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All that was missing was a leader. ‘Ultimately,’ McSweeney concluded, ‘we will need a candidate to win a future leadership election on the political platform we are developing. There is no need to identify a candidate at this stage, but we will proceed on the assumption that our organisation must be able to generate a successful leadership campaign operation when required.’ Lisa Nandy, sitting expectantly across from McSweeney, believed it would be her. Whoever it was would need to win a membership with little desire to renounce its faith in St Jeremy. And to secure that new leader’s hold on the party, ‘We need to make sure the party’s organisation is not used by the hard left to conduct political purges against our supporters.’
There was every chance Labour Together was doomed to fail. McSweeney’s final slide listed the threats it faced: its true identity being uncovered by the Canary, denunciations by a trade union, a hijacking by a self-serving MP. Graver than all of them was the unthinkable: ‘A Labour government.’ However unlikely they believed it to be, Corbyn’s victory would be their permanent defeat. Still McSweeney was undeterred. In the style of Dominic Cummings, the eccentric, single-minded strategist who had delivered Brexit and broken the Tory establishment, he concluded with a quote from Sun Tzu. ‘To not prepare is the greatest of crimes; to be prepared beforehand for any contingency is the greatest of virtues.’ So began the great deception that would destroy a movement.
2
The Candidate
McSweeney worked on Black Prince Road, a long street in Lambeth with a longer history. It took its name from Edward of Woodstock, the Plantagenet heir to the English throne whose palace had once stood nearby. The Black Prince was the great knight of his age. He psychologically crushed his enemies with the chevauchée: small units of mounted soldiers who stampeded and pillaged their way through villages whose rulers and riches never recovered. With Trevor Chinn’s money he hired space in China Works, a fashionable hot-desking space in an old ceramics factory. Room 216, the sparsely furnished headquarters of his conspiracy, was undecorated save for the skull and crossbones of a pirate’s Jolly Roger, pinned clumsily to the white walls a little while later. McSweeney was intoxicated by the arguments of Be More Pirate: Or How to Take On the World and Win, a book that presented the lawless behaviour of Captain Kidd and Blackbeard as rulebreaking for the greater good. Alone with his laptop, he had a view across the Thames to the citadel he one day hoped to retake.
For anyone to learn of Labour Together’s true intentions would be fatal. Few beyond the staffers it employed, Hannah O’Rourke and Will Prescott, were welcomed into Room 216. Only one outsider was allowed to sit beside McSweeney: Imran Ahmed, the eldest of seven children from a poor Pakistani family in Manchester, who looked and sounded like the investment banker he had once been. McSweeney was shy and shifty, disorganised and dishevelled: old colleagues recalled him as the man who would arrive late for meetings, jeans caked in mud. Yet the two men were of one mind. As an adviser to Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, Ahmed had helped draft Benn’s Commons speech in which he defied Corbyn to demand airstrikes on Syria. Like McSweeney, he believed the pages of the Canary and the Facebook groups of the left were incubators of extremism where prejudice and misinformation metastasised into conspiracy theory. Ahmed, traumatised by the assassination in June 2016 of the Labour MP Jo Cox, an old friend, had come to China Works to set up the Center for Countering Digital Hate. He appointed McSweeney his co-director.
They studied their subject closely. McSweeney and Ahmed joined Facebook groups full of thousands of Corbyn fans, including the leader’s own staff. The pair found their members were consumed with rage. They hated the media. They hated Labour MPs. They hated the Rothschilds. They hated Israel. One of the most voluble posters, Ian Love, an organiser for the Corbynite campaign group Momentum, declared that Tony Blair was ‘Jewish to the core’. Here, in full view of the leadership of the Labour Party, the left spoke the conspiratorial, hateful language of the far right. This was the army McSweeney would have to overcome.
McSweeney commissioned YouGov to poll members of the two biggest groups: We Support Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour Party Supporter. It revealed more about their minds than any Labour MP knew. Corbynism’s most devout, fanatical adherents believed the left’s political project was sustained by champagne socialists in north London. Nearly half were working class. 33 per cent were older than sixty, 65 per cent over forty. 56 per cent said they were dissatisfied with their standard of living – twice as many as Britain at large. Half said they found it hard to sleep at night. A quarter agreed that ‘sometimes I let people walk all over me’. They were paranoid and pessimistic, with nearly half agreeing that the world was controlled by a secretive elite. Nearly two thirds said the media could not be trusted to report the truth. Political violence did not shock them. When asked for their view on George Osborne’s vow to chop up Theresa May and store her remains in his freezer, 55 per cent described it as light-hearted banter. Their views were markedly more extreme than those of the population at large – and of the paid-up party members who had twice voted for Corbyn alongside them.
McSweeney ensured the most disturbing examples found their way to the Sunday Times. It reported his findings on its front page on 1 April 2018, underneath a screaming headline: ‘Exposed: Jeremy Corbyn’s hate factory’. Members of the groups were quoted praising Hitler, advocating for the murder of the prime minister, and dismissing the Holocaust as a ‘big lie!’ Activist Ian Love defended his comments to reporters: ‘The Rothschilds control all the money in the world.’ The BBC emblazoned the news across its website.
It could have been a crisis for Corbyn but instead it hardened the left’s resolve. The Labour Party’s spokespeople called the story a smear. Its members reappropriated the headline as a badge of honour. They ridiculed the media under the hashtag #armyofhate. The experiment had failed, succeeding only in persuading the Corbyn supporters who did not share the extremism of those quoted that there really was a conspiracy arrayed against their leader. Labour Together needed to persuade these people, not demonise them. Every member who felt unjustly accused of racism was a member more likely to reject overtures from outside Corbyn’s circle of trust.
McSweeney concluded that that was exactly what they had done. The YouGov polling paid for by Chinn and Taylor had confirmed his long-held thesis that the Labour membership was not overrun by Trotskyites and racists. If the research had proved anything, it was that they were in the minority – albeit a noisy and influential one. But to challenge them – as he had done via the Sunday Times – was to reinforce their conspiratorial world view. It was to prove the Canary right. Anyone who wished to break the hard left would first have to jam its feedback loop.
Perhaps the answer was to shout louder. In the 1980s, dismayed by the monopoly power of populist tabloids like the Sun and Daily Mirror, left-wing activists briefly printed their own red-top: the News on Sunday. It failed, just as McSweeney’s attempt to disrupt a new ecosystem of digital media would too. Tribune, the venerable old weekly once edited by Nye Bevan and Michael Foot, had collapsed into insolvency. McSweeney tried to buy it. The hard left did instead. A bid for LabourList, the party’s parish noticeboard, went nowhere fast. So did Changing Politics, a podcast hosted by the comedian Gráinne Maguire and journalist Marie Le Conte. Nobody listened, and for many months nobody was paid. Maguire later recalled that every episode was scripted by McSweeney. After six episodes, McSweeney’s brief foray into audio production was over. If he was to clip the Canary’s wings and concrete over its ‘cesspit of antisemitism’, he concluded that his only option was to kill it entirely.
He foresaw no end of opportunity in its death. Without its online Pravda, the hard left would lose in an instant its ability to manipulate the narrative to which its angry audience was so receptive, and which held disproportionate influence over the membership at large. Corbyn’s allies, too, would lose one of the only media outlets willing to report uncritically on its political project. Even veterans of the movement like Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, consumed and amplified its agitprop: he repeated live on BBC television its baseless suggestion that the lobbying firm Portland Communications was at the heart of a conspiracy to oust the Labour leader.
The real conspiracy against Corbynism, meanwhile, sought celebrity backing. Rachel Riley, the co-presenter of Countdown on Channel 4, was an implausible fellow traveller for the political odd couple of McSweeney and Ahmed. As a Jew who had been moved to frequent and occasionally foul-mouthed criticism of the hard left, however, she was in search of a productive outlet for her anger. Corbynites derided her as a dilettante and publicity junkie. One of the leader’s aides dismissed Riley publicly: ‘She’s as dangerous as she is stupid.’ In February 2019 she came to China Works accompanied by Adam Langleben, a Jewish Labour Movement activist convinced his party had been poisoned by racism. McSweeney and Ahmed made a modest proposal. Might Riley be the public face of a campaign to defund the Canary? She agreed with alacrity.
Branded, like Labour Together, in the idealistic language of the liberal left, Stop Funding Fake News was born. It did its job. Once alerted to the Canary’s combative and conspiratorial content by Ahmed, the FTSE 100 firms and corporate multinationals whose adverts appeared on its pages soon shut off their spigots of cash. Already weakened by a change to Facebook’s algorithms, which served users fewer news articles, within months the bird had been caged, and its staff cut by two thirds. Riley crowed on Twitter: ‘Bye bye birdie!!!’ The Canary blamed ‘political Zionists’ for the demise of its business model. They did not know what McSweeney had done.
*
For four years Corbyn had refused to be defined by the dreary old saws that pass for political commentary in Westminster. But by the summer of 2019 he was living Hemingway’s old cliché on bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly, his project fell apart. Brexit, still unresolved, had shattered Labour’s old electoral coalition. Its interminable, tedious parliamentary debates kept Corbyn chained to the despatch box, bored and restless. And when Britons elected their final Members of the European Parliament that May, Labour finished a distant third behind the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats, whose leaders were unafraid to speak the political languages Corbyn could never learn.
Meanwhile, accusations of antisemitism inflicted deeper wounds on his very sense of self. Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-racist. That was the very essence of his being. MPs, the media, the commanding heights of Britain’s Jewish community: all told him otherwise. Ancient comments on Israel and Zionism were disinterred by his prosecutors and accepted by his opponents as evidence that Jeremy Corbyn was not an anti-racist but an antisemite. He withdrew into himself. When he dared defend his record, he was cantankerous, unapologetic. He could no longer speak to the country. He could no longer bring himself to leave the house.
McSweeney revelled in Corbyn’s misery – and did all he could to exacerbate it. Ahead of a planned trip by Corbyn to address students at the University of Warwick that February, McSweeney had urged Patrick Heneghan – an election strategist who had been exiled from Labour HQ under Corbyn – to send young Remainers to harangue him. ‘Morgan wanted to get twenty People’s Vote volunteers to have a go at him,’ a co-conspirator recalled. On 28 May, the Equality and Human Rights Commission announced it would investigate Labour’s handling of antisemitism complaints – just as it had once investigated the racist membership policies of the BNP. Armed with 10,000 leaked emails supplied by Corbyn-sceptic staff, Ahmed disseminated some of their most shocking contents to political journalists. Meanwhile, in secret meetings in Room 216 of China Works, McSweeney and Adam Langleben ‘mapped out people inside the party who might want to come forward’ with witness statements attesting that the leader’s aides had interfered in racism complaints – among them the embattled and unnoticed Labour councillors McSweeney knew from his work at the Local Government Association. The dossier of evidence they amassed would one day secure a verdict of unlawful discrimination by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party against Jews.
McSweeney’s friends saw him as smilingly compliant with Corbynism. MPs such as the acid-tongued Brownite Chris Leslie told him they wanted to challenge Corbyn again. Two years earlier, over lunch at Leslie’s Nottingham home, McSweeney had urged caution, telling Leslie: ‘We’re giving up a party that had a bad leader for two years. This is a 125-year-old party. This is insane.’ In 2019, Leslie was no longer in any mood to listen. In February, along with six other Labour MPs he set up the Independent Group, later Change UK – the first official split in the Labour party in thirty-eight years.
Change UK crashed and burned but others continued undeterred. Tony Blair was chief among them. He told friends that Labour had become ‘too weak to win, but too strong to die’. He dreamt of a new party, a British answer to Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche!, unburdened by a membership that was at odds with the electorate. It could at last exorcise the division that had haunted progressives since the 1900s and unite Labourism and Liberalism under one banner. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, went from boardroom to boardroom, seeking converts among Labour donors. He distributed glossy brochures that promised a party that could transcend the old divisions of class, geography and education. One fell into McSweeney’s hands. He told the donors – among whom he spoke frankly of his intentions – that it would never work, for he would never let it. If people like Blair and Powell were allowed to abandon the Labour Party, it would forever belong to Corbyn. He spoke to the donors as if they were idiots. ‘We’re trying to take back the ship. You’re funding the lifeboat,’ he told them. ‘As soon as you give me money, I’m going to blow up the lifeboat. I can’t let them escape.’ Not least because the shore had at last hove into view. With Boris Johnson installed as prime minister and the Conservatives remorselessly focused on Brexit above all else, the reckoning loomed: a general election.
McSweeney was in no doubt: it was an election that Corbyn would lose. It was time to find his candidate. As he had told Labour Together’s board in 2017, he was agnostic as to who it might be. Several MPs sought his counsel. Their motivations were too transparent, their ambition too unsubtle. The more obvious their aspirations to leadership and hostility to Corbynism, the less plausible they would appear to the members. For two years he had imagined a silhouette, its exact profile as yet indistinct. They would need to be known by the members but they could not be a Corbynite. At the same time, they could not be a rebel. Above all they could not be honest about their ambition to replace the incumbent leader until the very moment of release. One July afternoon in 2019 the profile’s features at last resolved into clear view. The candidate was Keir Starmer.
*
Keir Starmer wanted to be Labour leader – and a Labour prime minister – long before he met McSweeney, and long before his arrival in Westminster. He did not say so; his actions spoke for him.
Gordon Brown tried first. As he prepared to take power as prime minister he had dispatched Jonathan Ashworth, his long-suffering Man Friday, to invite Starmer to join his future Government of All the Talents. One day in 2006 he met Starmer in the Treasury canteen and asked if he would like to become an MP. Starmer was interested in principle. He said he was interested in environmental law, and then demurred. He would soon begin a five-year term as director of public prosecutions. Parliament would have to wait. When his term ended, in November 2013, Ed Miliband was looking to use his powers of patronage to install a friendly barrister in the House of Lords. He called Charlie Falconer, the QC and former Lord Chancellor to Tony Blair, for his recommendations.
Starmer was a man of the left. Falconer did not know him intimately. Occasionally he had offered his younger colleague counsel. Starmer had sought his advice when, after two decades banging on the door of the big state as a human rights barrister, agitating against power from the outside, he applied to work within its ramparts and run the Crown Prosecution Service. It surprised only those who could not sense Starmer’s vaulting ambition. Falconer did. Even after five years as the apex predator of the English bar it still burned, unfulfilled.
‘Obviously,’ Falconer told Miliband, ‘the standout candidate would be Keir, by a million miles.’
‘No, no, no,’ the Labour leader said, with all the impatient insistence of a man who had been disappointed before. ‘I know Keir. I’ve discussed this with Keir. I suggested it to him, and he said no. Keir is determined to get a seat.’ Like his namesake, Keir Hardie, and every Labour leader since, he knew that only from the Commons could he change the country he wished to rule.
He coveted the safe seat in which he lived, Holborn and St Pancras: a long, thin wedge of London, from Primrose Hill to Covent Garden. Neil Kinnock, whose war against the left as Labour leader Starmer would one day wage again, recalls meeting him at a party fundraiser for Frank Dobson, the bluff old Yorkshireman who was then the local MP, in a Camden Cypriot restaurant in 2008. ‘He was a straight-up guy,’ says Kinnock now. Six years later he was selected to succeed Dobson in a contest that had been deliberately delayed by Miliband – aspirant Labour MPs were required to be members for six months before standing, and Starmer had been obliged by public service to resign his party affiliation until 2013. He applied himself to the select contest with the same single-minded rigour he had brought to countless complex cases. Though he betrayed little of his politics, he won comfortably. Martin Plaut, a local activist who later became a firm friend of the Starmers, recalls how the would-be candidate walked through sleet and snow to lobby members in their own homes. ‘He said: “Can I come and have a coffee?” I said sure. So we met him in our house in Kentish Town. I can honestly say, within ten minutes, I thought … he could be a gift to the Labour Party … there was something about him … What he did to us, he did to the whole of our Labour Party. Three months off, and he went door to door, knocking on every single Labour Party member.’
