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Labour has clarified that Morgan McSweeney’s salary was paid by Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign in 2020, after fresh attacks from the Conservatives on Wednesday.
The Tories have called for a parliamentary investigation into whether Starmer failed to declare support – including staffing costs – from the campaign group Labour Together for his leadership campaign.
Between 2017 and 2020 McSweeney was director of Labour Together, which began as a vehicle to prevent the Labour party from splitting under Jeremy Corbyn. After Corbyn’s resignation in January 2020, McSweeney ran Starmer’s campaign to become Labour leader.
Companies House records state that McSweeney remained director of Labour Together until April 2020, when Starmer won the leadership contest. At that point McSweeney became a senior aide to Starmer, first in opposition and then in government.
Kevin Hollinrake, chair of the Conservative party, said McSweeney’s role in Starmer’s campaign should have been declared as a donation from Labour Together in the parliamentary register and called for an investigation.
“Donations or support in kind to MPs from members’ associations must be declared – yet ‘nothing to see here Keir’ completely failed to do so,” Hollinrake said.
But the Labour party said that McSweeney’s salary was paid by Starmer’s campaign for the duration that he worked for it, and therefore his participation did not need to be declared as a donation.
A Labour source said: “Morgan’s salary was paid for by Keir’s leadership campaign for the duration of the campaign, not Labour Together. Neither Keir nor his leadership campaign accepted monetary or in-kind donations from Labour Together during the leadership election.”
Hollinrake wrote to the Electoral Commission last week demanding a fresh investigation into Labour Together’s declarations while McSweeney was running it.
The watchdog fined Labour Together £14,250 over its handling of almost £740,000 in donations in 2021. The group blamed an “admin error” for its late declarations, which were only made after McSweeney’s departure from the organisation.
Last week, the Conservatives released a leaked email from the Labour lawyer Gerald Shamash in which he advised Labour Together “to be seen as transparent as possible” in the matter.
He wrote that there was “no easy way to explain how Labour Together finds itself in this situation”, and that “if Labour Together cannot deal substantively with questions I pose then perhaps [it is] simply best to base our case as to the non-reporting down as admin error”.
The Tories have claimed that Labour Together used a “false excuse” of administrative errors.
The Electoral Commission has not reopened its investigation but is understood to be assessing whether any of the information published in recent days materially changes its original assessment, with the aim of arriving at a conclusion by the end of this week.
Sources said the 2021 investigation into Labour Together’s breaches, which resulted in a large fine, had been very thorough.
