By Rachael Burford

Copyright standard

A cabinet minister has insisted he has full confidence in Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff following allegations he misled the election watchdog about more than £700,000 of Labour donations.

The Conservatives released a leaked email from a lawyer to Morgan McSweeney in response to the Electoral Commission investigating the failure to report contributions to the Labour Together organisation he was previously in charge of.

The organisation was fined by the Electoral Commission over its handling of donations in 2021, but the Tories claim the leaked email suggested Mr McSweeney had sought to mislead the watchdog.

Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden, who worked closely with Mr McSweeney on Labour’s election strategy in the run-up to the 2024 landslide win, said he had full confidence in the Downing Street chief of staff.

He accused the Tories of launching attacks on Sir Keir chief of staff because he is a “very talented person”.

“He’s a person of enormous talent,” Mr McFadden told Times Radio on Wednesday.

“And these issues that are being raised today, the Electoral Commission said yesterday that they looked into them all four or five years ago. So I think they’ve all been examined in the past.”

The Conservatives published a 2021 email from Labour lawyer Gerald Shamash, now a peer, to Mr McSweeney discussing how to handle the Electoral Commission.

In it Mr Shamash questioned Mr McSweeney about the reasons for not reporting the donations and suggested “it may be better if LT (Labour Together) cannot deal substantively with questions I pose then perhaps best to simply base our case as to the non-reporting down as admin error”.

The Electoral Commission found a series of breaches by the group for failing to declare almost £740,000 in donations under Mr McSweeney’s watch and hit it with a £14,250 fine in September 2021.

Mr McSweeney left his Labour Together role in April 2020 to become a senior aide to Sir Keir in opposition and then in government.

Tory chairman Kevin Hollinrake said the legal advice to Mr McSweeney “shows how authorities may have been misled over hundreds of thousands of pounds of donations used to install Starmer as Labour leader”.

He said: “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.

“‘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.”

Labour Together spokesman said it “proactively raised concerns about its own reporting of donations to the Electoral Commission in 2020” and the outcome of the investigation was public knowledge.

The Electoral Commission said it had “thoroughly investigated the late reporting of donations by Labour Together” and concluded the failures occurred “without reasonable excuse”.