Frank Hansen explains why the Prime Minister’s claims of ignorance about Mandelson’s vetting process are not credible.

As the ‘Starmer Project’ staggers towards its death agony following the latest revelations concerning the security vetting of Mandelson, plus the likelihood of a massive defeat in the May local elections, this provides both an opportunity and a threat for the Labour Party.

 Starmer probably won’t be resigning soon due to external factors and the effect of his project on the Labour Party itself. The Iran debacle, local elections and above all the suppression of Party democracy have left a lack of an effective opposition in the Parliamentary Labour Party – destroyed by the Starmer Project’s manipulation of selection procedures – and a shortage of challengers for the leadership, who can bring about the radical change needed if Labour is to continue as a party of Government both now and in the longer term.  

Those who have read Paul Holden’s book The Fraud – described by Owen Jones as “meticulous, explosive, essential” – will know exactly what is meant by the term ‘Starmer project’ and be aware of its appalling, toxic impact on the Labour Party and UK politics. Those who haven’t, should do so – it is eye-opening and will cure you of any tendency to argue that ‘poor Sir Keir’, a ‘a lawyer and a decent bloke’, has probably been ‘manipulated’ by Mandelson, McSweeney and Labour Together. Wrong – McSweeney may have been the devious, invisible hand planning and guiding the project, but Starmer was up to his neck in it. He was the politician chosen to front a massive political scam that helped him become Labour leader and eventually put him and his clique into Government. He was a conscious participant in the project and still is. 

As the ship sinks and Cabinet loyalists huddle around to justify his increasingly ridiculous excuses, Starmer s striving to deflect responsibility away from himself by throwing former allies overboard – Mandelson. McSweeney, Josh Simons. At McSweeney’s leaving do, it is reported that Starmer even praised him as a great political strategist.

Indeed, the strategy (or ‘fraud’) that enabled Starmer to win the Labour leadership contest was a ‘clever’ one in the worst sense of the word. It was concocted by McSweeney and carried out in plain sight. Starmer posed as a successor to Corbyn – a socialist and a progressive internationalist.  His ten promises, promoted during his leadership campaign, ticked all the right boxes for Party members, but this was just a means to outflank Rebecca Long-Bailey and attract support. As we know now, it was just a con devised by McSweeney based on the polling of members, funded dubiously and for the project’s use.  Once elected the fake promises were ditched and the real Sir Keir emerged – a right-wing authoritarian, who set about purging those who opposed him.

As Paul Holden documents in his book, McSweeney and his allies carried out a series of secret machinations, dirty tricks and questionable funding arrangements to facilitate success. ‘Success’ meant winning the leadership and then destroying Corbynism and any effective opposition from the left or even the centre. This was achieved by the purges of life-long socialists, many of them Jewish comrades, deliberately using antisemitism allegations as a weaponised tool to promote this, backed up by underhand online techniques to whip it up into a crisis.

McSweeney also tried to undermine and take down media websites like The Canary who were beginning to expose what was really happening, just as Josh Simons tried to do later with journalists, including Holden, who were investigating the questionable activities of Labour Together – except he was caught out and forced to resign from the Cabinet.

CLPs were also suspended and prevented from selecting local candidates, although one of Starmer’s ten ‘promises’ was to protect Party democracy! This was orchestrated by McSweeney, and it is alleged that Mandelson even provided advice on which candidates to exclude.

As Holden says, the project “radically reshaped the Labour Party at every level, primarily to neutralise oppositional forces and disempower party members. One small, right-wing element of the Labour coalition effectively captured the party. This freed Starmer to move Labour to the right on nearly every political issue.”

We have seen the disastrous results of this in Labour’s dismal performance in Government: a failure to tackle poverty and inequality, support for Trump and Israel, legal attacks on human rights, shadowing Reform’s policy on immigration and so on.  The resulting loss of tens of thousands of members and local representatives means that the Labour Party has been hollowed out. Today it is less of a movement of activists in touch with communities and more a Party of time-serving politicians and bureaucrats many of whom owe allegiance to Starmer, and, until recently. McSweeney.

But now the Starmer project is falling apart. Ironically it is a victim of its own toxic culture and modus operandi. Having won a massive electoral majority due to the vagaries of the UK electoral system – an unprecedented 412 seats based on only 34% of the vote – the project seemed to have gamed the system via McSweeney’s strategy of making vague promises about ‘change’ and shadowing the right to avoid being outflanked.

With a Cabinet packed with loyalists it became easy to ‘fix’ the political agenda as required. Housing Secretary Steve Reed makes numerous appearances in The Fraud as a close long-term ally of McSweeney. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud and many others also feature, with links to and funding from Labour Together. The Cabinet – mainly a Starmer Project clique – embraced big business and proceeded to implement a programme of neo-liberal austerity – some of the worst aspects only abandoned because of protests by community groups and concern within the PLP – but still mainly intact.

On migration the approach was to mimic Reform. On foreign policy it was to appease Trump and support Israel’s destruction of Gaza – with minor ‘reservations’, while continuing to supply arms and even undermining civil liberties by proscribing Palestine Action. 

The decision to appoint Mandelson as US Ambassador was intended to help fix and solidify the relationship with Trump. It too must have seemed a ‘clever’ thing to do, another great plan of the ‘Starmer Project’. Of course, Starmer and McSweeney already knew all the key things about Mandelson’s past and McSweeney was a friend of his. As with the Starmer Project’s previous machinations and fixes, they thought they could easily get away with it, and the Cabinet was mainly tame and acquiescent. 

You would have thought that the ‘great strategist’ McSweeney might have identified the gathering storm around the Epstein files in the US and backed off.  Apparently not – a gross error that led to his own demise and could well finish off Sir Keir. These kinds of ‘mistakes’ happen when you have a political project which is devoid of diversity and any real democratic checks and balances, where differing opinions are not represented, let alone heard and respected, where real decisions are made behind closed doors.  

Starmer should never have appointed Mandelson – it was his own decision and mistake. Once further information about Mandelson’s activities were revealed in the Epstein files, Starmer should have resigned on the basis of incompetence and bringing the Labour Party and Government into disrepute. Instead, he threw McSweeney overboard and decided to cling on and fight to the bitter end. 

While there will be further investigations and revelations around the Mandelson appointment, we have sufficient ‘evidence’ to demand that Starmer sets a timetable for resignation. One that is acceptable to the Labour Party, that ensures an orderly succession.  We need an election process based on democratic procedures and principles which cannot be manipulated by a small clique as it was in 2020. Candidates will need to be open and transparent about their political programme and any previous association with McSweeney and the ‘Starmer Project’.   

To survive, the Party needs radical change – to restore internal Party democracy and enhance the diversity of views. We need an independent investigation into the ‘Starmer Project’ and Labour Together that holds the individual to account no matter what their current standing in the Party is.

Read Labour Hub’s interview with The Fraud author Paul Holden here. Read Bryn Griffiths’ introduction to his Labour Left Podcast interview with Paul Holden and watch the podcast here.  

 Frank Hansen is a former Councillor in the London Borough of Brent.

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