Review of The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy by Paul Holden (OR Books, 2025).
It was Thursday, June 8, 2017, and barely a mile away, Big Ben was striking ten o’clock. Everyone gathered in UK Labour’s campaign headquarters in Westminster was watching a single big screen, waiting for the BBC news to announce its general election exit poll. As the news broadcaster said “No overall majority,” there was a collective gasp followed by whoops and high fives. Over the next few hours, the actual results proved the poll right: Labour, led by Jeremy Corbyn, had defied predictions of a Conservative landslide and reduced them to only 317 of the 650 seats.
It would take the incumbent prime minister, Theresa May, nearly a month to complete a shabby deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) that allowed her to cling to power. Had Labour added a further seven seats to its net gain of thirty, the ten DUP MPs could not have saved May, and Corbyn — as leader of the next largest party with 262 seats — would have been entitled by precedent to attempt to form a government.
That prospect was anathema not only to Labour’s normal political enemies but also to Corbyn’s opponents within the party, many of whom still controlled its bureaucracy and bank accounts. The team running the election campaign — including myself — were only too aware of this; the Labour right had been attempting to undermine Corbyn since he was first elected leader in 2015. Even during the campaign itself, we had continually faced obstruction internally as well as leaks and smears that could only have come from insiders.
This created an atmosphere of suspicion. We didn’t…
Auteur: Steve Howell
