Peter Geoghegan

My name is Peter Gagan and I am the editor of Democracy for Sale.

I'm at the Paul Ford Awards for a story that I did with my colleague Khadija Sharif, which was all about how Labour Together, the campaign group slash think tank behind Keir Starmer, had hired a PR firm called APCO to investigate a bunch of journalists who had been reporting on their undeclared political funding, undeclared funding that was used to power Keir Starmer's rise to power.

If you've not heard of Labour Together, they've actually, since the story went out, they've changed their name.

I think this story actually possibly contributed to the change of the name.

They're now called, as of last week, Think Labour.

But basically Labour Together was the kind of think tank campaign group, call it what you want, that was set up by various people after Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015.

It was set up by various people and various wings of Labour Party, as the name suggests, as a way as a kind of cross party organisation, broadly opposed to Corbyn, looking to see where else Labour should go.

Over time, though, a very familiar name to many people became very involved, Morgan MacSweeney.

Morgan MacSweeney took over as the head of Labour Together.

He then became Keir Starmer's chief of staff.

But throughout the period and up until the 2024 general election, which Labour obviously won, Labour Together was a very important organisation.

It's important for a bunch of reasons.

One was it was quietly, wasn't that public about it, was really doing a lot of polling and camp focus group for Keir Starmer.

So it's kind of pushing Starmer's campaign, but also taking in lots and lots of money.

It took in millions and millions of pounds of donations.

It used that money to do things like run polling and focus groups, but also gave out money to politicians, to would-be politicians, to Labour people, to people that were aligned with Starmer and the Labour Together project.

So it was a very significant, important organisation, especially in the make-up of the government that we have now.

The crux of this story really was when Labour Together was kind of becoming this big, powerful political machine, like really for a good few years at the start of Labour Together, it had been a kind of slightly come by across labour thing where they'd hold, you know, they'd write the odd report and they'd hold the odd meeting.

Under Morgan McSweeney, it changed.

They got an office just south of the river in London, had a little pirate flag in the office, kind of sense of, you know, we're buccaneering out in the high seas.