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The Electoral Commission has today dismissed the Conservative Party’s request for a fresh investigation into Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. The complaint related to late-declared donations by Labour Together, of which Mr McSweeney is a former director. FactCheck takes a look. What is Labour Together? Labour Together was set up as a thinktank. Mr McSweeney reportedly described its mission in an internal document as “mov[ing] the Labour party from the hard left”. Mr McSweeney was a director of Labour Together from 2017 to 2020, overlapping with the time he spent heading Mr Starmer’s leadership campaign. Following the successful run, he left Labour Together in 2020 to become Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Did Labour Together have to declare its donations? Mr McSweeney said at the time he was in charge that he did not believe Labour Together to be a “campaigning” organisation, and therefore did not have any duty to declare its political donations. But the Electoral Commission wrote to Labour Together in December 2017 affirming it was considered a “members association”, and therefore did need to declare donations. Rules state that such groups usually need to declare political donations above a certain threshold within 30 days of receiving them. But Labour Together didn’t declare the donations until after Keir Starmer won the leadership election and after Mr McSweeney left the organisation in 2020. The late-declared donations together amounted to around £740,000. An investigation was already conducted into this affair and concluded in 2021, with Labour Together ultimately being fined £14,250 for failing to declare the money. Why is this back in the news? The row has reignited this week following a newly leaked email released by the Conservatives. In the exchange from 2021, when Labour Together was under investigation by the Electoral Commission, a Labour lawyer said there was “no easy way to explain” why the group had failed to declare the donations, and advised it to attribute the failure to an “admin error”. The Conservatives argue the email exchange shows that Mr McSweeney “misled” the Commission. Conservative Party chair Kevin Hollinrake this week described the donations to Labour Together as a “secret slush fund to install Starmer as leader”. In his complaint letter to the Electoral Commission, Mr Hollinrake argued that Labour Together “chose not to” declare the donations to avoid disclosing who was “bankrolling” the group’s campaign. The Daily Mail has reported that on the day that Labour Together received the 2017 letter from the Electoral Commission affirming its duty to declare donations within 30 days, it received a £50,000 pound donation from a hedge fund boss. This donation was reportedly not declared until 2021. The Conservatives have also drawn attention to the fact that Mr McSweeney was working for Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign while he was still a director of Labour Together. They argue Mr McSweeney’s work amounted to a donation from Labour Together. But Labour has argued that since it paid Mr McSweeney a salary out of Labour coffers for his work on the campaign, his work did not amount to a donation from Labour Together. Until today, the Electoral Commission was reviewing the new evidence to decide whether it warranted the investigation into Labour Together being re-opened. As of today, it has dismissed the Conservative complaint, saying it found “no evidence of any other potential offences” aside from the ones already adjudicated in 2021, and that it is satisfied with its original investigation. The Conservative Party has separately asked the parliamentary standards commissioner to investigate whether Mr Starmer should have declared support from Labour Together during his leadership campaign. The Labour Party told FactCheck: “In a pathetic and desperate attempt to stay relevant, the Tories only hope is to throw mud at the wall and hope something sticks. There isn’t a low that they won’t stoop to. They can’t be trusted and they haven’t changed. The Electoral Commission considers this matter closed. This Labour government is solely focussed on fixing the mess left by the Tories, and renewing Britain – to make people right across the country better off.”
