BOOK EXCERPT: “The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy”

Paul Holden details the ruthless right-wing political project by Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed to upend British politics and censor their critics on the Left and Right, including Americans.

19 minute read

In a recent interview with the DisInformation Chronicle, author and investigative journalist Paul Holden discussed the dark money British misinformation campaign led by Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed that pushed Jeremy Corbyn out of Labour Party leadership to install Keir Starmer as his successor. Starmer is now UK Prime Minister, with Morgan McSweeney as his chief-of-staff. Meanwhile, Imran Ahmed resides in DC as a mouthpiece for censorship and Democratic Party political ambitions.

Holden chronicles their history in his latest book “The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy” which can be purchased on Amazon.

As portions of Holden’s book began leaking to the British media in recent weeks, one of Prime Minister Starmer’s top aides was forced to step down, and Members of Parliament have called for a criminal investigation of Morgan McSweeney.

An excerpt follows.

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On the evening of Thursday February 8, 2024, The Guardian’s political editor, Pippa Crerar, informed me by email that the paper was twenty-four hours away from publishing an article that I feared would significantly damage, if not destroy, my professional reputation. Crerar explained:

We are planning on running a story on the Guardian site tomorrow, and in Saturday’s paper, that the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is investigating whether information obtained from an Electoral Commission hack may have been used to target the Labour Party. We understand the NCSC probe centres on a series of private legal emails between the political think tank Labour Together, which was previously run by Morgan McSweeney, and the Electoral Commission.

McSweeney is the chief of staff to UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and arguably the most powerful person in British politics. I have been investigating McSweeney and his secret, dodgy projects for the past three years, scrutinising how he used a seemingly anodyne think-tank called Labour Together to pull them off. This book is the result of that investigation.

‘The Guardian understands that part of the NCSC’s investigation is whether emails (subsequently leaked to you) came from that cyber hack’, Crerar wrote.

I was given a deadline of less than fourteen hours to respond.

My first reaction was confusion. I had literally no idea what Crerar was talking about. I quickly Googled ‘electoral commission hack’ and discovered that the Commission had, indeed, been hacked in 2021, likely by a hostile foreign actor such as Russia or China. I wrote back to Crerar to make sure that this is what she was referring to. She confirmed that, yes, this was the hack she was talking about.

My second reaction was dismay. I feared that The Guardian’s huge global readership would soon believe that I was being seriously investigated for receiving documents from an illegal hack, likely by a hostile foreign country, targeting a Labour Party just about to sweep to power. While Crerar confirmed that The Guardian would not allege that I had participated in a hack, and would only say I was being investigated, I worried it would not take long for social media users and columnists to collapse this distinction and start wondering how and why I’d received hacks from a foreign power.

My third reaction was anger. I’d never even heard of this hack, let alone received materials from it. I was painfully aware of how The Guardian’s story would undermine my investigation into McSweeney and the Labour Party he effectively controlled, and how, more broadly, it would be immensely useful to some truly gnarly people: organised crime figures, money launderers, crooked politicians, and corrupt titans of industry. I also knew it would be politically damaging to good people in my country of birth, South Africa.

I’ve been investigating grand corruption and serious economic crime for fifteen years. My work has featured in newspapers and TV documentaries around the world and in multiple books. In fact, one of my investigations into how organised crime was moving billions via HSBC in Hong Kong and China had been featured in The Guardian itself only three years prior. I didn’t hesitate to tell Crerar this fact, also pointing out that I’d been the source of numerous stories in The Guardian where I hadn’t been credited.

Some of my most important work has unfolded over the past six years. Starting in 2018, I’ve been investigating what has been called ‘state capture’ in South Africa, where I lived until my mid-twenties. For close to a decade, a family called the Guptas had worked with the government led by Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s former president, to loot and pillage the state with the eager assistance of some of the world’s biggest multinational companies. I worked with an incredible team of investigators, advocates, and auditors, using big data analysis and forensic techniques to unearth huge troves of evidence. We used that evidence to unravel the complex money laundering systems that had been used to hide the Guptas’ loot.

I set out this evidence in a lengthy report that was under pinned by thousands of pages of raw financial data. I provided days of oral testimony under oath before a judicial commission of inquiry headed by South Africa’s most senior judge, Raymond Zondo. Judge Zondo ultimately accepted my evidence and used it as the basis of a substantial part of his mammoth final reports.

Zondo’s investigation, findings, and recommendations have had enormous legal and political consequences in South Africa and in many other countries, too. Most notably, his findings and my evidence have been fed into a stream of criminal and civil recovery cases. I have worked closely—and still work closely—with law enforcement and civil recovery agencies around the world to help build those cases. They have allowed the country to claw back close to a billion dollars in fines and seizures and have catalysed criminal proceedings in multiple jurisdictions. I am inexpressibly proud of this work, not least because the money that has been recovered can be used to build South Africa’s sometimes infuriating and sometimes inspiring post-apartheid future.

I believed the Electoral Commission hack story would be a godsend to the network of criminal actors that had been the focus of my investigations. The pro-Zuma faction, still powerful in South Africa, would have loved to exploit these allegations to discredit me and my work, to undermine the efforts of Judge Zondo, and to attack the independence and credibility of the agencies now cleaning up a decade of corruption based on Zondo’s findings.

I took two hours to collect my thoughts, contact my lawyer, and compose my reply. ‘I want to make this very, very clear’, I wrote to Crerar. ‘If there is any hint in your reporting that I received material from the hack of the Electoral Commission referred to above, whether knowingly or unknowingly, I will immediately be bringing defamation proceedings against you and the Guardian. . . . The allegation that I have received information from a hack of the Electoral Commission is not only false, but I can positively prove it to be false’.

Crerar acknowledged my response but did not ask me how I could prove it to be false. ‘I’ll let you know what we do’, she said. But she never did. Instead, I waited up anxiously overnight, checking The Guardian website to see if anything had appeared. Nothing. I wrote to Crerar the next day asking what was going to happen. She said that she would get back to me in a few days.

I never heard from her again.

And, of course, I have never heard from the NCSC—neither before nor since Crerar’s email.

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I have been investigating Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together for about three years. As a result, I now believe that I have enough evidence to plausibly argue that Morgan McSweeney may have purposefully broken the law when he failed to report hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Electoral Commission as required by statute between 2018 and 2020. McSweeney then used those undisclosed funds to propel Sir Keir Starmer to the leadership of the Labour Party, transforming both the party and British politics.

In investigating how McSweeney and his allies have trans formed the Labour Party, I have come across evidence pointing to serious wrongdoing over an extended period, some of which I believe requires further investigation by regulatory agencies and law enforcement. Indeed, I have come to the opinion that the political project that delivered us a Starmer government has been a reckless and arguably lawless endeavour whose misconduct threatens the health of British democracy.

I came to these conclusions after I was given access to a substantial leak of documents from within the Labour Party. That story is a bit twisty, but don’t worry—the documents were a legitimate public interest leak, and I hold them legally as a journalist. And while the size and richness of this leaked treasure trove is unusual, it is hardly an uncommon event for internal documents from the Labour Party to make their way into the hands of political reporters. That’s a regular Tuesday.

In mid-2023 I took some of those documents to Gabriel Pogrund of The Sunday Times, which ran a story about the undeclared money on its front page in mid-November. It was a good story but ultimately did not pull the trigger quite as I’d hoped. The article concluded by citing me as the source of documents, noting that I was writing a book. On the day of the Sunday Times article, my publisher put up a short blurb that made it clear I was deep into an investigation of McSweeney and Labour Together.

At the same time, I started publishing a series of articles with the prominent US journalist Matt Taibbi. Not long before, he had been given access to the so-called ‘Twitter Files’ and had been writing disturbing stories about government overreach and censorship across the pond. I contacted Matt in 2023 when I realised his investigations were crossing over with mine. One of the organisations Matt came across in that work was the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which had also attracted the angry attention of Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk. My investigations and subsequent articles with Matt revealed that CCDH, together with its dodgy sister project Stop Funding Fake News, had been incubated by Labour Together under McSweeney—and resourced by Labour Together at the time that it was failing to report donations as required by law.

This book irrefutably documents McSweeney’s involvement in CCDH. That secret history now sits like a volatile piece of unexploded ordinance that could blow up the relationship between the current Donald Trump administration and Starmer’s office.

In late December 2023, the Electoral Commission responded to a Freedom of Information request that I had sub mitted while working with Pogrund. The documents, which I describe in detail in Chapter One of this book, shed further light on Labour Together’s breach of electoral law.

This time I took the story to The Telegraph, which had contacted me after the Sunday Times report with a view to taking it further. By late January 2024—just days before Crerar’s email arrived in my inbox—The Telegraph had sent ‘right of reply’ notices to Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney ahead of its forthcoming article.

A few days after I had seemingly seen off the ‘Electoral Commission hack’ story, I reread Crerar’s emails and noticed something I’d missed. There was no independent, self-initiated NCSC investigation into how I might have received hacked material. What had happened, Crerar told me, was that Labour Together had reported ‘their concerns’ to the NCSC. This means that Labour Together had raised ‘concerns’ about me to the British security services at about the same time that The Telegraph was asking questions about Labour Together’s undisclosed money, based on the new evidence I’d provided.

Odd things had been happening ever since it was made public that I was investigating Labour Together and McSweeney. Two days prior to the Crerar email, I was contacted by a young man who claimed to be a journalist from the progressive news and investigative website openDemocracy. He was lying. But I trusted him because he had got in touch via a family connection that would be difficult if not impossible to discover through open records. I still wonder how he made that connection, and whether it was based on the sort of human intelligence gathered by private investigators.

The imposter asked me about my investigations into McSweeney, Labour Together, and the Labour Party. I gave him an overview but without a huge amount of detail. He then started asking pointed questions about Anonyvoter. As I discuss later, Anonyvoter was the internal Labour Party voting system that at least two MPs believed was being abused to stitch up their selections.

At this point my alarm bells started ringing and I ended the call. Something didn’t feel right about the conversation. When openDemocracy confirmed that the young man had nothing to do with them, I contacted my lawyer. On his advice, I reported the call to the police as a case of fraud. I still have no idea who this person really was and how I had come onto their radar. I also have no evidence that Labour Together had anything to do with it, and a well-placed source indicated that it was highly unlikely that they would. But it was mighty strange.

A few months later, I was contacted by an old friend, a formidable researcher with a stellar investigative record. She had been looking into how reputation management agencies based in the UK (and the private intelligence firms they subcontracted) were used by rich clients and multinationals to manage problematic allegations—as well as the whistleblowers and journalists that made them.

‘Your name came up’, she said. ‘One of these firms is looking at you’.

I still didn’t quite believe it. I thought that perhaps my name had come up because of my close working relationship with my long-time friend and colleague, Andrew Feinstein, who has upset more arms dealers around the world than is strictly healthy. No. My friend was adamant: ‘You are the focus of the investigation. They call you a “significant person of interest”. They have been looking into you and your family and your colleagues. They’ve been writing reports about you’. ‘Since when?’ I asked, my heart racing.

‘November 2023’, my colleague confirmed—the same month that The Sunday Times had cited me as a source of documents for its exposé of Labour Together’s unlawful failure to disclose donations.

‘Who was the client?’ I asked.

‘Labour Together’, came the reply.

‘Is there anyone from Labour Together on any of the emails?’ I asked.

‘Some young guy called Josh Simons’.

Simons was appointed a director of Labour Together in late 2022. He became the organisation’s public face as the ‘provisional wing’ of Starmer’s incoming government in late 2023 and the first half of 2024. In 2024, Simons was parachuted into a safe seat during the general election. He now sits as the MP for Makerfield, in which role he has appeared on the popular online politics channel PoliticsJOE lamenting how politicians have lost the trust of the public.

Corroborating evidence soon emerged. Reports I saw confirmed that the investigation into me was launched after the Sunday Times’ Labour Together exposé that cited me as a source. The firm used a mixture of human intelligence and expensive data scraping tools to find out where I lived and with whom, and who I associated with professionally. They had to use such approaches to find this stuff out about my private life because I have for many years purposefully kept a low profile, including foreswearing social media. I have done this because information about my private life had previously been used by bad actors I investigated in South Africa to target me for harassment.

The investigations paid for by Labour Together lingered on my colleague, Andrew Feinstein. They sought to discover who funded the small anti-corruption organisation that we use to investigate and expose the sort of criminals and kleptocrats who loot states and destroy democracies. The funding I received from the Open Society Foundation to undertake my work on South African state capture was noted as a point of potential ‘leverage’. Colleagues and fellow journalists who worked at my shared office space in London or who served on our small board also came under scrutiny; some of them were subjected to deep dives into their family histories stretching back decades. Minor infractions of presumed political etiquette were then woven into a caricature alleging political malevolence or improper bias on the part of myself and my associates.

To widespread mirth in my office, I was told that the ‘investigation’ had eventually alighted on the allegation that—wait for it—Andrew and I were connected to Russian state actors via South African intelligence structures. This came as a huge surprise to Andrew and I: our previous investigations into Russian oligarchs had left us facing years of legal and extra-legal threats while Russian president Vladimir Putin was famously allied with the former South African president Jacob Zuma—the guy Andrew and I have been trying to get prosecuted for over a decade. Indeed, if Zuma’s long pending and infuriatingly delayed corruption case ever takes place, Andrew is slated to appear as the first witness for the prosecution.

While I have not seen everything written by the company that Labour Together hired, none of the materials I had seen from the investigation claimed that my evidence was wrong, or that my information was incorrect, or that my leaked documents were inauthentic. Instead, they primarily indicated a burning desire to understand where I was getting my information from—and what else I might have.

As the following pages show, Labour Together had good reason to worry. I invite every citizen concerned with the fair ness of British democracy to read on as I reveal the sordid inner workings of the Starmer machine, discover the serious wrongdoing I unearthed, and then join me in an effort to hold the culprits and their enablers to account.

CREATING CCDH

There is some confusion as to when CCDH was established. Imran Ahmed claims on his LinkedIn that he became a director of the organisation in December 2017. At the time, however, there was no corporate entity called CCDH. Across multiple interviews, Ahmed has given slightly different versions of when the idea for CCDH first came to him, or when he started putting the plan into action. His most recent story is that the idea for CCDH was seeded in 2016 when he was working with Angela Eagle. On this version, the impetus for establishing CCDH was the death of Jo Cox, the Labour MP who was killed in June 2016 by an adherent of the far right. If true, this would mean that Ahmed was considering the need for the organisation just as his work levelling unsubstantiated allegations of abuse and discrimination against the political opponents of Angela Eagle was being challenged by independent media asking difficult questions.

The corporate entity that would eventually become CCDH was originally called Brixton Endeavours. Brixton Endeavours was set up in October 2018 and shared its address with Labour Together. Morgan McSweeney was its sole director. This is also the date that McSweeney has provided on his LinkedIn for when he became a director of CCDH.”

McSweeney ran this LinkedIn account for years, listing his role in CCDH. But in November 2024, as this book was being finalised and just after Donald Trump swept to victory in the US presidential election, McSweeney’s LinkedIn profile suddenly went dark. This happened two weeks after a story broke in the US media about how CCDH had targeted Elon Musk’s Twitter, based on leaks from within the social media company. That exposé was written by the American journalists Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi, with whom I’d been working for about year on CCDH. It quoted extensively from my work on CCDH’s prehistory and highlighted McSweeney’s role in creating CCDH.12 The story caught the attention of Elon Musk who announced that he was declaring ‘war’ on the organisation. Trump campaign insiders told Taibbi and Thacker that CCDH would be ‘investigated from all angles’ if Trump was elected.

Was it a coincidence that McSweeney’s longstanding LinkedIn profile disappeared just as Trump was entering the White House and critical attention began to be trained on CCDH? Certainly, Thacker and Taibbi’s article had set the cat among the pigeons and there were hurried attempts to distance Labour Together and McSweeney from CCDH. On October 24, two days after their story came out, Taibbi appeared on the Times podcast to talk about the history of CCDH. He was told that Labour Together claimed they had ‘nothing to do’ with CCDH. ‘What can we say in response to that?’ Taibbi texted me. I sent him a raft of screenshots, company reports, and extracts from the documents we had already published. Amongst them were screenshots of McSweeney’s LinkedIn page, which I had fortuitously saved after Taibbi reached out to me. Soon there- after, McSweeney’s LinkedIn profile disappeared. About a year later, McSweeney’s LinkedIn was reactivated, with subtle but interesting changes to how he described his overlapping occupational arrangements at Labour Together and CCDH, and as Starmer’s campaign director (see Figure A).

The day after Taibbi appeared on the Times podcast, The Guardian ran a lengthy story about how Ahmed and CCDH were determined to continue their work despite Musk’s threats. The Guardian explained that McSweeney had simply helped Ahmed out by ‘providing a shell company to house the organisation’ and that McSweeney ‘had no operational role at CCDH’. Then why had McSweeney listed his directorship in CCDH for years on his LinkedIn? It was hard to credit.

As noted, CCDH started life as Brixton Endeavours; it shared an address with Labour Together and listed McSweeney as its sole director. This enterprise would eventually be renamed CCDH in September 2019, coinciding with the outfit’s public launch via the publication of a thin pamphlet entitled ‘Don’t Feed the Trolls’. McSweeney would remain a listed director of CCDH until April 2020, giving up the role only after Starmer won the Labour leadership election.

Another company that shared its address with Labour Together and Brixton Endeavours/CCDH was Labour Campaigns. Labour Campaigns’ sole director was none other than Imran Ahmed. He changed the registered address of Labour Campaigns in January 2019 to that of CCDH and Labour Together. This was the same month that some unknown person or entity registered the web domain of Ahmed’s first public foray into the world of disinformation: Stop Funding Fake News.

There is, however, a striking lack of detail known about how CCDH has been funded. When the organisation first launched in late 2019, its website said it received funding from five philanthropic foundations: the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Pears Foundation, the Laura Kinsella Foundation, Barrow Cadbury Trust, and Unbound Philanthropy. In June 2020, CCDH changed its website so that individual funders were no longer listed; it now simply stated that CCDH ‘is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that is funded by phil- anthropic trusts and members of the public’. The current incarnation of CCDH’s website, launched after the creation of a US affiliate company registered in Washington, does not identify any funders.

CCDH has never publicly acknowledged that it was created by Labour Together, or that it received resources from the think-tank while being set up (including ‘office space’ and ‘help’ with raising start-up funds)—or that Labour Together was failing to report its donations as required by law at the time.

THE ASTROTURF CAMPAIGN

In March 2019, five months after the formation of Brixton Endeavours, Stop Funding Fake News was born. As noted above, Mumford’s briefing suggested that CCDH had emerged out of SFFN’s work. But in 2020, Ahmed would give a talk to a US State Department conference on antisemitism opened by such storied fighters for civil liberty and moderation as Mike Pompeo, Michael Gove, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Pompeo served as the director of the CIA and then secretary of state under Trump. His contributions to global free speech included plotting with CIA officials to abduct and assassinate WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. Gove, a long-time Tory MP and cabinet minister, has been robustly criticised for his views on Muslims. One of his critics is the Tory grandee Lady Warsi, who was genuinely ‘fearful of the idea of Michael Gove becoming prime minister’ because of ‘his views on British Muslims. Ahmed suggested in his speech that SFFN had emerged out of research work done by CCDH-not the other way around.

In reality, there seems to have been little distinction between these entities behind the scenes. In 2021, for example, Ahmed noted on Twitter that he was the ‘founder/CEO’ of both CCDH and SFFN. Historical website registration data for the now-defunct SFFN website shows that it was previously registered as belonging to Imran Ahmed and under his personal email address. In fact, in light of what we now know about McSweeney and Ahmed’s long-term collaboration, there does not appear to be any real distinction between SFFN, CCDH, and the Labour Together Project itself.

The purview of SFFN extended beyond alleged antisemitism. SFFN also tackled what it called ‘fake news. In a Twitter thread from April 2019, SFFN explained that ‘fake news . . . means lies & deliberate misleading, particularly when designed to fuel hate.’ This definition is important, because it meant that SFFN, in effect, defined fake news as disinformation rather than misinformation. Disinformation refers to the creation and spread of false information with the intention to deceive; misinformation refers to false information spread without such intention.

The irony was that SFFN, run by a man who had made his career as a factional spin-doctor, could itself be regarded as a prime example of fake news. SFFN did not disclose the actors behind its creation and operation; it was only in May 2020 that SFFN declared any relationship with CCDH. For the first year of its public existence, SFFN explained to readers of its website that ‘we would like to be open about our identities, but doing so could put our activists at risk’. SFFN was thus presented as a group of anonymous ‘activists’ inspired by a US campaign called Sleeping Giants, which had targeted the right- wing Breitbart News in the US.

But the contrast between the two initiatives is stark: Sleeping Giants was initiated and run by grassroots campaigners, while SFFN was resourced from undeclared funding provided by millionaires to Labour Together, which itself featured three Labour MPs on its board alongside Morgan McSweeney—who subsequently became perhaps the most powerful non-elected official in the country.

SFFN was assiduous in cultivating this grassroots image in profiles of its work. In April 2019, the Jewish News described SFFN as a ‘small group of friends’ and ‘activists’. Explaining why they had remained anonymous, these plucky underdogs said they ‘didn’t want the levels of hate that far braver people than ourselves have been subjected to.’ They then neatly deflected attention away from their anonymity by explaining that ‘the campaign isn’t about us’ but relied on ordinary people taking a ‘stand for truth and tolerance’.

SFFN’s failure to disclose its true origin, funding, and political leanings makes it a textbook example of what is known as astroturfing. As an academic article from 2019 explains, political astroturfing involves ‘a centrally coordinated disinformation campaign in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens acting independently.’ The article warned that such campaigns can ‘influence electoral outcomes and other forms of political behaviour’. As this definition indicates, astroturfing is not just considered ethically dubious but is a form of disinformation. SFFN was thus an astroturf disinformation campaign purporting to target disinformation.

SFFN’s astroturfing had a profound impact on how it was received. The group’s work would surely not have resonated as widely as it did if audiences had known the group was founded by Labour Party insiders who despised Corbyn’s leadership and run by a man with a long history of battles against the independent media outlets he was now trying to demonetise. Its studied secrecy allowed SFFN to pass as non-partisan, a false impression that would have rendered its activities more credible.

Anonymity also made SFFN and its controlling minds unaccountable to public scrutiny and, most importantly, the law. Because no-one knew who was behind SFFN, it would have been difficult to bring claims of libel against it. To do so would have required getting Twitter or SFFN’s website registrars to disclose confidential information, which may have ultimately needed court applications. There is a good case to be made that SFFN may have defamed media outlets, their editors, and journalists when it accused them of making up ‘lies’ and being ‘deliberate[ly] misleading, especially when such allegations were directed against outlets like The Canary that were independently regulated and whose survival depended on public trust. Yet these targets were, on account of SFFN’s anonymity, effectively denied their legal right to defend their reputation at the time.

SFFN launched its online campaign on March 5, 2019, with a series of Twitter posts directed at advertisers. SFFN targeted four sites from what it presented as ‘both sides’ of the political spectrum: Evolve Politics and The Canary on the left, Westmonster and Politicalite on the right. Its methodology was strikingly similar to that employed by the likes of LAAS. SFFN compiled virtual ‘dossiers’ against their targets based on deep dives into social media posts. The dossiers were then posted in long Twitter threads as evidence of fake news and antisemitism.

ELECTORAL INTERFERENCE

As well as demonetising Labour-supporting websites, SFFN also staged a problematic intervention in the European parliamentary elections of May 2019.

On May 23, SFFN posted a lengthy thread about participants in the election. ‘We’re not party-political’, SFFN absurdly promised, but we do campaign against fake news ... Here are the fake news merchants involved in today’s #EUelections2019’.

SFFN’s thread targeted two right-wing figures, Tommy Robinson and Michael Heaver. Heaver, a journalist, was also the Brexit Party candidate for the East of England and co-founder of SFFN’s target Westmonster. He would be elected to the European Parliament in the 2019 campaign alongside the Brexit Party chairperson, Richard Tice. Tice subsequently formed and ran the Reform Party with former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage. SFFN complained that Heaver was the editor of the ‘fake news website’ Westmonster, also pointing out that he had previously worked as Farage’s press officer. SFFN’s ‘evidence’ threads against Westmonster, posted when SFFN was launched and thereafter, included numerous allusive photographs of Farage and Donald Trump, amid complaints that ‘fake news website Westmonster, co-founded by Arron Banks, is now effectively a propaganda channel for Nigel Farage’s #Brexit Party’.

‘Please don’t vote for those who spread lies, bigotry or hate’, the May 23 thread implored. ‘And make sure you vote today!’

I do not support the politics and opinions of the likes of Farage and Heaver. But this is beside the point. SFFN’s Twitter thread was a direct and material intervention in a UK election, which sought to convince people who they should and should not vote for. It is manifestly problematic for an astroturf campaign funded with resources not declared to the Electoral Commission in violation of electoral law, and secretly created by an organisation that counted multiple sitting Labour Party MPs among its directors, to attempt to influence electoral outcomes.

What a fillip to Farage, Tice, and Reform, who can now legitimately claim that the current chief of staff to the prime minister was responsible for creating a secret astroturf campaign that tried to ‘cancel’ a news website sympathetic to their views, and which used its censorious mode to try and influence the outcome of a major national election to the detriment of the Brexit Party—all in the name of fighting ‘misinformation’. But for those concerned about the rise of Reform and the health of British democracy, and those who fear that SFFN’s history could be turned to Reform’s advantage, the real question is: How could McSweeney and Ahmed have been so irresponsible?