Starmer’s ‘Incredible’ Rise to Power

The system is rigged, writes Jonathan Cook. Everything about Starmer’s rise to power – and the media’s permanent incuriosity about how that rise was engineered – is incredible.

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

Few believe British prime minister Keir Starmer when he says he learnt only recently that Peter Mandelson, his political mentor in the Labour party, failed to receive the security clearance needed to be appointed as ambassador to the United States in late 2024.

Mandelson has become politically toxic since last September, when it became clearer how deeply he was connected to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – including the fact that, while in government in 2009 and 2010, Mandelson passed on insider information that would have been of considerable benefit to Epstein and others.

Starmer has been desperate to off-load responsibility, accusing Oliver Robbins, the then recently arrived top civil servant in the Foreign Office, of failing to tell him that Mandelson had been denied clearance.

Robbins, in turn, told a committee of MPs this week that by the time he took up his post the deal on Mandelson was done. Starmer’s office put “constant pressure” on his department to retroactively approve Mandelson’s appointment.

His testimony to a parliamentary committee suggests that, given the febrile climate in Westminster at the time, he may have been misled over what the vetting process had discovered in a bid to smooth Mandelson’s path to Washington.

These claims and counter-claims serve chiefly to obscure the central fact Starmer is either a liar or grossly incompetent.

Mandelson was sacked as ambassador last September over his ties to Epstein. Either Starmer failed to check on the politically explosive matter of Mandelson’s security clearance in the meantime, or, more likely, he did and has been “misleading” – that is, lying to – the media and parliament ever since.

As Starmer himself admitted to the House of Commons this week – to raucous laughter – the whole story sounds “incredible.”

In truth, everything about Starmer’s rise to power – and the media’s permanent incuriosity about how that rise was engineered – is incredible.

The deeply troubling backstory to Starmer’s political evolution is yet to be told by the establishment media. As critical as they currently are of his treatment of Mandelson, the media are telling only half the story – the surface part.

The prime minister’s political subservience and vulnerability to Mandelson – why Starmer was determined to promote him to the post of ambassador despite the all-too-conspicuous dangers – have gone largely unexamined by the media.

The answers are available elsewhere, such in investigative journalist Paul Holden’s recent book The Fraud, an examination of Starmer’s rise to power, which has still not been reviewed by a single mainstream publication.

Secret Operations

At the very least, the real story should have come to light when Mandelson, the grand old man of the Labour right, was arrested in February on suspicion of “misconduct in public office.” He is accused of passing on confidential market information, in his role as business secretary, to Epstein.

That followed the resignation weeks earlier of Morgan McSweeney, Mandelson’s protégé who propelled Starmer to high office. He was forced to quit as the prime minister’s chief of staff over his involvement in Mandelson’s appointment.

Around the same time, Josh Simons, then a minister in the Cabinet Office and a Starmer loyalist, was investigated – by the Cabinet Office – over revelations that he funded a covert smear campaign against journalists critical of Starmer.

Simons has since stepped down from the government.

There is a thread connecting all three figures – a thread that ties them intimately to Starmer and the current furore.

They were each essential to the operations of a shadowy think tank called Labour Together. It was founded in 2015 in the immediate wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader.

The group quickly strayed from its ostensible remit of uniting a party divided by Corbyn’s election between, on the one hand, hostile MPs and a hostile party bureaucracy and, on the other, the Labour membership. Labour Together’s real, covert task was to deepen those divisions.

With the help of rich donors, Labour Together created a secret slush fund worth at least £730,000 to wage a public relations war against Corbyn and the left – a campaign that was enthusiastically supported by the establishment media.

With Corbyn finally ousted, Labour Together then mounted a new operation, using those same funds, to deceive party members into crowning Starmer as leader on the basis he would continue Corbyn’s policies.

Following his election, Starmer immediately set about purging Labour of its left wing, driving down the record membership numbers brought in by Corbyn and relying instead on rich business donors.

Labour under Starmer became another party entirely captured by the business class. The Conservative and Reform parties were thereby given permission to hew even further to the right, to distinguish themselves from Labour.

Skating Close to Illegality

For the past decade, Labour politics has been a charade – and one that not only betrayed the values it publicly claimed to espouse but skated constantly close to illegality.

The Electoral Commission fined Labour Together for unlawful conduct after McSweeney repeatedly failed to abide by its warnings to declare the money wealthy benefactors were pouring into his slush fund.

This was not an oversight. It was because McSweeney did not want Labour Together’s activities – subverting the democratic process by using Big Money – to become public knowledge. The very nature of Labour Together’s anti-democratic agenda necessitated operating in the shadows.

It was for that reason that Corbyn called in February for an independent public inquiry into what he termed the “sinister operations” of Labour Together.

The government responded dismissively. But that is because, were the threads to unravel further, they would almost certainly lead directly to Starmer’s door.

Mandelson was one of the driving forces behind Labour Together, famously alluding to his role in a 2017 comment that “every day, I try to do something to save the Labour Party from his [Corbyn’s] leadership.”

That same year McSweeney took over the reins of Labour Together, using the undeclared funds to covertly character-assassinate Corbyn and then dupe Labour members into voting for his and Mandelson’s preferred candidate, Starmer.

In late 2023, a year after taking over Labour Together, Simons turned to the same character-assassination playbook developed by McSweeney.

This time, instead of smearing the Corbyn-supporting Labour left, he targeted a handful of journalists who had started to dig into the covert, and unlawful, operations behind Starmer’s rise to power.

Simons commissioned a report, codenamed Operation Cannon, into the journalists’ “backgrounds and motivations.” It claimed, without evidence, that these journalists had colluded in a supposed Kremlin-backed hack of the Electoral Commission.

Slush Fund

Simons went so far as to pass on this disinformation about the journalists to the National Cyber Security Centre, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), presumably so they could be investigated for breaching national security. Tellingly, the centre refused to get involved.

What Simons was up to is not hard to fathom. Labour Together was trying to create a British version of the U.S. Democratic party’s years-long, fruitless efforts to promote a “Russiagate” conspiracy theory that Donald Trump had colluded with the Kremlin to get elected.

The goal in both cases was similar.

The Democrats hoped to foreclose any examination of their incompetence and institutional corruption in losing the 2016 presidential election by attributing any such discussion to Russian disinformation.

Labour Together, meanwhile, wanted to shut down any examination by journalists of its own misdeeds by attributing them to Russian disinformation. The aim was to scare these journalists away from scrutinising Labour Together’s activities.

But the truth is the establishment media continue to have little appetite for the bigger Labour Together story, even though its journalists have known about the group’s illicit activities since at least 2021, when the Electoral Commission issued its fine for 20 breaches of electoral law.

More likely, some in the media knew what was going on even earlier, when McSweeney and others close to Starmer were ignoring Electoral Commission demands that the slush fund money be declared.

The media are still resolutely refusing to join the dots – and continuing to allow Labour Together to hide in the shadows, even though it has a starring role in this and the Mandelson story.

The reporting of McSweeney’s fall solely concerns his poor judgement in promoting Mandelson to the U.S. ambassadorship, not about his unlawful behaviour as head of Labour Together.

The reporting of Mandelson’s fall is about his alleged insider trading with Epstein, not about his conniving with Labour Together to undermine the democratic process.

The investigation of Simons is attributed personally to his poor judgment in financing a report against journalists, rather than the fact that this smear campaign was entirely of a piece with Labour Together’s activities over many years.

In an uncritical BBC report last month Simons claimed only that he had been “naïve” in colluding in the smearing of the journalists rather than concede that it was Labour Together’s modus operandi.

In so far as Labour Together has been mentioned in this story, it is only because it provided the pot of money Simons used to target journalists who had fallen foul of Starmer.

Tellingly, Simons alludes to his and Labour Together’s real agenda in the BBC account, telling the state broadcaster that he acted – to damage the reputation of journalists – out of fear that their reporting “might be used to retell the story of the antisemitism crisis that happened under [Labour] and to downplay it.”

In truth, this decade-long campaign desperately needs retelling – in a way that makes clear how the Labour right, backed by establishment media like the BBC, weaponised antisemitism to oust Corbyn.

Not suprisingly, outlets like the BBC are not likely to dig deeper to reveal what really took place.

Media Cover-Up

Instead, the media are treating these episodes as individual failings rather than evidence of institutional capture of the Labour party by the Epstein class and its hangers-on.

Labour Together emerged as an exercise in democracy subversion to stop a socialist gaining power. And it then continued as an exercise in democracy subversion to install permanent guardrails against the Labour party ever being led by anyone other than a placeman, like Starmer, for the billionaires.

The point was to make British politics a simulacrum of U.S. politics: two main parties representing – and ensuring the permanent rule of – the super-rich, and mirroring minor internal differences in their perceptions of how to best safeguard their class interests.

All of this happened in full view over the past decade. But it was impossible to get it into the mainstream.

Even at this stage, the real story is not being allowed to break through. Because it would expose not just corruption at the heart of the British political system but at the heart of the British media system too.

The state and billionaire-owned media was happy to see democracy covertly subverted if it ensured Corbyn would be prevented from winning power. And the media was equally pleased to promote the Starmer cabal as gatekeepers over who would be allowed to lead the Labour party.

There was a shared interest in entrenching how the system was rigged.

Anyone who doubts that the media has been deepy complicit in the cover-up of Labour Together’s activities should recall that there were journalists – and others – reporting on Labour’s dismantling of internal democracy to preclude the emergence of any kind of meaningful political choice. However, they were denied mainstream attention.

The internal plotting against Corbyn was first highlighted in 2017 by Al Jazeera’s three-part undercover investigation The Israel Lobby, which showed how an Israeli embassy official, Shai Masot, was covertly working with the rightwing Labour factions to use antisemitism to destroy the party leader.

Three years later, as Corbyn stepped down, a cache of internal Labour party documents were leaked showing that the party bureaucracy – loyal to the Mandelson wing – conspired to bring about Corbyn’s downfall. It even prioritized his destruction over winning the closely fought 2017 general election.

Starmer appointed a KC, Martin Forde, to investigate the leak – chiefly, it seems to identify who was responsible and punish them.

Forde would later admit that Starmer’s team had obstructed his work and tried to endlessly delay the report. But when it was finally published in summer 2022, Forde confirmed what was already obvious: that the Labour right had waged a dirty factional war against Corbyn and the left of the party, weaponising antisemitism to tar them.

Months later, Al Jazeera would air a second, four-part investigation, The Labour Files, showing how the party’s right wing – loyal to Mandelson and McSweeney – purged the party’s left wing based in most cases on false accusations, fabrications, misrepresentations and smears.

The documentary fully justified one victim of those purges describing the past few years in Labour as a “criminal conspiracy against its members.”

All of this happened unreported by the media.

The revelation in The Israel Lobby documentary that Labour had been infiltrated by an Israeli spy with the active collusion of sections of its members and MPs to take down a potential prime minister provoked no political or media debate.

The follow-up disclosures in the leaked Labour internal review, the Forde Report and The Labour Files have similarly dropped off the radar, even as the story they tell is the only way to make sense of the serial falls of McSweeney, Mandelson, Simons and, soon, Starmer.

Facts Buried

Similarly, Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, which brings the unlawful activities of Labour Together sharply into focus, is being ignored rather than mined for details of what has really happening in British politics over the past decade.

These resources have all been buried, even as the Mandelson furore fully justifies their vigorous excavation.

There is good reason. Because the plan is to roll out the same, anti-democratic playbook against the Green Party and its leader Zack Polanski, because he is seen as another Corbyn-like figure who refuses to bow down before the Epstein class and rejects the warmongering, money-laundering, resource-grabbing exploits of the western war machine posturing as a NATO “defence” alliance.

Polanski is Jewish, but the signs are already there that this will not stop the same charlatans who defamed Corbyn from “outing” Polanski as an “antisemite.”

It can happen again because the same media that colluded in Starmer’s rise by engineering Corbyn’s downfall will once again do their duty and defend the interests of the billionaire class.

The system is rigged – and the people rigging it are not about to draw our attention to the reality of what they have been up to.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.

This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.