Labour rebels have told the British Prime Minister he must sack his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, “the most powerful unelected official in British politics”, as a new report underlines an emerging pattern of the censorious mandarin’s war against journalism.

Morgan McSweeney, an “essential” part of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s team, has again been linked to an effort to get at journalists, with new claims that his Labour Together pressure group paid a company to dig dirt after a news article revealing misconduct over political spending was published in 2023. The allegations come with astonishing timing, arriving as they do as rebels within the Labour Party demand Starmer sack McSweeney for the role he’s said to have played in making disgraced, Epstein-linked Labour grandee Peter Mandelson the British Ambassador to the United States.

These new claims come weeks after other claimed revelations about McSweeney, that he created astroturfed campaign groups, cutouts for Labour Together, to destroy news outlets dangerous to his campaign to get Labour back into government. Those titles targeted included the Sleeping Giants-like campaign to defund Breitbart News.

Allegations published by investigation group Democracy For Sale and reported by The Guardian and The Financial Times states Labour Together, the campaign group that guided now-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to power, say Labour Together paid to spy on journalists holding the group to account and their sources.  The report claimed to have found:

Labour Together paid a controversial PR firm at least £30,000 to investigate journalists that were digging into how its undeclared funding bankrolled Keir Starmer’s successful Labour leadership campaign… McSweeney had failed to declare £730,000 in donations to his think tank between 2017 and 2020. The money paid for polling and campaigning powered Starmer’s rise to the Labour leadership.

The story, bylined by Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, was filled with serious accusations. At its core, is that McSweeney had intentionally kept Labour Together’s donors secret so the think tank would look like a humble, grassroots initiative when in fact it was a well-funded vehicle to take over the party.

Democracy For Sale states Jon Cruddas, a prominent Labour politician presently out in the cold as he is not part of the New Labour clique of Starmer, McSweeney, and Mandelson, responded to the “shocking “allegations that the group was digging dirt on journalists and remarked: “I have heard of black briefings, but never heard of anything like this… This is dark shit.”

The report makes clear the big-money project to get at the sources of journalists unveiling uncomfortable information about the Starmer campaign machine took place after McSweeney left Labour Together, hanging the organisation to Josh Simons. Simons is now a Member of Parliament, and the government minister responsible for Starmer’s Orwellian push to roll out digital ID. Nevertheless, it stated, McSweeney was “aware ” of the plot and The Guardian went further, reporting a Labour source who said: “There was never any distance between Labour Together and Morgan, even after he left.”

Nevertheless, per Democracy For Sale, the £30,000 memo produced for Labour Together by London consultancy APCO did allegedly attempted to “discredit” the journalist who made revelations about McSweeney’s censorious campaign against dissident news outlets including Breitbart, and explored “leverage” that could be used against him.

These claims come, with remarkably precise timing, as calls from within the Labour Party — the only body in the UK that can really hold the Starmer government to account outside of the five-year election cycle — for the Prime Minister to sack McSweeney to save his own leadership. It is claimed that while Starmer ultimately picked scandal-hit Mandelson to be Britain’s ambassador to the U.S., it was McSweeney who pressed for him to be the preferred candidate.

The Daily Telegraph notes Labour insiders have been blunt in their demands, telling Starmer to drop McSweeney or face a leadership challenge. Labour MP Karl Turner is reported to have said:

The Prime Minister has a choice to make. If he doesn’t sack Morgan McSweeney, who has bullied and briefed against Members of Parliament, Cabinet ministers and ministers in a savage way for the last two years, he will be challenged… The Prime Minister, I’ve just texted him this, needs to sack McSweeney now. This minute. And then there’s no f——challenge. No challenge. Sack him now, this minute.

Another Labour MP, Jon Tirckett, said “No 10 needs to be cleared out. The Government needs to change direction”. Earlier, Karl Tuner MP — again, a Labour member — had added his voice, saying again that it was a choice between Starmer or McSweeney. He said:

If the prime minister decides that he has to be surrounded by advisers who give him shoddy advice, I think the reality of that will end in the prime minister having to be making a decision about his future at some point soon… If McSweeney continues in No 10 Downing Street, I think the PM is up against it in a way that he doesn’t need to be.

While such criticisms have been circling for days, it is significant that MPs are now willing to go on the record with their own names, rather than as anonymous briefers as on Wednesday.