{"id":158139,"date":"2025-09-24T20:07:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T20:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/158139\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T20:07:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T20:07:07","slug":"labour-says-starmers-2020-leadership-campaign-paid-mcsweeney-salary-morgan-mcsweeney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/158139\/","title":{"rendered":"Labour says Starmer\u2019s 2020 leadership campaign paid McSweeney salary | Morgan McSweeney"},"content":{"rendered":"

Labour has clarified that Morgan McSweeney\u2019s salary was paid by Keir Starmer\u2019s leadership campaign in 2020, after fresh attacks from the Conservatives on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

The Tories have called for a parliamentary investigation into whether Starmer failed to declare support \u2013 including staffing costs \u2013 from the campaign group Labour<\/a> Together for his leadership campaign.<\/p>\n

Between 2017 and 2020 McSweeney was director of Labour Together, which began as a vehicle to prevent the Labour party from splitting under Jeremy Corbyn. After Corbyn stepped down after losing the 2019 general election, McSweeney ran Starmer\u2019s campaign to become Labour leader.<\/p>\n

Companies House records state that McSweeney remained director of Labour Together until April 2020, when Starmer won the leadership contest. At that point McSweeney became a senior aide to Starmer, first in opposition and then in government.<\/p>\n

Kevin Hollinrake, the chair of the Conservative party, said McSweeney\u2019s role in Starmer\u2019s campaign should have been declared as a donation from Labour Together in the parliamentary register, as he called for an investigation. \u201cDonations or support in kind to MPs from members\u2019 associations must be declared \u2013 yet \u2018nothing to see here Keir\u2019 completely failed to do so,\u201d Hollinrake said.<\/p>\n

But Labour said McSweeney\u2019s salary was paid by Starmer\u2019s campaign for the duration that he worked for it, and therefore his participation did not need to be declared as a donation.<\/p>\n

A Labour source said: \u201cMorgan\u2019s salary was paid for by Keir\u2019s leadership campaign for the duration of the campaign, not Labour Together. Neither Keir nor his leadership campaign accepted monetary or in-kind donations from Labour Together during the leadership election.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hollinrake wrote to the Electoral Commission last week demanding a fresh investigation into Labour Together\u2019s declarations while McSweeney was running it.<\/p>\n

The watchdog fined Labour Together \u00a314,250 over its handling of almost \u00a3740,000 in donations in 2021. The group blamed an \u201cadmin error\u201d for its late declarations, which were only made after McSweeney\u2019s departure from the organisation.<\/p>\n

Last week, the Conservatives<\/a> released a leaked email from the Labour lawyer Gerald Shamash in which he advised Labour Together \u201cto be seen as transparent as possible\u201d in the matter. He wrote that there was \u201cno easy way to explain how Labour Together finds itself in this situation\u201d, and that \u201cif Labour Together cannot deal substantively with questions I pose then perhaps [it is] simply best to base our case as to the non-reporting down as admin error\u201d.<\/p>\n

This was in response to McSweeney\u2019s apparent claim that he had been told by the Electoral Commission early in 2018 that Labour Together did not need to declare its donations. But Shamash warned that neither the commission nor Labour Together had any record of such a conversation.<\/p>\n

The Tories have claimed that Labour Together used a \u201cfalse excuse\u201d of administrative errors.<\/p>\n

The Electoral Commission has not reopened its investigation but is understood to be assessing whether any of the information published in recent days materially changes its original assessment, with the aim of arriving at a conclusion by the end of this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Labour has clarified that Morgan McSweeney\u2019s salary was paid by Keir Starmer\u2019s leadership campaign in 2020, after fresh…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158140,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-158139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}