Activist Left, Patriotic Left, Centrist Liberals, Disillusioned Suburbans.
- openDemocracy reported extensively on the presence of lobbyists within newly selected Labour Together approved cohorts of Labour MPs.
- Starmer, on a Sky News interview on October 11 2023, was asked whether "cutting off power, cutting off water" was appropriate, Starmer responded: "Well, I do think Israel has that right." - Starmer openly endorsed Israel's war crime of collective punishment.
- Red Shift's confident prediction that the party could ignore the Activist Left without consequence.
- Josh Simons (Labour Together) hiring private investigators (APCO Worldwide) for £30-40k to track the writer of this book, Paul Holden and other investigative journalists, and put their colleagues and family under surveillance.
- Feinstein only had 6 weeks to launch a campaign against Starmer in Holborn & St Pancras but still, Starmer lost more than 22,000 votes from his 2017 victory.
- Controversies of government: cutting the Winter Fuel Allowance, marginalisation of left-wing BAME candidates, party's readmission of Islamophobic Trevor Phillips, the McSweeney/Mandelson scandal, the shameless breaking of Ten Pledges, Labour's embrace of billionaires, attempting to be more right-wing on immigration than the Conservatives, interviewing with The Sun, marginalising Muslim and left-wing Jewish voters,

Takeaways:
- Keir Starmer was the frontman for a factional, ruthless right-wing project masquerading as a coalition between the party's Left and Right.
- Morgan McSweeney's vendetta against Corbyn was enacted by all means necessary, using corrupt means 'for the greater good'.
- This book genuinely hollowed out Starmer's credibility further (on top of the Mandelson/Epstein scandal, the Reform landslide in mid-terms, losses in byelections to Green Party, inflation, pensioner poverty).
- Labour Together essentially controlled the party machinery under Starmer, even to the point of controlling Starmer.
- "A near decade long campaign of misdirection, political subterfuge, outright lying, and anti-democratic stitch-ups."

[Ben Hunt]

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.

[Andrew]

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…

[John Kelly]

For those of us who were in the party during this period & thought that an entryist group were taking (& have now taken) over the party, but couldn't put all the pieces together, this book provides the proof.

[Jo Wilkinson]

5* no notes. We need more forensic journalists like Holden who are willing to pore over the details and lay them out clearly for people to read. No notes.

[Phil Smith]

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]

4.5

[Frankie Eccles]

Damn! Timely af lol

[Fred Robinson]

I was really skeptical going into this book as thought it would be too biased to a left wing perspective, which could make it quite a boring read. I was proved completely wrong. It obviously is of a left view but what it unveils is truly shocking.

The way it barely talks about Starmer specifically as a character and focuses on McSweeney is very telling of his leadership. This has cemented my view that Starmer is the passenger rather than the driver. However, he should be criticised for who he places around him and the power he allows them to wield.

Would definitely recommend to anyone interested in understanding what Starmerism really is.

[Lauren Carruthers]

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.

[Mike Cross]

fascinating read, skulduggery at its best

An interesting tale of what people will do to gain power.

The book repeats the same points over and over again, it may well be necessary to explain the interrelated web of events, but it got a little repetitive.

[Lord Bathcanoe of Snark]

Shocking? Not really. It's only what you expect from the likes of these self serving scrotes.
In a way it gives hope to everyone. It means that even someone who has a fleeting acquaintance with the truth and the personality and ethics of a dung beetle can rise to the highest political position in the land.

[madi]

Important read. Thoroughly researched and examined. The book is weighty, and frustrating to read as a Brit, but it needs to be read.

[Alistair Robinson]

This is a, to coin a word, forensic examination of the Starmer project and the utter hypocrisy and well lies at the heart of Labour. The party has always been prone to factional infighting and dodgy goings on, in this case the author details some actually really unpleasant events and actions all while Labour see themselves as good people and on the side of the angels. All the links are laid bare, McSweeney, Mandleson, how the left were erased from the party and the legacy of Corbyn exercised. On the latter point I don`t quite agree with the authors conclusions, the party did have a problem with anti semitism, Corbyn and his cohort having a strange blind spot to this in the hierarchy of racism.

What is clear is that all the contradictions and inadequacy of Starmer as a leader were plain to see, p144 while at the CPS he wanted to be briefed about high profile cases (quite rightly) , then as with disciplinary cases, p267, and with the Mandelson appointment. or the prosecution of journalists when things blew up it was that no one told him, he didn`t ask and it was all someone elses fault. Then p291 "as ever Starmer could not resist a macho brag about his tough decisions in media a[ppearances , but immediately wilted when people expressed their anger at him personally".

The author meticulously follows the disciplinary cases, the hacks, the take over of local constituencies, the removal of candidates, the weaponization of anti semitism and just the overall baseness at the heart of Labour. What is sad as you read this book is you wonder what the point of it all is, power possibily or it seems the exercise of it but to no overall purpose, certainly no moral compass is evident and Starmer leaves office 2 years after the 2024 election victory humiliated and just about if not the most unpopular PM in history and Labours civil wars continue.

Slightly unusually the foot notes, index and other notes are on a website, I haven`t seen this done before and I actually quite liked it, it makes it easier to maintain the flow of the text while reading and the site is clear, there are cons to this approach as well but in this case it works.

Overall this is a must read for anyone interested in politics.

[Shane]

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.

[Nigel Stock]

This brilliant book offers independently verified facts and public record based evidence that:

Keir Starmer is a congenital liar.
That Morgan McSweeney was a fanatical factionalist who acyed against any Labour member with views to the left of Labour's Right Wing funded by secret financial donations from wealthy individuals
The events around Philip Mandelson and his association with Epstein were entirely predictable

The author has a strong record as a Journalist who has written articles for The Guardian and other newspapers and he draws on publicly available records and responses to Freedom of Information requests.
able records and responses to Freedom of Information requests.

Maybe one for the already committed. The last year or so has been a good one for reading books, a terrible one for maintianing my Good Reads. To catch up this is one in a series of reviews of 100 words or less.

[Alan Downes]

It's indisputable that the Labour party we have today is far more right wing than it was under Jeremy Corbyn's stewardship. This is the story of the unsavoury way it was engineered, and by whom. The maliciousness, cruelty and dishonesty behind the Starmer project is meticulously researched, evidenced and documented in this truly excellent book. It's good to be reminded of what Sir Kier told us during both of his election campaigns, to become Labour leader and to become PM, and how far he's strayed from those promises, including the wealth of 'gifts' he received from companies whose business could be described as unsavoury or corrupt.

It's hard, after reading the whole book, not to come to the conclusion that what we ended up with are Temu Tories.

I only hope the Burnham story isn't as damning. But after reading how misled we all were about Starmer, I wouldn't be surprised.

An easy 5 stars.

[Pete Davies]

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!

[Ian Pierce-Hayes]

The factionalism in the Labour Party is pretty squalid. That and the fact that Jeremy Corbyn never stood a chance as leader of the opposition because of the attempts (successful) to undermine his leadership is shocking. And it puts to bed the idea that Corbyn was antisemitic. MacSweeney and co are shameless.

[Mickey Dubs]

Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney were pulling all kinds of Machiavellian moves to crush their enemies and win power, but their sheer unpopularity meant they were unable to keep it once they had it. In the end, the one-thousand year ᛋᛋtarmereich lasted just a little over two years.

Keir Starmer has played a blinder here. Meep meep.

[George Walker]

Incredibly detailed, important, but dense chronicling of how Starmerism rose and failed so quickly and with such duplicitousness. It falls down where the author relitigates factional battles and the bluntness of his prose makes it all too obvious where he sits on them, before he's explained why; which in my mind, is less journalistic and more opinion.

[Tessa Fergusson]

3.5 Stars
Extremely well researched. So much information I didn't know & the public should know but doesn't. However, big parts of the book is boring af (to someone very interested in politics). If we want more people to care it has to be a fascinating & compelling read.