Well that was decisive. Andy Burnham won Thursday’s by-election by the proverbial landslide. Inevitably the last 24 hours have been filled with instant analysis of what it all means. But there’s one person I really wanted to hear from: John McTernan.

McTernan was director of political operations under Tony Blair, among many other roles in the party, and is one of the sharpest commentators around on Labour. So I was delighted when he agreed to write for Democracy for Sale about how progressive politics beat Nigel Farage and Reform in Makerfield - and can do so again.

Hope won the day for Burnham

By John McTernan

The King in the North is marching south triumphantly. Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield was so decisive that it exposes the hollowness of Keir Starmer’s position as prime minister.

While before the by-election defiance from No 10 was understandable as a delaying tactic, now it is seen for what it is - delusional. The numbers don’t lie. Starmer has halved the Labour vote nationally during his two years of leadership, while Burnham doubled Labour’s vote share in just the six weeks since the local elections.

It wasn’t even close. ‘Andy For Us’, as the campaign was branded, stormed home in Makerfield with 55 per cent of the vote and a majority of 9,000 over Reform - itself larger than the entire vote won by Rupert Lowe’s Restore, the insurgent on Farage’s right. The turnout was higher than the general election and Labour’s vote was higher in this by-election than in 2024.

The last time Labour increased both its share and its raw number of votes while defending a seat in government was six decades ago, when Kevin McNamara held Hull North in 1966 - a result that encouraged Harold Wilson to call the general election that gave Labour its landslide. The vote share of the Greens and the Lib Dems plummeted as their supporters voted Labour against Reform.

The message is clear - Labour can beat Reform and beat them decisively. But the key to this is being seen clearly as the leader of the ‘progressive bloc’ in UK politics.

At the moment, British politics has as many viable political parties as a European country, but without proportional representation. Reform, Restore and the Conservatives are in the right bloc with Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens on the progressive side.

In an evenly split six party contest, 17 per cent is a plurality. Which is why Reform were predicted as easy winners of the next general election - before this week’s by-election in Makerfield. Farage’s 26 per cent support in national polls was a political ‘category killer’ when Labour were losing votes to both them and to the Greens.

This by-election was a mirror image to the one in Gorton and Denton earlier in the year. There, Starmer barred Burnham from standing and immediately ceded to the Greens the position of progressive party best placed to defeat Reform.

That victory gave the Greens credibility and momentum which took them to stunning wins across England. It was also the beginning of the slow death of Starmer’s authority within the Labour party. Authority which disappeared completely when the result was announced.

Standing in Makerfield was a high-risk strategy for Burnham. This is Reform heartland - not just one of their target seats, but what should be one of their dozen or so safest seats if they aspire to form a government. Makerfield, remember, voted 50 per cent Reform and only 27 per cent Labour in the local elections six weeks ago. The blow to Farage’s ambitions will be substantial.

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The next round of MRP polls - the seat-by-seat polling predictions - will show Reform going backwards. Partly because a swing on this scale puts many Labour MPs back in the lead locally, but also because a split on the right - caused by the rising popularity of Restore. Just as Andy Burnham unites the progressive bloc behind Labour, so Rupert Lowe splinters the regressive one.

That leads to the most obvious implication of this result - Labour’s leadership election is over before it even formally started. Consider this a primary in which Andy Burnham emerged as the only candidate who can win the convention.

The question is not if Starmer hands over to Burnham but when. The most dangerous place in politics is standing between an MP and their re-election and that is where the prime minister is now.

Starmer should meet Andy Burnham on Monday - in the prime minister’s office in the Commons, not Downing Street - to agree a smooth and dignified transition. That prevents a brutal battle within Labour - and stops Starmer being humiliated, which would be an awful ending for the man who overturned a Tory landslide with one of his own. It also allows for Burnham’s team to have access to civil servants to develop a full-blown plan for turning ‘Manchesterism’ into a transformative project for the UK.

Hope won the day for Andy Burnham in Makerfield, now optimism is back as the currency of UK politics. Two years of miserabilism will be banished in as many months, a turning point to welcome.

John McTernan is a writer, commentator and former Labour party adviser.

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Nigel Farage doesn’t seem to want to answer questions about his money. The Reform leader has scaled back press events amid scrutiny over an undisclosed £5million gift from Thai-based crypto tycoon Christopher Harborne.

But while Farage has ducked questions about his finances, Democracy for Sale has found that the Reform leader’s personal service company is breaking UK companies law.

Farage has used Thorn in the Side Ltd to receive payments for his numerous second jobs, including more than £700,000 for presenting on GB News since he became an MP in 2024.

But Thorn in the Side – of which Farage is the sole director – has missed a deadline to file a confirmation statement with Companies House. Farage has also failed to verify his identity as required by law. Farage’s company had until May 25 to file these documents.

A confirmation statement is a yearly report of key company details and must be filed within 14 days of the annual deadline. Failure to do so is a criminal offence and can lead to directors being prosecuted and the company being struck off the register.

Under the 2023 Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, company directors also have to verify their identity. Again, not complying with identity verification requirements on time is an offence.

When Democracy for Sale pointed out Farage’s breaches of company law, a Reform spokesperson said: “This is being rectified immediately.”

Thorn in the Side is Farage’s vehicle for “media, speaking, journalism and other services”, according to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

In January, Thorn in the Side changed its registered address from Leigh on Sea in Essex to 49 Upper Brook Street in London. This is the address of Candy Capital, the privately-held family office established by Reform fundraiser and donor Nick Candy.

Farage’s company has just one employee – the Reform leader – but is cash-rich. Thorn in the Side had £1,967,406 in cash for the year ended May 31, 2025, according to its most recent company accounts.

As well as being paid by GB News through Thorn in the Side, the Reform leader owns close to 500,000 shares in the loss-making broadcaster through his company.

Farage also owns shares in cryptocurrency outfit Stack BTC PLC through Thorn in the Side, according to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Land registry documents show that Farage owns property through the company, too. The politician purchased a coastal property in Greatstone, Kent, via his firm for £575,000 in March 2023. A renovation project could transform it into a “substantial contemporary coastal home” worth up to £1.5million, according to the Mirror.

Reform UK’s leader also purchased a house in Lydd-on-Sea for £499,995 in 2020 through Thorn in the Side. The firm also owns a fishing boat, which is operated by his son Tom Farage.

Farage’s personal finances have come under scrutiny since the revelation that Reform mega-donor Christopher Harborne gave him £5m ahead of the 2024 general election. The money was not disclosed in Farage’s register of interests.

Just weeks after receiving the money from Harborne, Farage purchased a grade II-listed property in Surrey for £1.4m in cash. The purchase was not made through Thorn in the Side, and analysis in the Financial Times found that the money was unlikely to have come from the company, which still has almost £2m in cash.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is currently investigating Farage’s £5m donation from Harborne. He has denied breaking any rules.

Responding to our story today, a Labour Party spokesperson said: “Nigel Farage’s finances are already murky, and this latest development will not reassure the public that he is getting his affairs in order.

“From his secret £5 million “gift”, questions over who paid for his Clacton house, and the lack of transparency over his use of his donor’s private planes and choppers – Farage is embroiled in scandals on various fronts.

“Farage isn’t on the side of ordinary working people – he’s just in it for himself.”

Leader of the Green Party in Parliament, Ellie Chowns MP said: “How could we ever trust someone who can’t even run his own company correctly to run the country responsibly? Nigel “nine-jobs” Farage’s personal company is awash with money from his various side hustles that he clearly prefers to serving his constituents.

“Earlier this year he went eleven weeks without turning up for a single vote in Parliament. A majority of the public think that MPs should not have second jobsl. Politics should be about public service not lining your pockets.”

At Democracy for Sale we’re dedicated to uncovering dark money and hidden influence wherever we find it.

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When I was nine years old something magical happened. Ireland qualified for the World Cup. For the first time in our history, the boys in green were playing on football’s biggest stage.

I still think back to Italia ‘90. The sticker album. The replica shirt. That Packie Bonner penalty save. The warm tears that poured when we lost in the quarter finals.

I thought I’d always love the World Cup. But this week I realised that I don’t anymore.

Sure it was great to see the scenes from Mexico City on Thursday’s opening game. But I can’t ignore the dark reality: the Somalian referee and head of the Palestinian football association both denied entry to the US; the rip-off prices; the craven Fifa peace prize for Donald Trump.

This is a MAGA World Cup. But it’s also a product of how Fifa has mutated from being a corrupt organisation to a dangerous one that increasingly exists to serve the interests of authoritarian leaders and states.

In recent days I found myself wondering how football changed, why, and whether we can ever get our World Cup back.

So this week I invited Nick McGeehan onto Democracy for Sale. He is an expert in football corruption and director of FairSquare, a human rights group that has launched a campaign for Fifa reform.

The World Cup, as McGeehan explains, is a massive money spinner for Fifa. The association has said that it expects to generate around $3 billion in ticket sales from this month’s tournament – more than four times the ticket revenue from the 2022 Qatar World Cup.

This money is then dispersed across Fifa’s more than 200 member associations. That might sound very egalitarian – the football association of Curaçao, the smallest nation to qualify for the World Cup, would struggle to survive without this cash injection – but the money buys Fifa president Gianni Infantino his power.

“What we’ve seen is more money flowing to bolster [Infantino’s] patronage system,” McGeehan says. “It all comes down to the fact that power is centralised in the hands of the president. And he just breaks the rules whenever he wants to.”

Fifa has a strict political neutrality policy, and yet Infantino has regularly voiced his support for MAGA policies and invented the spurious peace prize specially for Trump. Earlier this week, Infantino was named in a criminal corruption complaint filed by former UEFA boss Michel Platini.

In many ways, such problems are baked into Fifa’s structure. When England won the World Cup in 1966, Fifa was presided over by Stanley Rous, a patrician former schoolmaster who had a tiny backroom team.

It was only in the 1970s, as sponsors such as Coca-Cola and Adidas saw the huge marketing opportunity, that the World Cup was transformed into a global, colour-televised and commercialised spectacle.

Fifa is still a not-for-profit under Swiss law, but it is run as a global business without any of the transparency of a publicly listed company.

“So the governance structure has remained the same. Fifa is not set up to be able to handle all this revenue that they’re generating,” McGeehan says.

Corruption has flourished. Ironically, when Infantino was elected president a decade ago he was seen as the anti-corruption candidate in the wake of repeated scandals under his predecessor Sepp Blatter, including a rigged vote that awarded the World Cup to Russia and Qatar.

In the early days, Infantino brought in some reforms – like creating a human rights committee – but the changes were ‘cosmetic’, says McGeehan. The deaths of migrant workers in Qatar, for example, were brushed aside.

Instead, Infantino has become a very public reputation launderer for some of the world’s most corrupt and violent regimes.

The Fifa president has cosied up to Putin, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and, most brazenly, Donald Trump. In the process, Fifa has gone from an organisation riddled with a culture of brown envelopes to an active participant in the spread of authoritarianism.

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So what can be done? Is the 2026 World Cup so nakedly corrupt that something will have to change?

There are some positive signs. The Attorneys General of New York, New Jersey, Texas and California have launched a joint investigation into Fifa’s ticketing and pricing practices.

McGeehan thinks now – at the World Cup’s darkest hour – could be the moment for change. FairSquare has launched Reboot, a campaign aimed at reforming Fifa, which gives the general public the opportunity to add their names to an ethics complaint against Infantino for repeated and serious breaches of Fifa rules.

“This tournament and the massive amounts of frustration and anger that we’ve seen because of Infantino’s behaviour and Fifa’s behaviour is potentially a tipping point,” McGeehan told me.

“Politicians in countries that say they care about football are allowing this sort of corruption and misgovernance to fester. At some point there is going to be a politician out there – and hopefully there’ll be a few of them – who will actually see that there is political gain to be made by taking this organisation on.”

Thirty-six years after I fell in love with the World Cup, I really hope McGeehan is right. The people’s game should belong to all of us, not just the kleptocrats and autocrats.

At Democracy for Sale we’re dedicated to uncovering dark money and hidden influence wherever we find it.

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By Peter Geoghegan and Khadija Sharife

Josh Simons has had a good couple of weeks. The former Cabinet Office minister - forced to resign over his role in hiring a PR firm to investigate journalists critical of Labour Together - is now being praised for standing aside as Makerfield MP to clear the path for Andy Burnham.

Simons is reportedly “across everything” in Burnham’s campaign and is hotly tipped for a top role in any future administration led by the Greater Manchester Mayor. There’s even talk of a seat in the House of Lords.

But not everyone is so enamoured with Simons.

Democracy for Sale can report that days after Simons resigned from the Cabinet Office - following revelations in this newsletter - he received a legal letter on behalf of the PR firm he had paid more than £30,000 to investigate journalists reporting on Labour Together’s undeclared political donations.

In the lawyer’s letter, reported here for the first time and reproduced below, APCO Worldwide privately accused Simons of making “misleading statements” about his role in the scandal and of changing his story in ways that were “wrong in numerous important respects” - and even of suggesting APCO could do more work for Labour Together.

Simons, you might recall, refused to answer our questions when the story broke. But, as pressure grew, on February 11 the then Cabinet Office minister broke his silence, saying that he had hired APCO to investigate “a suspected illegal hack” of Labour Together information that was fed to “pro-Kremlin journalists”.

He claimed the PR firm had been asked to look at Paul Holden and Matt Taibbi but had “extended far beyond the contract I agreed with them.” After APCO filed reports which included conspiracy theories and speculation about the ethnicity and political beliefs of journalists including the Sunday Times’s Gabriel Pogrund, Simons said he was “deeply distressed and furious.”

But that account has now been refuted by the very PR firm he hired.

In a letter from its solicitors Withers dated March 2, APCO privately told Simons: “You did not indicate any distress or fury to APCO; on the contrary, you stated the report was incredibly useful and indicated that you were keen to continue stay [sic] in touch as APCO might be able to help with other upcoming issues.”

APCO’s work was led by Tom Harper, a former Sunday Times journalist. The legal letter states that Simons told Harper in an email that his “report was incredibly useful” and added: “I’m keen to keep talking as there are a few things in teh [sic] pipeline we might want to pick with you, if you’d be open to that?” Simons also directed Labour Together’s operations team to pay APCO’s invoice as soon as possible.

Rather than raising concerns about the report’s contents, Simons sent it to GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, urging them to investigate a Russian hack - for which there was no evidence.

Ciaran Martin, who led the NCSC until 2020, told Democracy for Sale that politicians claiming to have been hacked need to back up their claims. “If someone does go public with a claim that they’ve been hacked, whether or not they’ve reported it to the NCSC, but don’t provide any evidence, they should expect the media and others to call out the lack of supporting evidence.”

“Inconsistent with the facts”

APCO did not just dispute Simons’ February 11 statement. His version of events, it said, had “evolved” in the two weeks before his resignation - in ways that were “inconsistent with the facts”.

In his resignation letter to Keir Starmer on February 28, Simons said he “did not know” that the Sunday Times’s Harry Yorke and Henry Dyer of the Guardian had been targeted by APCO, and that once he saw the “reprehensible material” about Pogrund “I took immediate action and removed it.”

APCO flatly rejected this. “No such indication was given to APCO. You did not raise a complaint or objection to the work product delivered. On the contrary, you described it as ‘incredibly useful’ and stated a desire to continue to work with APCO. Your statement ‘What happened subsequently was wrong’ in your resignation letter is inconsistent with your statements to APCO and actions at the time.”

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The letter also noted that “APCO’s engagement commissioned and approved by you sought to understand the information underlying a news article and then-upcoming published works and was not limited to the writings of the two journalists mentioned in the scope.”

APCO’s letter ended with a warning. “APCO does invite you to consider the contents of this letter carefully. APCO reserves the right to correct any future statements that are inconsistent with the facts and set out what it regards as mischaracterisations.”

The letter also acknowledged that as an MP, Simons was protected by parliamentary privilege - but made clear that protection did not extend beyond the chamber.

After the story broke, Harper told an APCO contractor to “get rid of” evidence of its work for Labour Together and asked whether a Proton Mail account set up in a false name to transmit the report could be deleted without forensic detection.

Harper has since left APCO. His wife, Caroline Wheeler, was until earlier this year political editor at the Sunday Times - where some of the journalists targeted by APCO were based. Morgan McSweeney, who previously ran Labour Together, also met Harper and was briefed on APCO’s work.

Last month, Labour Together - which has rebranded as ThinkLabour - told Democracy for Sale that its work with APCO was “indefensible”. APCO said it was conducting “an ongoing review of the Project” and is “likely to make some changes”.

What happens next?

The emergence of APCO’s legal letter has prompted renewed calls for a full investigation and fresh questions about Simons’ role in Burnham’s Makerfield campaign.

Green MP Siân Berry said the letter shows “APCO’s account of Josh Simons’ earlier enthusiastic endorsement of its work to investigate journalists who were deemed a threat to Labour Together is clearly at odds with his claims. A full investigation is needed now to determine if Josh Simons broke the Ministerial Code by failing to give accurate and truthful information.”

Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake said the letter “confirms what we all suspected. Josh Simons had full knowledge of APCO’s efforts to undermine journalists and attack their integrity.” He added: “Andy Burnham must now make clear whether he intends to give Simons any role in his Downing Street team and whether he condones this behaviour.”

Democracy for Sale contacted Josh Simons and Andy Burnham’s team with a full list of questions. Neither has responded.

Withers To Simons Letter

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By Sue Hawley and Tim Picton

British politics has a big problem. A big money problem.

This week’s Electoral Commission data revealed over £20m was donated to political parties by individuals and companies in the first three months of 2026. That is a 215% increase on the total value of donations made in the same period last year.

Half of these donations came from just nine sources. But perhaps most strikingly, £7m out of the £20m - over a third - came from just two crypto billionaires, Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo - and went to one party: Reform.

Mega donors aren’t entirely new to British politics. Over an 18 month period leading up to the 2024 general election, Frank Hester and his company the Phoenix Partnership donated £20m to the Conservative Party.

The Labour Party isn’t immune to multi-million pound donations either - having received around £10m from the major unions during the same period and a £4m one-off donation from the offshore-based hedge fund, Quadrature Capital.

But the ever-increasing arms race on multi-million pound donations is deeply corrosive to our democracy. And there are no guardrails to stop it spiralling even further.

In the UK there is no limit to how much a person can donate - something that was driven home by Elon Musk’s recent threat to donate $100 million to Reform before he fell out with Farage. There is a possibility that Musk might still donate to Restore Britain - Rupert Lowe’s party that has called for ‘reverse mass immigration’ and which has received Musk’s public backing.

Huge donations don’t just skew the electoral playing field in favour of those parties and candidates with wealthy backers. They also risk the capture of a whole party and its policy agenda by a few individuals.

Almost two-thirds of Reform’s donations have come from crypto-related businessmen. Completely coincidentally, Reform has been the only opposition party to propose a light touch and welcoming regulatory regime for crypto firms.

Big money is damaging to public trust in democracy. No wonder the British public largely believes that politics is just for the wealthy and those with privileged access.

The good news is that the public don’t like it and want change - a new poll released this week from Fair Vote UK shows that 92% of voters would support some kind of cap on donations.

And the even better news is that the government can do something about it.

The Representation of the People Bill currently before parliament introduces a sweeping package of measures aimed at shielding our democracy from foreign interference and the inflows of illicit finance.

Following the independent review into foreign interference in UK politics by Philip Rycroft, the government has adopted some of his most ambitious recommendations with immediate effect, including a moratorium on donations made in cryptocurrency and a £100,000 donation cap for overseas electors.

Questions are rightly being asked by campaigners about why the government is prepared to apply a £100,000 cap on overseas electors, and not British ones - particularly after one of Reform’s crypto-billionaire donors pointedly moved back to the UK to show just how absurd this distinction is.

So far, the government has shown signs of digging in on this, with Democracy Minister, Samantha Dixon, telling Parliament that a cap would be “a step too far.” But when the Bill comes back to Parliament there is going to be major pressure for the government to think again.

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There are already amendments down to the Bill which call for a review into donation caps, and more in the pipeline, with Labour backbencher, Alex Sobel flagging he will put down an amendment for a cap of £1 million. Given the Electoral Commission has said that a £1m cap “may have a limited impact on public confidence” it is likely other MPs will want to go further.

It is important that the UK gets this right. In the state of Victoria in Australia, a successful legal challenge to a recently imposed donation cap has resulted in the catastrophic voiding of all of its political finance regulations just before state elections this November.

Two of Reform’s donors have already said that they will challenge the UK government’s overseas donation cap in the courts. Ensuring that any cap has democratic legitimacy, and is accompanied by tight year-round spending limits is crucial to ensure they work and have buy-in from the public.

A cap on donations isn’t a silver bullet to completely restore public trust in politics but it is a critical step to show that the government is serious about making UK democracy fair again. There is now a once in a generation opportunity to prevent the UK sliding towards the US model of unchecked money in elections. This government cannot afford to bottle it.

Sue Hawley is executive director of Spotlight on Corruption. Tim Picton is Spotlight’s senior advocacy advisor.

It’s been a whirlwind week at Democracy for Sale. On Monday, we won Private Eye’s prestigious Paul Foot Award for our investigation into Labour Together hiring a PR firm to discredit journalists who were reporting on its undeclared political funding.

The Paul Foot is a pretty special award. It still feels extraordinary that the list of winners - which covers some of the biggest stories of the last 20 years, from Cambridge Analytica to Michelle Mone - now also includes Democracy for Sale!

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To mark this moment, I did a special live event with my colleague Isabelle Roughol, talking about the Labour Together investigation, where that is going next and what else we are working on.

More than 130 of you joined the live call, but many who couldn’t make it have got in touch asking if there is a video. I’m pleased to say that there is! (And it’s at the top of this email.)

As I told Isabelle, our winning investigation has already had a huge impact: Josh Simons, who hired APCO, resigned as a minister, and then an MP, triggering probably the most consequential by-election in decades, in Makerfield later this month.

It’s not just Simons. Labour Together has rebranded as ThinkLabour. APCO is under investigation by the PR trade body. Tom Harper, the former Sunday Times journalist who led the Labour Together campaign, has left APCO.

Each of these developments came directly from our reporting. But the story is not finished. There are still huge questions about who knew about APCO’s work, including Keir Starmer. The black ops PR industry operates without transparency or accountability.

We will continue reporting on this story. But we also have numerous other investigations we are working on, from Palantir in the British state and dark money to the funding of Nigel Farage and Reform and foreign interference in our politics.

We couldn’t do this work without the support of our readers. If you are a paid supporter, many thanks. You make this all happen.

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America’s attitude to drugs seems to be undergoing something of a revolution. Last month, Donald Trump signed an order to speed up a review of psychedelic drugs to treat mental health.

More than two dozen states have now legalised recreational marijuana for adults. When it comes to drugs, the US president is not alone in asking “can I have some, please?“

It all feels a far cry from the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan would reportedly open cabinet meetings by asking colleagues what each had done recently to fight the war on drugs.

The White House’s newfound fondness for drugs has been a boon, for some. Curaleaf has a market cap of over $1 billion. You might have seen the cannabis company’s adverts on the London underground.

But is this really the harbinger of a more enlightened era of drugs policy? Or is something less sanguine going on?

To find out, I invited Kojo Koram onto Democracy for Sale. Koram is a writer and academic whose last book, Uncommon Wealth, explored how Britain turned to privatisation, outsourcing and tax havens after the fall of the empire. (You can watch a video of an event we did together for Novara Media earlier this year here and follow his Substack .)

Koram’s new book, The Next Fix: the Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs, is ostensibly about a very different subject, but the connective tissue soon becomes clear. The same forces Koram tracked in Uncommon Wealth - the carving up of public goods into private markets, and the lobbyists and financiers who profit from it - are, he argues, now circling the global trade in drugs.

He also shows how imperialism itself was fuelled by drugs. As Koram explains, William Jardine - the founder of the still-extant Jardine Matheson - was “probably the most successful drug dealer in history.” Not only did he build a legal fortune selling opium, he even convinced the British government to wage war on China on his behalf.

The Opium War was followed by mass drug commercialisation. On British high streets, Victorian shoppers could buy laudanum over the counter. Heroin, first synthesised by an English chemist in 1874, was later commercialised and trademarked by German pharmaceutical giant Bayer.

Then came prohibition, criminalisation and mass incarceration. As Koram movingly recounts, he first became interested in US drugs policy as a young lawyer in Louisiana visiting inmates in the notorious state penitentiary, Angola.

“What I wanted to do in The Next Fix was really drill down on the changes that are happening at ground level, follow the people who have been campaigning and sacrificing for this change in drug laws,” Koram told me.

“But I also, whilst doing that investigation, started to trace how a lot of big capital is positioning itself to be the eventual winner of this massive regulatory change. So we’re talking about buying up licenses, registering patents, ensuring that they are positioned to monopolise whatever market emerges from substances like cannabis and psychedelics, which are currently scheduled to be one of the big growth areas of the 21st century.”

And while drugs are being commercialised again, the war on drugs’ architecture of incarceration remains in place. It is a deeply racist regime: Black American men are far more likely to be imprisoned for drug offences than their white counterparts.

Drug laws are the single most common reason women are in prison. In Brazil and Costa Rica, more than 60 per cent of women inmates are there on drugs charges. In Thailand, that figure is 82 per cent.

The “fix” in Koram’s title does not just mean the next hit of drugs. He picks up geographer David Harvey’s idea of capital needing a “fix” to produce new markets - and a new generation of super-rich drug company owners.

The cost of a legal licence to make marijuana or mushrooms in the US is eye-wateringly high, locking out all but a handful of well-connected people (and their lobbyists).

“If this happens at a global scale then the fix is in,” Koram warns. “The game is rigged in favour of the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels for the next generation.”

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So is mass decriminalisation inevitable? Is the war on drugs now over? Koram doubts it.

Drugs policy rarely makes front-page news in the UK. Parties often talk tough on the issue - witness Labour’s attacks on the Greens over the latter’s policy on decriminalisation.

On the other side of the political spectrum, Nigel Farage talked about drug legislation a decade ago. But his Reform party is now firmly opposed.

There has been a backlash against loosening drugs laws, too. In 2024, Oregon rolled back its pioneering decriminalisation law, restoring criminal penalties for possession just three years after voters approved it. Canada has seen organised opposition to drug reform, and Massachusetts will likely have recriminalisation on the ballot in the mid-terms.

But after decades of a war on drugs that shows little sign of being won, Koram believes the time has come for a radical re-think. He cautions, though, that decriminalisation is necessary but not sufficient.

What is needed, he says, is a new model of drugs policy - one that is co-operative, open and puts education, not profit, first. You might not agree with the policy proposal, but I think it is a fascinating argument that is well worth your time.

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Palantir’s £330 million NHS tech platform is “slow and clunky” with a “poor user experience,” according to an internal NHS document seen by Democracy for Sale.

Labour leadership hopeful Wes Streeting - who recently resigned as health secretary - has said that Palantir is “absolutely critical to the future of the NHS.”

But a briefing prepared for NHS England senior leaders in February said that Palantir’s NHS platform is eight to ten times slower at analysing data than the current NHS tool in use.

“Processing time is reported as taking 4-5 minutes compared to 30 seconds [in the current system]” the briefing states, even after making “optimisation” changes to speed it up.

A senior NHS source who uses Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP) every day told us the runtime is much slower still, in their experience. “I’d be happy with four or five minutes,” they said, “but usually I’m waiting closer to ten”.

For analysts who run dozens of queries a day, this means large chunks of their workday are spent simply waiting for Palantir’s system to load, a problem they didn’t previously have.

Responding to this story, Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, chair of the health and social care committee, said that her committee would hold an evidence session to probe “issues around the rollout of the FDP” next month.

“There is a groundswell of concern that needs to be addressed regarding how data will be used, shared and accessed, in addition to reports about the experience of NHS staff whose lives it is supposed to make easier,” Moran told Democracy for Sale.

NHS England awarded Palantir the £330m contract to build a “new operating system” for the NHS in 2023.

Since then the UK government has faced repeated calls to cut ties with the firm founded by Trump donor Peter Thiel which works closely with US military and immigration enforcement and has a deal with Israel to support “war-related missions”.

This week London mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a £50m Met Police deal with Palantir. Ministers are also reportedly considering whether to activate a break clause in Palantir’s NHS contract in February 2027.

But Labour ministers and health service bosses have defended the NHS’s work with the defence tech firm.

Last month, outgoing NHS data chief Ming Tang claimed Palantir was delivering “outstanding results”.

Privately, however, NHS leaders have been told that Palantir’s tech is slow, hard to use and substantially worse at some tasks than the software it is supposed to replace.

The briefing seen by Democracy for Sale - prepared for NHS England’s senior leadership team for data and analytics - identifies the Federated Data Platform’s slow runtimes as a key issue hampering its adoption.

Palantir’s platform is meant to join up data across the health service and make it easier to schedule appointments, free up hospital beds and identify staff shortages.

But, as we revealed last year, many English hospitals have refused to take up the FDP. A trust in Leeds warned privately that it would “lose functionality rather than gain it” if it moved to Palantir’s platform.

Duncan McCann, head of tech at the Good Law Project, said that “the revelation that Palantir’s platform is ten times slower than existing systems strips away the final defence that their controversial reputation is a necessary trade-off for superior technology.”

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Palantir rejected the claim that the FDP is markedly slower than the current NHS system and said that comparing the two systems is not like-for-like as Palantir’s platform introduces guard rails to improve data correctness, enforce purpose based access and allow more controlled data sharing.

“The Federated Data Platform is reducing the administrative burden on the NHS and its staff and helping to deliver better patient care,” a Palantir spokesperson said, pointing to 110,000 additional operations, a 15 per cent reduction in discharge delays, and almost 800,000 patients removed from waiting lists.

Palantir added that the FDP had “recently hit its target to have 85 per cent of acute Trusts live on the FDP by April 2026. And the Government has forecast that the programme will deliver £5 of benefits for every pound spent.”

NHS England did not respond to a request for comment.

The NHS and the government have repeatedly refused to release crucial information about Palantir’s performance to Democracy for Sale under Freedom of Information rules.

So last month we filed a legal case against the Department for Health and Social Care to access internal briefings about the FDP prepared for ministers.

Democracy for Sale is only able to do this work thanks to the support of our readers. If you are not already a paid subscriber, support us today. For just £50 a year you can help us chase down more agenda-setting investigations and fight vital legal battles against government secrecy.

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By Peter Geoghegan and Khadija Sharife

Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and his head of communications were briefed about Labour Together’s controversial investigation into journalists more than two years ago, Democracy for Sale can reveal.

Morgan McSweeney and Paul Ovenden were kept in the loop about APCO’s work for Labour Together. The US PR firm was paid over £30,000 to “investigate the sourcing, funding and origins” of a Sunday Times story in November 2023 about the think tank’s undeclared funding that helped drive Starmer’s leadership victory.

In an email ahead of a proposed meeting with APCO’s Tom Harper in January 2024, Labour Together’s then boss Josh Simons wrote: “Tom will be delivering his report on Paul Holden on Monday. Can we find a time for Tom, Morgan, Paul and me to meet or zoom in HQ sometime after next week?”

The email was sent to McSweeney and Ovenden’s Labour party email addresses. At the time both men were Labour party employees. Six months later, they joined the heart of Starmer’s Downing Street operation.

Labour figures confirmed that a meeting subsequently took place, though it is unclear what was discussed. They said the material presented was heavily redacted. They added that McSweeney and Ovenden knew about the report and approved of it but neither commissioned nor helped write it. Starmer himself was not aware of its existence, they added.

They added that McSweeney and Ovenden took Simons at his word that he believed that there had been a hack of sensitive Labour Together materials. “At the time Josh was concerned about where this stuff had come from and was looking into it,” said one.

Alison Phillips, CEO of ThinkLabour said that she remained “shocked at the work undertaken by APCO in 2023 for Labour Together.”

“It was indefensible and, as a former journalist, I believe it was work that should not have been commissioned or undertaken,” Philips added.

APCO’s subsequent report for Labour Together spuriously suggested that the organisation had been the victim of a Russian hack fed to a “pro-Kremlin network” and cast aspersions on the political and religious background of journalists, including author Paul Holden and the Sunday Times’s Gabriel Pogrund.

Simons, who resigned from the Cabinet Office in February in the wake of the scandal, recently stood down from his Makerfield seat to allow Andy Burnham to run.

Tom Harper, as we reported earlier this month, is no longer with APCO after it emerged that he told a contractor to “get rid of” documents related to the PR firm’s Labour Together work. The think tank rebranded as ThinkLabour in recent weeks.

The Labour party has always maintained that Labour Together was “a separate legal entity”, and that the party had no involvement in APCO’s campaign to discredit journalists who were digging into the think tank’s undeclared funding.

But the revelation that McSweeney and Ovenden were looped into Harper’s work for Labour Together raises more uncomfortable questions for Starmer and Labour about the whole affair.

McSweeney, long seen as Starmer’s right hand man, resigned three months ago, shortly after we first reported on APCO’s work for Labour Together. But the former adviser reportedly has been back in Downing Street in recent days, counselling an embattled Starmer.

Ovenden, who left government last year after explicit text messages about Labour MP Diane Abbott emerged, recently set up a PR company. As we previously reported, Ovenden’s wife Kate Forrester worked for APCO and was on Labour Together’s advisory board at the time APCO was commissioned.

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The email between Simons, Harper, McSweeney and Ovenden is part of a trove of documents obtained by Paul Holden, author of The Fraud, through a subject access request to Labour Together and shared with Democracy for Sale.

Email correspondence shows that Harper - a former Sunday Times journalist whose wife, Caroline Wheeler, was that paper’s political editor until earlier this year - subsequently told Simons to submit a report to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) saying that he suspected Labour Together had been hacked.

“I would emphasise that you are a political organization closely affiliated to the Labour Party and you believe that the hack on your systems is an attempt to interfere with the UK’s political processes by a hostile state actor in the run-up to a general election,” Harper wrote. “That should focus their minds.”

Simons then wrote to the National Cyber Security Centre, saying he believed sensitive personal information had been obtained as a result of a hack of the Electoral Commission.

He suggested that Holden was “part of a far-left network…which disseminates pro-Russian propaganda, including questioning of the Russian attacks on Sergei Skripal”.

And he told the NCSC that he believed the coverage to be part of a “co-ordinated effort to discredit Keir Starmer and Labour ahead of the general election.”

The emails also suggest that Simons shared the NCSC complaint with journalists. In one instance he forwarded his complaint to a journalist at the Guardian. We understand the Guardian journalist was not its political editor, Pippa Crerar. (Crerar subsequently worked on a story about an alleged hack of Labour Together that was not published.)

However, a report commissioned by Labour Together this year - after it commissioned cybersecurity experts - found that Holden’s materials were probably leaked by an individual rather than the result of a hack.

“We have reasonable evidence to believe that the materials were not hacked at Labour Together but leaked by a source at (redacted).”

Paul Holden said the “documents show that the deeply invasive investigation into me, my family, colleagues and associates was, in effect, a joint project on the part of Labour Together, APCO and the highest levels of the Labour Party, including Morgan McSweeney.”

“It is clear that only a part of this story has yet emerged. There is an urgent need for a full Parliamentary inquiry into the history and conduct of Labour Together.”

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A Labour Party Spokesperson said: “The freedom of the press is a cornerstone of our democracy. The Labour Party remains firmly committed to upholding and protecting that freedom, which is vital in ensuring journalists are able to rightly hold public figures to account.

“Any suggestion that the Labour Party had any role in the commissioning of this report would be incorrect. Labour Together have themselves acknowledged that the scope of the work carried out through this report was indefensible.”

Alison Phillips, CEO of ThinkLabour said: “ThinkLabour is a very different organisation today compared to Labour Together then and what was done does not reflect and represent what we stand for and how we operate today under my leadership.”

Simons has previously said that he was “surprised and shocked” by APCO’s report, and claimed that the PR firm had gone beyond the terms of its contract.

Calls for a parliamentary inquiry into Labour Together’s conduct have grown in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Commons speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle told Labour MP John McDonnell that his concerns about APCO’s work for the think tank needed “to be investigated thoroughly”.

The Serious Fraud Office is separately understood to be in receipt of a disclosure concerning APCO’s destruction of documents relating to its work for Labour Together.

Last Friday, we published a major investigation into how libel lawyers who have acted for oligarchs and the super-rich lobbied the government against reforms to stop Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation, better known as Slapps.

Today (Tuesday) in Parliament, justice secretary David Lammy announced that the Labour government will be “bringing forward legislation” to tackle Slapps.

The justice secretary’s announcement came in response to a question from Labour MP Brian Leishman, prompted by our investigation.

“I have concerns about the recent reports that the Society of Media Lawyers, who are against Slapp reform, has had significant access to Ministers and civil servants while lobbying against stronger protections for journalists, whistleblowers and campaigners,” Leishman said.

“Slapps continue to be used by the super wealthy and super powerful to silence investigative reporting and public-interest speech; will the Government bring forward meaningful and undiluted anti-Slapp legislation,” he added.

Our investigation, based on hundreds of pages of documents released under Freedom of Information law and numerous interviews, revealed how the Society of Media Lawyers had opposed Slapp legislation. The lobbying appeared to be having an effect, with anti-Slapp measures being shelved from a civil justice and courts bill in February.

The calls for Slapps reform extended to the House of Lords. On Monday, Baroness Stowell said she was disappointed that Slapps did not appear in the King’s Speech last week and announced that she would bring forward a Slapps Private Members’ Bill.

Stowell’s proposed bill would include measures such as an early dismissal mechanism to prevent cases from moving forward if the claim is not likely to succeed and if the public interest expression outweighs the alleged harm to the claimant, as well as measures to protect defendants from adverse cost orders in Slapp cases.

“To be clear, this mechanism would not prevent claims from being brought, but would prevent claims without realistic merit consuming disproportionate resources and doing so much harm,” Stowell said.

The lawyers write back

The parliamentary response was not the only reaction to our investigation. A few hours after publication on Friday afternoon, an email landed from the Society of Media Lawyers itself.

The letter - signed only “TSML” - said the Society was unhappy with how we had reported its position (you can judge for yourself) and was “proposing to publish online an article correcting inaccuracies and omissions in your article and setting out properly the position of TSML”.

The Society also demanded to know “whether you support or oppose the question of legislative reform concerning SLAPPs to be referred to the Law Commission for proper analysis and if so why”.

Between us, in two decades of journalism, we can’t recall the subject of an investigation demanding that we declare our position on a policy question. We replied asking the Society to point to any errors in our work.

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A significantly longer letter followed. Again there were no concrete examples of inaccuracy - but plenty of disquiet about our describing the lawyers’ lobbying as, well, lobbying.

The Society also decried us as campaigners for Slapps reform and noted that “you have signed several letters prepared by the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition” - something we mentioned in the investigation itself.

Given the Society’s stated intention to publish “an article correcting inaccuracies and omissions”, we expect a piece “exposing” Democracy for Sale to appear shortly. (You can read some of our correspondence on the TSML’s website….)

We will continue to expose any system in which the rich and powerful can use the courts to silence not just journalists, but experts, campaigners and even victims of sexual violence. That is what the original investigation was about. The parliamentary response this week suggests we are not the only ones who think it matters.

The rich and powerful have lawyers. We have readers. If you’re not already a paying member of Democracy for Sale, please consider joining us - it’s the only reason we can keep doing this work.

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Cormac Kehoe was in the semi-arid mountains above Málaga last August when he received an unexpected email. A county court in Bromley, south-east London, was ordering him to pay £10,000 for “defamation, aggravated harm and loss of business”. The 28-year-old freelance reporter didn’t even know a libel claim had been made. But the claimant’s name was very familiar: Claudio Di Giovanni.

Before taking a rare week off in the Andalusian hills, Kehoe had published an investigation into Di Giovanni’s property empire on the Londoner website. Now the Italian was suing him personally for libel. “It’s a nightmare, really. You’re trying to take a break from the relentless torrent of work and then you are suddenly faced with this prospect of financial ruin,” Kehoe said. Di Giovanni later filed a separate suit claiming £250,000 in damages.

Cases like Kehoe’s were supposed to be a thing of the past. London has long been called “the libel capital of the world”. The Aga Khan, Kremlin insiders and Kazakhstan’s one-time dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev have all availed themselves of Britain’s relatively strict libel laws, as have myriad well-heeled Britons. It’s not just journalists who have been targeted. Environmental campaigners, online reviewers, even victims of sexual assault have been hit with libel suits.

But in March 2022, soon after Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, London’s libel lawyers became international news. MPs lined up to accuse claimant-friendly law firms of abusing the legal process to intimidate critics into silence. The former Conservative MP Bob Seely told the Commons these “amoral lawyers” had teamed up with “Putin’s henchmen” to offer a “one-stop corruption shop”. In April a US congressman accused London’s media lawyers of “enabling” Russian oligarchs. In response at the time, the accused firms rejected these claims, with one describing them as “misconceived”; another said they acted at all times in accordance with their professional and legal obligations.

The libel lawyers’ rebuttals were not enough to prevent action, or at least the promise of it. Boris Johnson announced a clampdown on “the oligarchs and super-rich” who use the threat of legal action as “a new kind of lawfare”. The Conservative prime minister said his government would introduce legislation that would stop “strategic lawsuits against public participation” – commonly known as “Slapp” litigation. These are generally defined as cases designed to intimidate, harass and financially exhaust critics and to silence free speech. Slapps don’t have to involve libel action, but in the UK they usually do.

Four years later, however, comprehensive anti-Slapp legislation is yet to materialise in England and Wales. Increasingly, the blame for inaction is being laid at Labour’s door, even by some of the party’s own MPs. A few months after winning the 2024 general election, Keir Starmer pledged to stop “powerful people using… Slapps to intimidate journalists away from their pursuit of the public interest”. But in February this year, anti-Slapp measures were shelved from a civil justice and courts bill, reportedly following interventions from Downing Street.

The government’s change of tack was preceded by a discreet but highly effective lobbying blitz – spearheaded by a group of leading London libel lawyers whose members have in the past represented Russian oligarchs, the disgraced Tory peer Michelle Mone, and even Jeffrey Epstein.

The Society of Media Lawyers (SML) has little public presence, but over the course of almost three years it has secured meetings with key officials and aggressively pushed back on anti-Slapp legislation, according to hundreds of pages of documents, released following a number of freedom-of-information (FOI) requests. The society’s lobbying appears to have borne fruit.

“The Carter-Rucks of this world have successfully scared the civil servants into thinking that it’s too difficult to do anything about Slapps,” said a source close to the government’s discussions on libel reform.

While our source was speaking generally, the law firm Carter-Ruck responded to this characterisation, telling us that “we would do nothing of the sort… We agree that the issues surrounding so-called Slapps are properly a matter of public interest, and would welcome a sensible and balanced debate about these issues.”

The SML has a clear message: that anti-Slapp legislation is unnecessary, and could even embolden the media’s worst excesses. In this telling, concerns about the use of Slapps to muzzle investigative journalists, and even victims of sexual abuse, are all part, according to the SML, of “a misleading narrative presented by the media”. That lawyers who represent wealthy clients would lobby against laws that might restrict their business is hardly surprising, perhaps. Anti-Slapp campaigners have been pushing their case, too. But the society’s lobbying is seen by many as an important factor in the government’s apparent decision not to act.

The former Tory MP Charlotte Leslie, who successfully saw off a long-running defamation claim from Conservative donor Mohamed Amersi, said that “it’s clear from these documents [obtained by us by FOI] that the Society of Media Lawyers conducted a persistent lobbying campaign to kill off any prospect of sensible legislation that could threaten the UK’s lucrative racket in libel lawfare.” Leslie added that the lobbying “exposes a sector of the British legal profession that is in complete denial about the threat they have posed to freedom of speech and the reputation of the UK’s legal system”.

In response, the SML told the New Statesman that it “has written a very limited number of letters to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and one to MPs trying to share its expert views on the efficacy of the proposed Slapp provisions”. The society also rejected the idea it was “in any form of ‘denial’ about anything”, adding that “its position is informed, expert and measured”.

The libel capital

London’s libel gold rush long predates the city’s “Londongrad” days. In the Second World War, a young lawyer named Peter Carter-Ruck came back from duty as a gunner in the Royal Artillery and set about turning the then almost moribund Libel Act of 1843 into the basis for a lucrative business. His trademark was aggressive suits on behalf of wealthy clients. In 1963, Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, instructed Carter-Ruck to sue “every single person connected with Private Eye, right down to the girls in the office” over a story that suggested an official biography of his father would gloss over incidents such as Churchill sending the army to tackle striking Welsh miners. Carter-Ruck secured all the top libel barristers for his client to prevent them acting for the magazine – which swiftly apologised and paid Churchill’s legal costs. Private Eye also had to publish a full-page retraction and apology in the Evening Standard.

After this, a charabanc of colourful characters used libel threats, primarily against publishers, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. James Goldsmith settled a notorious libel case with Private Eye on the steps of the Old Bailey. Robert Maxwell and Mohamed al-Fayed had an army of lawyers on retainer. Soon, rich claimants with far less obvious ties to the UK were filing defamation cases in London.

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An oddity of our libel law, compared with some other countries, is that it presumes a supposedly defamatory statement to be false from a claim’s outset – it is up to those being sued to prove they were in fact telling the truth. This has made bringing defamation actions in Britain a particularly attractive option for the rich and powerful around the world.

In the 1990s, Carter-Ruck persuaded the British courts to hear a claim from the Russian oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Glushkov relating to a piece in Forbes that described the pair as “criminals on an outrageous scale”. The House of Lords gave permission to sue in London even though fewer than 2,000 copies of Forbes were distributed in the UK. The case was eventually settled in 2003. Forbes did not pay damages or legal costs, or make an apology. The following year the editor of the magazine’s Russian edition, Paul Klebnikov – who was the unbylined author of the contested article – was shot dead in Moscow. Allegations that the killers were acting on orders from Berezovsky have long swirled. (Both Berezovsky and Glushkov later died in Britain, five years apart, after falling out with Putin.)

The Berezovsky trial opened the floodgates for a wave of libel tourism that, almost three decades later, has yet to abate. Reforms introduced in 2013 that were supposed to rebalance the playing field between defendants and claimants and to prevent “jurisdiction shopping” had limited effect. Uzbek oligarchs, Russian state-owned enterprises, a Kazakhstani dictator: all have filed defamation claims in London in recent years.

Often, small journalism outfits or human rights organisations are targeted. An Azerbaijani MP sued the investigative journalist Paul Radu over a 2017 series exposing alleged money-laundering. The case was brought in London even though Radu is Romanian and the publisher, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, has a minimal footprint in the UK. (The case was settled on terms favourable to Radu in 2020.)

Perhaps the most egregious case involved Yevgeny Prigozhin. The former hot dog seller who had become a central figure in Putin’s regime sued for defamation after the investigative outlet Bellingcat published a series of stories in 2020 about his mercenary army, the Wagner Group. But rather than pursue Bellingcat, which is based in the Netherlands, Prigozhin went after the site’s founder, the British journalist Eliot Higgins, for his social media posts about the story. In a turn worthy of a black comedy, Prigozhin’s lawyers – the aptly named Discreet Law – were given special dispensation by the Treasury to represent him, as the Russian was under British sanctions – for his involvement in the Wagner Group. Court papers claimed that Higgins’s tweets had caused Prigozhin “great distress” and his character and reputation had been “gravely damaged”.

The case collapsed when Discreet Law withdrew their services after the invasion of Ukraine. Higgins, who was left with costs of £70,000, complained vociferously to the Solicitor’s Regulation Authority (SRA). As the investigative journalism website Democracy for Sale revealed last year, the SRA took two years to produce a four-page report that found “no evidence” that Discreet Law was aware that Prigozhin ran the Wagner Group and that the firm had “acted appropriately” in handling his claim.

These cases became the cornerstone of calls for Slapp reform after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “The government will not tolerate Russian oligarchs and other corrupt elites abusing British courts to muzzle those who shine a light on their wrongdoing,” declared the then justice secretary, Dominic Raab, in March 2022. By the autumn of 2023, the Tories were preparing to pass new laws to tackle financial crime that included anti-Slapp provisions. The measures – which came into force last year and cover libel threats on reporting around economic crime – were widely seen as piecemeal but were enough to convince some of London’s most expensive libel lawyers that they needed to mount a campaign of their own, against broader anti-Slapp legislation. The Society of Media Lawyers was born.

A discreet society

The society is not a registered company or charity, which means it does not have to file accounts or give much detail about its activities. A blurb on its website talks about adding “fairness and balance… to the discussions surrounding media law”. But a published list of its over 80-strong membership is tilted towards solicitors predominantly known for their work on behalf of wealthy libel claimants. There’s the Carter-Ruck boss Nigel Tait; the current “reputation lawyer of the year” Emma Woollcott from Mishcon de Reya; Paul Tweed, the lawyer to the stars, whose clients have included Johnny Depp, Uri Geller and Jeffrey Epstein. (A spokesperson for Tweed has said that his involvement with Epstein was “brief” and that the pair never met.)

From its inception, the SML prosecuted its case with gusto. The documents we obtained paint a picture of a dedicated, and highly targeted, lobbying campaign. When the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced it was setting up an anti-Slapp taskforce in September 2023, the SML wrote to the then culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, demanding to join. The plea was unsuccessful, but the lawyers were undeterred. Two months later, the Tory peer Edward Garnier wrote an op-ed in the Times summing up the SML’s position: that “the emotional demand” for comprehensive anti-Slapp legislation “should be resisted”. (The piece did not mention that Garnier, a former solicitor general for England and Wales, was a member of the society.)

While the Conservative government was flatlining in the polls, the battle around comprehensive Slapp legislation intensified. In December 2023, the Labour MP Wayne David introduced a private members’ bill that would greatly expand the definition of an abusive lawsuit, and allow courts to strike out meritless claims. As the Tories threw their weight behind David’s wide-ranging bill, the SML started to lobby ministers more directly. Garnier, widely seen as an eloquent and effective advocate for the cause, wrote to the justice under-secretary Christopher Bellamy with his “grave concerns” about the proposed legislation. “You cannot simply ban rich people, our own citizens or foreign nationals, from bringing claims against poorer defendants,” Garnier counselled his Conservative Lords colleague. In April 2024, the SML wrote to the then lord chancellor, Alex Chalk, himself a KC, warning that David’s bill was “entirely one-sided” and that “the government should heed the lessons of the Leveson Inquiry and be very slow to hand further litigation advantage to the unregulated press”. This is a common refrain among those who oppose Slapp reform: that defamation reform may enable press abuse. The SML’s letter did not mention that Leveson was sparked by phone hacking – not libellous claims.

If the society’s interventions were designed to get its views noticed within government, it seemed to work. A civil servant in the Ministry of Justice wrote that the society was “packed with heavyweights, including peers. I’m personally more concerned about their strength of feeling on the bill.” Another mentioned that they believed the SML had support from the then Tory MP and former defence secretary Ben Wallace. (”I am not against making sure that our legal system is not abused by organised criminals or oligarchs,” Wallace told us in a phone call. “But just be careful you don’t burn the people on the other side in over-protecting it.”)

Officials advised that ministers should meet with Garnier “but only once possible concessions have been agreed with whips”. As it turned out, Conservative ministers did not need to offer any sweeteners to the media lawyers. Rishi Sunak’s snap general election marked the end of David’s bill, and of the government.

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Lobbying Labour

Faced with an incoming Labour administration led by a human rights lawyer who was personally committed to Slapp reform, the media lawyers stepped up their lobbying. On 31 July 2024, less than four weeks after the general election, the society wrote a letter to the incoming justice minister in the Lords, Frederick Ponsonby, copying in the then justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, the then foreign secretary, David Lammy, and senior figures in the Law Society, which represents thousands of solicitors in England and Wales. The tone of the letter was clear: the entire Slapp issue was overblown, based on “a misleading narrative” presented by the media and campaigners “who want to reduce the legal protections available to victims of misreporting and invasions of privacy”. High-profile cases such as that against Catherine Belton and HarperCollins over her 2020 book Putin’s People (brought by Roman Abramovich, Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and the oil company Rosneft, among others), and the Kazakh mining conglomerate ENRC’s failed defamation claim against investigative journalist Tom Burgis were the exception, not the rule. “Libel claims by oligarchs are a rarity.”

At times, the lawyers stressed their political connections with the new administration. “As a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, I am hopeful that the new government will want to consider the matter afresh,” Iain Wilson, a partner at Brett Wilson, wrote in an email to Ponsonby. Civil servants seemed wary of antagonising the well-connected lawyers. Privately, they mused about the risk that the lawyers might “lobby via other means, which is unhelpful”. In another email, a Ministry of Justice official commented that “the fact we’re not moving on Slapps quickly will please them”.

In internal proposals for consulting on Slapps, the MoJ began to classify the SML as a “civil society organisation” alongside anti-Slapp campaigners. “A balance must be struck between claimant and defendant positions given the strength of feeling at this time,” an official wrote, “so equal engagement should be the aim.” The peer Edward Faulks KC, an English barrister who until April this year chaired the press regulator the Independent Press Standards Organisation, told us that it was “very surprising” that civil servants were treating the SML as a civil society group. “These are not disinterested stakeholders,” he said. “Let’s not forget this is pretty lucrative stuff for them.”

The society often strongly contested the idea that Slapps existed at all. The media lawyers sent MoJ officials a 2024 research paper that, it said, “undermines the evidential basis put forward by the previous government” for anti-Slapp legislation. Written by Paul Wragg, a professor of media law at the University of Leeds, and funded by the society, the paper argued that numerous high-profile cases, including Belton and Burgis’s, were not Slapps. Wragg concluded that the current public debate about Slapps was “worryingly one-sided”. He examined the cases relied upon by the Coalition Against Slapps in Europe as examples of strategic libel actions and found only one lawsuit that he believed was “properly classifiable as a Slapp”. The case, brought by a Serbian businessman who had been accused of involvement in organised crime in the Balkan-language press, was thrown out of a London court in 2013.

The SML told us that it considers the paper “to be detailed and informed” and “significantly more authoritative than the other documents we have seen citing supposed Slapp cases”. The society confirmed that its members had “contributed to the cost of his report”. Wragg told us the SML had approached him as “they were looking for an independent report and they approached me as an expert in the field”. He added that he was concerned about the “ambiguity” of how Slapps have been defined in the UK. “What we don’t want is mischievous defendants trying to misuse the language of Slapps in order to frustrate legitimate claimants,” he said. “We’ve got to be careful not to rush into any kind of legislative solution thinking that this will just solve all the problems.”

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For Susan Coughtrie, co-founder and co-chair of the UK Anti-Slapp Coalition – which includes campaigners, media organisations and lawyers – searching for “the perfect example of a Slapp completely misses the point”. The cost of going to court is so high that many abusive cases are never made public, she said. “People are forced into making retractions or settlements simply because they cannot afford to go to trial to defend their reporting. This is then spun to imply they did something wrong. The system is not balanced, there is a clear inequality of arms, and while there is no legal protection, this will only continue.”

This lack of legal protection is not just an issue for journalists. In 2010, a 20-year-old student, Nina Cresswell, was sexually assaulted while walking home from a nightclub in Sunderland. A decade later she wrote a blog and a series of social media posts accusing a tattoo artist, Billy Hay, of the crime. Hay responded, threatening legal action.

When the case went to court a judge ruled in Cresswell’s favour, finding that her account was “substantially true”, and that her statements were “on a matter of public interest”. The use of legal threats to silence victims of sexual abuse has been well documented. A 2021 United Nations report found that, in a “perverse twist in the Me Too age”, women who denounced alleged attackers online are “increasingly subject to defamation suits or charged with criminal libel”.

The SML’s letters to officials mentioned Cresswell’s case, but said claims that libel law is used to silence victims of sexual crimes is “a misleading oversimplification”. Cresswell’s victory, the letters went on, showed that the current legal system is fit for purpose.

Cresswell explained to the New Statesman that, despite winning the case, the drawn-out process had had a “devastating impact” on her life and her work. “I couldn’t focus on the work, I couldn’t manage clients, because all my time was consumed with fighting off these legal threats,” she said. “I know this isn’t an oversimplification, because it literally happened to me. It’s legal silencing.”

Responding to this, the Society of Media Lawyers told us that in citing the case in its letter, it “did not intend in any way to seek to dismiss or diminish the ordeal of Ms Cresswell”. It also observed that her case “was notable for the flexible approach which the court took in applying the public interest defence [under the 2013 Defamation Act] to assist the defendant”.

It added that “it is important to note in the context of the Slapps debate that courts will work to find solutions under existing provisions. That is, in our view, to be encouraged.” In their correspondence with us, both the SML and Carter-Ruck pointed out that lawyers in their organisations act on behalf of claimants and defendants in defamation cases.

Nevertheless, the media lawyers’ arguments seemed to chime with the government’s evolving position on Slapps. In October 2024, the SML wrote to Labour’s then minister for courts and legal services, Heidi Alexander, warning that campaigners from the UK Anti-Slapp Coalition were “promoting a misleading narrative in order to place parliamentarians under pressure to introduce legislation”. Anyway, the lawyers said, a remedy already existed to tackle the problem: the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) can refer cases to an independent tribunal that adjudicates allegations of misconduct against solicitors. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal ultimately “has the power to impose an unlimited fine and strike off solicitors”. A few weeks later, Alexander told the Commons that while Slapps “represent an abuse of our legal system”, the area was “complex” and “we should not legislate in haste”. Instead, the justice minister said, the SRA was a “weapon in our arsenal to deal with abuse of the system”.

(Alexander added that her department was in regular contact with the regulator, but when we asked the Ministry of Justice for its correspondence with the SRA during the six months after her speech we were told none existed.)

By most measures, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has struggled to deal with the issue of Slapps. The regulator has issued guidance – warning against using threatening language in correspondence – and prosecuted lawyers accused of taking on Slapp cases. But in recent months the SRA’s Slapp strategy has suffered a string of high-profile defeats.

In December 2025, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal threw out a case against Carter-Ruck’s Claire Gill (who is an SML member), who had been accused of sending an “improper” legal threat to a whistleblower in 2017 on behalf of the “cryptoqueen” Ruja Ignatova. While Ignatova’s cryptocurrency business, OneCoin, was later found to be an investment scam – the whistleblower had been trying to warn fellow investors of this – Gill was cleared of all wrongdoing by the tribunal, which said the SRA’s case against her was based on “hindsight not evidence of professional misconduct”. Carter-Ruck has said it intends to seek costs from the regulator, believed to be around £1m. The firm told the New Statesman that in its dismissal of the case, the tribunal had “made unequivocally clear that [Gill] had acted properly and in good faith”.

An in-house media lawyer at one of Britain’s biggest newspapers said that this and other rulings against the SRA have emboldened aggressive libel lawyers. “We are definitely seeing more in the Slapps category in the last few months,” the source said. “For 18 months, when the SRA seemed to be really pushing the issue, it wasn’t as bad, but now the threats have regained some of their old force.”

In February this year, the Times reported that the current minister for courts and legal services, Sarah Sackman, had drafted anti-Slapp measures, but that the proposed legislation had been shelved. A government source blamed the fear of backlash from lawyers. Speaking to the New Statesman, the Conservative MP David Davis said that documents uncovered by this investigation showed the impact of the claimant lawyers’ lobbying efforts.

These lawyers have helped “create a multimillion-pound industry around suppressing free speech”, said Davis. “In the process, they have become fabulously wealthy and have helped turn London into the global capital of Slapps. For the Ministry of Justice to look to those same lawyers for advice on whether Slapps are a problem would be laughable if the issue were not so serious.”

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice told us that it had “engaged with a number of different stakeholders and campaigners while we consider how these measures are working – and how we can further clamp down on Slapps”.

The Society of Media Lawyers, meanwhile, remains sceptical that the system needs reform. It told the New Statesman: “We do not contend that there are never inappropriately brought media cases. But we do believe the evidential basis on which the MoJ and parliament has proceeded as regards the extent of the problem is to say the least questionable.”

The land of expensive speech

Defenders of Britain’s libel laws argue that newspapers and TV stations can afford the cost of defamation cases. The BBC is fighting a long-running case brought by the political donor Mohamed Amersi; Amersi is reported to be seeking £10m in damages and legal costs. But the days in which publishers were willing – and even keen – to go toe-to-toe with wealthy claimants are largely over.

Defamation isn’t the only legal threat. Data protection and privacy laws are increasingly used as alternatives to a libel claim. Unlike a defamation writ, which must be filed within a year of the offending article’s publication, data protection and privacy actions can be taken up to six years later – and for publishers there is no recourse to the complete defence that a published statement is true, as in a defamation case.

All of which, campaigners say, makes the need for anti-Slapp legislation more urgent. In January, an open letter calling on Starmer and the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, to legislate was signed by national newspaper and magazine editors – including the authors of this piece, on behalf of Democracy for Sale. In March, more than 100 British academics joined the chorus of calls for reform.

Pressure has been applied from inside the Parliamentary Labour Party, too. In February, more than 50 party MPs signed a letter calling on the Prime Minister to introduce “universal anti-Slapp measures in the next King’s Speech”. The letter, whose signatories included Phil Brickell, who has been recently appointed parliamentary private secretary to the MoJ, and the Business and Trade Committee chair, Liam Byrne, closed with an appeal to end the government’s timorousness: “Almost two years on, we need to finish what we started to firmly demonstrate our commitment to freedom of expression, the public’s right to information, and access to justice as fundamental pillars of a democratic society.”

Responding to this investigation, the former shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds, who also signed the letter, told the New Statesman that “Slapps stop the investigation and scrutiny of matters that are squarely in the public interest. Academics, journalists and whistleblowers should not be harassed or intimidated through Slapps. There is a real problem here, with the UK substantially out of step with other countries on this issue; so it is concerning to hear about the extent of lobbying to stop action against Slapps.”

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The sense of urgency felt by Dodds and her fellow signatories has so far been unmatched on the ministerial benches. David Lammy, who took over as Justice Secretary from Shabana Mahmood last September, did introduce a new anti-corruption strategy that mentions Slapps – but only to say that the UK will “consider the future approach for comprehensively tackling all Slapps” by 2029. A promise to think about doing something within the next three years hardly feels like a binding commitment. While London’s libel lawyers have successfully argued that legislation is tough – if not outright impossible – other jurisdictions have acted. Ireland, another libel-tourism destination, recently completed a radical overhaul of its defamation law. The European Union brought in an anti-Slapp directive in 2024. Ontario, whose anti-Slapp provisions are often held up as particularly effective, has had legislation in place for more than a decade.

Gavin Millar KC, a libel specialist at Matrix Chambers, says that there is a straightforward solution for our libel problem. Rather than try to define what constitutes a Slapp in the abstract – “which is impossible to do satisfactorily” – the government could pass legislation that allows courts to dismiss cases against public-interest expression as soon as they are issued.

“A case should be stopped if the defendant has a valid defence, or if the public interest in protecting the free speech right outweighs the need to protect the claimant’s reputation through complex and costly court proceedings,” Millar told us. “If the judge decides there is a valid defence, the case gets struck out simply because it concerns public-interest speech.”

Back in London, the journalist Cormac Kehoe is still fighting the case brought by Claudio Di Giovanni, and the costs – presently sitting at £20,000 – continue to mount. “It’s not just the money. It’s the massive amount of our time and energy that gets sucked up by this kind of litigation,” said Joshi Herrmann, who runs the parent company of the Londoner, which published Kehoe’s article on Di Giovanni. “Our archaic libel system means that lots of resource we should be spending on reporting is spent fighting [such] cases in the courts.”

London’s reputation lawyers present themselves as a bastion of justice against a rapacious press. There is an alternative view. “If Jeffrey Epstein had been English, we may well have never known about his crimes,” says one former newsroom editor. So long as the rich and powerful can continue to pay lawyers exorbitant fees, this country is, in the words of the veteran human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson KC, “not the land of free speech. It is the land of expensive speech.” Whether this matters enough to the government after the libel lawyers’ lobbying blitz remains to be seen.

This piece also appeared in the New Statesman.

Nigel Farage arrived in style at Chelmsford race track last Friday. The Reform UK leader and his entourage stepped out of a helicopter to address the media following his party’s win in the Essex county council election.

What Farage didn’t mention was that the helicopter he was travelling in is owned by one of the party’s donors.

Now - following an investigation by Democracy for Sale that is also covered in today’s Guardian - the Reform leader is facing questions about why he did not declare his use of a donor’s helicopter to travel around Britain for multiple rallies over the past year.

The helicopter Farage travelled in, which has the licence number G-NALC, is the property of a company owned by Lorenzo Zaccheo, a businessman who gave Reform £25,000 last year.

When questioned about why Farage had not declared the travel, Reform said the flights had been paid for “at commercial rates” and there was “no undeclared registrable interest” arising from those flights.

But the party did not respond to follow up questions about who paid for the flights and whether they were paid for by Farage himself, who may face an inquiry over an undeclared £5 million gift he was given by the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. Farage has said the donation was to cover his personal security.

Following publication, a spokesperson for Reform told the Guardian it had paid for the flights. The party was asked much the flights cost, whether last year’s flights had been declared to the Electoral Commission and if it would be doing so this year.

The helicopter’s movements were recorded in publicly available flight data. Our analysis found that G-NALC travelled to and from numerous locations on dates when Reform rallies were being held, including in Kent after last May’s local elections win.

The questions about Farage’s helicopter use come after political opponents last week queried his claim that a return trip to the Maldives on a private jet linked to Harborne, the Thailand-based Reform megadonor, cost as little as £25,000 as the Reform leader attempted to reach the Chagos Islands. Reform did not reply to requests for comment.

Anna Turley MP, chair of the Labour Party, said: “Nigel Farage has form on being less than transparent about the cost of flights. It looks like he massively under-declared the commercial cost of private jet trips to the Maldives donated by his billionaire backer Christopher Harborne.”

“Now he expects us to take at face value, without providing a shred of evidence, an assertion that Reform paid full commercial rates for helicopter flights provided by another wealthy donor.

“The parliamentary watchdog has already rapped Farage on 17 counts of rule-breaking. If Nigel Farage wants the public to have confidence that this is all above board, Reform need to show the receipts and say who paid for these helicopter jollies.”

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The twin-engined Eurocopter at the centre of the latest questions was used in to travel to Birmingham on March 28 last year on the day Reform held a major campaign launch rally at Arena Birmingham, a favourite venue of the party.

On the following day it travelled from Birmingham to Kent, which is where Zaccheo’s company, Alcaline Aviation, is based. The following day Farage was pictured speaking to the businessman at his company’s headquarters as Reform launched its campaign for the county council elections

A month later, on May 2, Farage was photographed exiting the helicopter at an election party in Maidstone, Kent, after Reform swept to power in the county council.

MPs have 28 days to register flights costing more than £300, which are not paid for personally or by public funds, in parliament’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

When asked why Farage had not declared the flights, a Reform spokesperson said the questions “proceed from an incorrect premise”.

“The flights to which you refer were paid for at commercial rates. There was therefore no gift, donation, benefit, or benefit in kind provided to Mr Farage by Mr Zaccheo or Alcaline Aviation, and no undeclared registrable interest arising from those flights,” they added.

“The fact that a commercial supplier, or its owner, may separately have made a properly declared political donation does not convert paid-for services into a personal benefit or donation in kind. Any suggestion that Mr Farage received undeclared helicopter travel would therefore be false.”

Zaccheo said in response to questions from the Guardian that “the statement made by Reform is accurate and factual.”

Zaccheo added: “I would never allow anyone to use our assets without payment.”

His Kent-based helicopter charter company specialises in events and private charter and has a fleet of three helicopters.

He has spoken out in a past on issues including the fines faced by hauliers for inadvertently having migrants aboard their lorries.

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Responding to this story, Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper MP said: “Between these flights and the serious questions regarding his £5m gift from a crypto billionaire, Farage’s finances appear to be shrouded in secrecy.

“The British people have a right to know who is paying for Farage’s high-flying lifestyle. If he has nothing to hide, he should have nothing to fear.”

British political parties have to declare almost nothing about how they spend money outside general election period. Susan Hawley, executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, said that our findings showed the need for much greater transparency - and election spending limits.

“It is staggering that we know so little about how much political parties spend outside of a limited period in the run up to elections.

“Whether it’s building up their war chests, buying adverts, or getting flown across the country to spread their political message, the public have a right to know what is being spent to influence their vote.

“But transparency is not enough on its own - we need limits that apply all year round to ensure that there is a fair and level playing field for all candidates running for public office. Without that, elections will continue to be gamed by those with the richest backers”.

This week’s elections have redrawn the political map of Britain. The Greens and Plaid Cymru won major victories. Scottish nationalists have retained control of the devolved government in Edinburgh.

On the other side of the ledger, the Conservatives sustained major losses. Labour did even worse.

But there is little doubt about the headline story of these elections: what many media outlets called the “Reform surge”.

Nigel Farage’s party won a swathe of councils across England, and came from nowhere to take a raft of seats in Scotland and Wales.

Lots of column inches have already been dedicated to Reform’s success - and more will doubtless come - but I wanted to understand in a bit more depth what’s happening. So on Friday afternoon, I called up the award-winning journalist and author Daniel Trilling.

Trilling has followed the British right for over a decade and a half, and his brand new book If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable looks in depth at the rise of Reform.

Trilling is in no doubt about the scale of Reform’s success. “Reform is the most successful right-wing populist party to date,” he told me.

Reform’s coalition, on Trilling’s reading, is “a very contradictory group of people - voters in deindustrialised towns, affluent right-wing voters in the south east of England.” What Farage has done, brilliantly, is hold them together.

“Reform have managed to bundle together a whole set of frustrations people feel and shape that into a coherent narrative.”

The party’s success, too, must be seen in a much wider context. “You have to see Reform as part of an international phenomenon,” Trilling argued, one heavily shaped by the American right and fusing Thatcherite economic instincts with a hard ethno-nationalist core.

The intellectual scaffolding, the donor networks, the talking points, the playbook - all of it travels. What is happening to Britain has happened, in different ways, to the United States, to Hungary, to Italy, to half of Europe. Reform has also profited from a billionaire-owned media friendly to its agenda and the rise of algorithmically fed news.

But Trilling also cautioned against the seeming inevitability of Reform’s success.

“These elections have confirmed that Reform can attract 24, 25 per cent of the electorate,” he said, “but they have struggled to go beyond that. What they have really benefited from is that their opponents are split.”

So what is to be done? The instinct of much of the establishment has been to circle the wagons around existing institutions and hope the storm passes. Trilling’s prescription runs the other way.

“The answer to this isn’t less democracy, it’s more democracy,” he told me. It means resisting the attack on local democracy that Reform’s rise is already accelerating, in councils where Reform groups are already cancelling diversity initiatives, sacking officers and trying to rip up climate commitments.

It means a politics confident enough to make a positive case for migration, for pluralism, for the public goods that disaster capitalism wants to hollow out.

And, he says, it means confronting the dark money flowing into British politics - the undisclosed millions, the crypto billionaires, the foreign-tinged networks that Democracy for Sale spends so much time documenting.

A Reform government is not inevitable. But more of the same will only make it more likely.

Democracy for Sale is dedicated to uncovering dark money and hidden influence in our politics and fighting against secrecy.

We are pursuing new investigations, developing sources and following leads that others ignore.

Your support makes that work possible. If you haven’t already, become a paid supporter of Democracy for Sale - together we can do much more.

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A senior PR executive who led a controversial investigation into journalists reporting on Labour Together’s undeclared funding has left his post, Democracy for Sale can reveal.

Tom Harper, APCO’s head of media relations in Europe, left the firm late late week.

Neither Harper nor APCO responded to Democracy for Sale’s questions but sources familiar with the matter confirmed Harper’s departure. His profile has been taken down off the PR firm’s website.

Democracy for Sale understands that Harper left APCO shortly after an audio recording emerged of him telling an APCO contractor to “get rid of” evidence of the firm’s work for Labour Together after receiving a legal notice to preserve records.

Harper also said that he had used an encrypted Proton Mail email account in a false name to transmit the report to Labour Together, that he had already deleted its contents, and asked whether the account itself could be wiped without forensic detection, according to the FT.

The revelations about Harper telling the contractor to destroy material about APCO’s work for Labour Together - first reported on Democracy for Sale - prompted calls in Parliament for a full inquiry into the scandal.

“The NUJ [National Union of Journalists] parliamentary group is concerned about the smearing of journalists. We need to know what surveillance, if any, was taking place of members and for what purposes,” Labour MP John McDonnell said last week.

“We call again for an independent inquiry into the role of APCO and Labour Together in this issue.”

Harper joined APCO in 2022, having previously worked at the Sunday Times. His wife, Caroline Wheeler, was the paper’s political editor until March.

As part of the Labour Together work, Harper authored a 58-page report into the “backgrounds and motivations” of journalists who had been reporting on Labour Together’s undeclared funding in 2023.

Harper’s report claimed, without evidence, that the journalists were linked to a “pro-Kremlin network” and had received information hacked by Russia. His report also speculated about the religious and political affiliations of journalists from the Sunday Times and Paul Holden, author of a book on Labour Together.

The revelations about APCO’s work for Labour Together led to the resignation of cabinet minister Josh Simons, who had commissioned APCO when he was running the think tank.

Labour Together was previously run by Morgan McSweeney, who went on to serve as Starmer’s chief of staff until he resigned earlier this year.

Now headed up by former Daily Mirror editor Alison Philips, Labour Together recently announced plans for a major overhaul in the wake of the scandal, including a new name and a commitment to cease funding Labour candidates.

After we broke the story in February, APCO told the media that it was conducting “a detailed internal review of the project” and was “deeply committed” to upholding its values and standards.

The firm is currently under investigation by the Public Relations and Communications Association over a potential breach of the PR trade body’s code. That investigation has yet to report but a source close to Labour Together said that the think tank was surprised that it had not been contacted by the PRCA or anyone working on its behalf.

“It’s more than two months and we haven’t heard anything at all from [the PRCA],” the Labour Together source said.

Democracy for Sale asked the PRCA about this but has yet to receive a response.

By Lucas Amin and HennyGe Wichers

A flagship British research agency set up to “restore Britain’s place as a scientific superpower” has given more than £50 million of UK taxpayer cash to US tech companies and venture capital projects.

Dreamed up by Boris Johnson’s former advisor Dominic Cummings, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) was devised as a British version of the US’s long-running Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops cutting-edge technology for the American state.

But a joint investigation by Democracy for Sale and the Guardian has found that ARIA is handing out tens of millions of pounds in British public money to private US firms, some of which were set up just days before the awards were made and already have billionaire investors from Silicon Valley.

In one case, ARIA awarded nearly £9 million to an American company backed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman to develop energy efficient AI. It is unclear whether the firm, Rain Neuromorphics Inc, is still trading.

ARIA also gave £6 million to an AI business owned by a US parent company and backed by Google cofounder Eric Schmidt. Normal Computing Ltd set up its UK arm just three weeks before its ARIA deal began.

A US venture capital firm, Pillar VC, was also given a £10.9 million award to run fellowships for AI researchers just a day after incorporating a subsidiary in the UK.

The findings raise questions about whether ARIA is meeting the purpose set out in the legislation that created it.

“The ARIA Act requires the organisation to benefit the UK by driving economic growth, supporting scientific innovation or improving quality of life,” Labour MP Chi Onwurah, chair of the commons science and technology committee, said.

“It’s unclear how funding US-based venture capital and tech firms meets these aims, or aligns with the government’s commitment to regional innovation.”

Our findings come as technology secretary Liz Kendall this week pledged to develop “AI sovereignty” and reduce Britain’s dependency on foreign tech.

Cecilia Rikap, an economics professor at University College London, said: “Disguised as promoting moonshot projects, the government is using taxpayer money to further expand the power of the US tech ecosystem.”

“This is not a surprise coming from a government that has agreed to be not only Trump’s but also big tech’s footman.”

ARIA defended its approach, saying its mission is “to unlock breakthroughs that benefit the UK” and that “over 80% of our funding goes to UK-based teams.” Where it funds international organisations, a spokesperson said, “it is to transfer scientific capabilities to the UK, with contractual protections ensuring the benefits flow back here.”

But the agency’s “standard approach” is not to take shares or intellectual property rights in the companies it funds, according to its website. Democracy for Sale understands that ARIA requires a royalty fee on any intellectual property commercialised outside the UK, though it is unclear how this works in practice.

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ARIA was set up in 2022 to fund cutting edge scientific research and “moonshot” projects - like this controversial experiment to block sunlight from hitting the earth to reduce global temperatures. Its chair is Keir Starmer’s former AI tsar Matt Clifford.

ARIA has been described as “bringing Silicon Valley’s free market fundamentalism and its ‘move fast and break things’ ethos to disrupt the buttoned-up British science establishment,” in a recent report by environmental group ETC.

The research agency was explicitly designed to be free from “red tape.” At Cummings’ behest, the Conservative government made the new agency exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Last year, Democracy for Sale won a legal challenge, which found ARIA must still respond to environmental transparency requests.

ARIA does, however, publish details of who it funds - and those public records show that of the £400 million that the agency has allocated in past two years, £52 million has gone to nine firms based in the US and three more which are US-headquartered but set up UK arms very shortly before winning their deals.

Much of the money went to companies with high profile Silicon Valley investors.

A rival of Elon Musk’s Neuralink was given £5m to research how to “measure and manipulate” the “brain states” of people with mental health problems via a therapeutic wearable device. Motif Neurotech Inc had already raised more than £13m from ten private investors. It is working in partnership with a UK firm.

ARIA has given US venture capital firm Fifty Years Industries LLC £7 million to teach Britain’s top scientists how to start up companies. The firm will run a 14-week crash course for 50 students twice a year for three years in total.

ARIA is also paying £5.4 million to a “venture cafe” company to run networking events for tech investors and entrepreneurs in London, Manchester and Edinburgh over the next three years. Wholly owned by a parent company in Massachusetts, the firm set up its UK arm on the same day it won its ARIA contract.

Rain Neuromorphics, which has been funded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and received almost £9 million in October 2024, was reported by the New York Post last year to be seeking emergency financing. ARIA has since closed one of its two contracts with the company. Rain did not respond to a request for comment.

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Several US firms backed by ARIA told Democracy for Sale they had established a UK presence following their awards.

“More than half of this award is being used to directly fund work performed by our collaborator Mint Neuro, a UK startup,” a spokesperson for Motif Neurotech said. “Because of the award, we’ve established a UK subsidiary, Motif UK, which now employs engineers in London.”

Normal Computing said that “establishing a UK presence and building UK operations was a contractual condition of receiving ARIA funding” and that it had “reinvested approximately 150% of the award value back into the UK”.

Fifty Years Industries LLC told us it was “investing “over £5M per year in UK staff compensation” and that it had established a 12 person team in Britain. The company said it had funded two companies formed out of its program and that course graduates had raised £7m.

Pillar VC did not respond to a request for comment.

Rachel Coldicutt, executive director of Careful Industries, told us that “these investments show that the UK govt can’t help but follow the Silicon Valley playbook” and that “officials at ARIA see the UK as instrumental to US innovation.”

“The real challenge,” said Coldicutt, “should be how we use R&D to position and secure the UK in a shifting geopolitical and environmental landscape.”

By Daniel Bates and Peter Geoghegan

Reform is widely tipped to perform strongly in next week’s elections. Nigel Farage’s party is tapping into rising anger with the political establishment - but it’s also tapped into a rich seam of political funding.

Among the party’s biggest donors is Ben Delo. Until a few weeks ago, most people in British politics had never heard of the Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency billionaire who recently gave £4 million to Reform - and has promised to move back to Britain to avoid Labour’s new cap on donors abroad.

Much of the coverage of Delo’s funding mentioned that he had been pardoned by Donald Trump after he was convicted for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering checks on his crypto derivatives platform BitMEX.

Delo has said that the US conviction was a “blip” and a “non-crime”. His lawyers have threatened social media accounts publishing information about his offence.

So nothing to see here? Well, Democracy for Sale decided to take a closer look at Delo’s US conviction - and found a story that doesn’t exactly match the light dismissals.

The facts of Delo’s case are clear. In 2022, Delo, who is reputedly Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire was given 30 months probation and a fine of $10 million (£7.3 million).

Delo pled guilty, along with three others, to a violation of the US Bank Secrecy Act by willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an anti-money laundering (“AML”) program at BitMEX between 2014 and 2020.

In official court records, submitted for the purpose of his sentencing hearing, US prosecutors described Delo as a “leader of a criminal enterprise” and accused him of telling Iranians they could trade on BitMEX even though it could have breached US sanctions.

In the pre-sentence memo, the prosecutors said Delo had shown a “deep disrespect for the rule of law” and called for him to be placed under house arrest for six months because of the gravity of his conduct.

According to a transcript of the hearing in New York, District Judge John Koeltl told Delo that his crimes were “very serious” and that he “willfully caused his company to violate” US corporate law.

Delo did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this article. During the court case, his lawyers said Delo was guilty of “a compliance failure, a criminal compliance failure, because the systems to keep the US users off the platform didn’t work adequately enough”.

At sentencing Delo said that he made a “terrible decision” and that his sentence of 30 months of probation reflected a “fair resolution” of the case against him.

Recently, however, Reform’s new mega-donor has been noticeably less contrite about his brush with US law enforcement.

“The most successful crypto exchange”

In March 2025, Trump pardoned Delo and the other founders of BitMEX. The US president has issued a slew of pardons for cryptocurrency tycoons.

After his pardon, Delo went on the attack. “A legal wrong has been righted today”, Delo said in a statement.

“As the most successful crypto exchange of its kind,” Delo said, “we were wrongfully made to serve as an example, sacrificed for political reasons and used to send inconsistent regulatory signals”.

Delo added that he “should never have been charged with a criminal offence through an obscure, antiquated law”.

But the Bank Secrecy Act, the law Delo was convicted under, has been on the books since 1970. It’s hardly “obscure” either. It’s been described as “a cornerstone US law aimed at combatting financial crime.”

The court documents in Delo’s case do not give the full breadth of the evidence against him as it didn’t go to trial. The pre-sentencing memo prepared by the prosecution does however, give new insight into his role in BitMEX, where he was chief operations officer and later chief strategy officer, and why he was charged.

In their memo filed ahead of Delo’s sentencing, prosecutors said that he was a “leader in BitMEX’s criminal failure to comply with the BSA (Bank Secrecy Act)”.

Prosecutors alleged that BitMEX allowed US customers to use the platform, even though they should have been prevented from doing so.

In 2015 after a change in US regulation of cryptocurrency, BitMEX said it was withdrawing from the US market but insufficiently rigorous checks allowed Americans to remain on the platform.

Prosecutors claimed that more than $200 million (£148 million) of suspicious transactions ran across the whole of BitMEX’s platform during 2015 and 2020.

Prosecutors also said Delo owned 30 percent of BitMEX and personally made hundreds of millions of dollars from its operations as BitMEX became one of the world’s biggest crypto derivatives platforms.

Delo “thumbed his nose at the law”, prosecutors said, calling for a sentence of six months of home confinement “because of the seriousness of the offense”.

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During sentencing, Delo’s lawyer Patrick Smith argued that Farage’s new donor took “numerous steps” to deal with the issue of US users on the BitMEX platform and cited “hundreds and hundreds” of customer support tickets where Delo personally restricted Americans from using their accounts.

Smith said that Delo had “consistently cooperated” with the US Department of Justice including coming to the US voluntarily to give statements and that his client’s role was making sure the trading engine worked and developed the code, rather than setting the compliance policies.

Iranian sanctions

Among the most serious claims against Delo was that he personally told Iranians they could trade on BitMEX even though it could have breached US sanctions.

According to another pre-sentence memo, in January 2017 Arthur Hayes, another executive at the company, who was also charged, and Delo “both told Iranian customers that they were free to trade”.

As a result of these failures, internal BitMEX reports show the company earned money from customers in Iran until at least April 2018.

The court documents stated: “Delo understood as late as November 2018 that the company did not have ‘strict enforcement of US sanctions against Iran etc.,’ and sometimes ‘let these people slip through the cracks’.”

In their submission to the court ahead of sentencing, Delo’s lawyers disputed the claim BitMEX was a hub for illegal activity and said that was an “outdated view of cryptocurrency as inherently nefarious”.

Smith said: “That a handful of potential criminals had accounts on BitMEX does not demonstrate that BitMEX was a haven for criminal activity or that Ben or BitMEX encouraged or enabled laundering of criminal proceeds”.

During sentencing, Delo took full responsibility for his crimes, a sharp contrast to his later tone.

He said he “did not act quickly enough or effectively enough” to ensure BitMEX wasn’t serving US customers. “It was a terrible decision, the consequences of which I have to carry the rest of my life.”

Delo thanked the prosecutors and said that he understood they “have a job to do and work very hard”.

“And ultimately the plea agreement reflects a fair resolution of the BSA charge against me,” he said.

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In other court filings and legal arguments, Delo’s lawyers pleaded for leniency and said that his record as a philanthropist was proof he was fundamentally a good person who had overcome adversity.

Delo has signed on to the Giving Pledge, the initiative started by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett to encourage the wealthy to give away their money.

According to reports, Delo has already donated £100 million to charity.

In March 2024 BitMex as a company, pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act for, as prosecutors put it in a press release, “willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an adequate anti-money laundering program”.

Damian Williams, who was then the top federal prosecutor in New York, said that BitMEX “opened itself up as a vehicle for large-scale money laundering and sanctions evasion schemes, posing a serious threat to the integrity of the financial system”.

In January last year, BitMex was sentenced to a fine of $100 million and two years of probation.

Then US Attorney Matthew Podolsky said in a press release that the laws that BitMEX breached were essential to “prevent the financing of terrorist activity”.

Two months later, Delo was given a pardon by Trump, as was HDR Global Trading, the entity which controls BitMex. It was reportedly the first time in US legal history that a corporation has received a pardon.

The crypto party

Delo is the latest cryptocurrency billionaire to put his money behind Reform.

Christopher Harborne, a Thai-based businessman and one of the largest shareholders in Tether, has given more than £20 million, including £12 million in the last year - and reportedly an undeclared £5 m to Farage personally ahead of the 2024 general election.

Like Trump, Farage has become a vocal supporter of cryptocurrency. The Reform leader has batted aside warnings from financial crime experts that crypto can be used to facilitate money laundering and illicit activity and said he was considering legal action over Labour’s introduction of a moratorium on crypto donations.

Farage has skin in the crypto game, too. Earlier this year, the Reform leader announced that he had invested £215,000 in a crypto business chaired by former Conservative chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.

Farage even appeared in a promotional video for Stack BTC, prompting calls from the Lib Dems for the Financial Conduct Authority to investigate whether his actions amount to “attempted interference in the cryptocurrency market” or “attempted market abuse.”

In a press release, Farage said that he had “long been one of the UK’s few political advocates for Bitcoin, recognising the role digital currencies will play in the future of business and finance.”

A senior executive at the PR firm previously hired by Labour Together to investigate journalists told a freelance contractor who had worked on the project at APCO to destroy evidence of its campaign against journalists.

The contractor subsequently made a whistleblowing disclosure about that instruction to the Serious Fraud Office, which investigates serious fraud and corruption.

The instruction to delete material came from Tom Harper, who ran the Labour Together project for APCO, after Democracy for Sale revealed that the Starmerite think tank had paid APCO to investigate journalists reporting on more than £700,000 in undeclared funding used to power Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership win.

Josh Simons, who had succeeded Morgan McSweeney as Labour Together boss, resigned as a minister in Starmer’s government in February, in the wake of the revelations about APCO’s work for the think tank.

After our initial story, Harper, a former Sunday Times journalist who is still listed as head of APCO’s European media relations practice, told the contractor to destroy evidence of the Labour Together work.

The material was subject to a legal hold, which is a formal instruction from company lawyers to preserve documents that might be relevant to anticipated or threatened litigation. At the time, APCO was under investigation by its trade body and its work for Labour Together was facing scrutiny in Parliament.

Now the contractor is being pursued by APCO in a secretive London arbitration court, where the global PR firm is represented by London-based law firm Withers LLP.

Early day motion

The revelations about senior APCO staff ordering the destruction of information and taking a whistleblower to court emerged in a parliamentary motion lodged by Labour MP John McDonnell.

The former shadow chancellor’s early day motion calls on justice secretary David Lammy to conduct an urgent assessment of the adequacy of legal protections for individuals making protected disclosures.

The motion cites information provided to McDonnell “that a contractor has been instructed by a senior employee of APCO Worldwide to destroy material relating to work undertaken for Labour Together, notwithstanding that the material was subject to a legal hold and subsequently made a protected disclosure to the Serious Fraud Office.”

Early day motions do not typically lead to debate, but they place matters on the formal parliamentary record and are frequently used by MPs to signal concern to government departments.

Speaking to Democracy for Sale, McDonnell said that this new information underscored the need for an independent investigation into Labour Together’s campaign, which targeted journalists from the Sunday Times, the Guardian and Declassified, as well as authors Paul Holden and .

“This is now further evidence of the urgency for the Government to establish an independent inquiry into Labour Together and to get to the truth about the role played by Labour Together and the agency APCO into the alleged smearing of journalists and collection of data on Members of Parliament,” McDonnell said.

“This issue is not going away and a growing number of MPs on all sides of the Commons are supporting this demand.”

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Press freedom campaigners said that the public needed “total transparency” about APCO’s work for Labour Together.

“Following the reports of APCO investigating and monitoring journalists on behalf of Labour Together, the public is entitled to total transparency and accountability to ensure it cannot happen again,” said Nik Williams, policy and campaigns officer at Index on Censorship.

“That APCO has sought to allegedly destroy evidence subject to a legal hold and is pursuing the contractor who blew the whistle in court demonstrates the alarming steps some will take to avoid and suppress scrutiny. Democracy cannot thrive if such conduct continues.”

Josh Simons resigned in late February after the prime minister’s independent adviser on ministerial standards, Sir Laurie Magnus, concluded that he had not breached the ministerial code, but that there was a “distraction and potential reputational damage” in Simons remaining in the government.

The PR industry’s trade body also launched an investigation into APCO’s conduct. At the time, APCO told the media that it was conducting “a detailed internal review of the project” and was “deeply committed” to upholding its values and standards.

APCO’s Tom Harper was previously identified as the author of controversial reports for Labour Together that falsely linked journalists to a “pro-Kremlin network” and focused on Sunday Times investigative journalist Gabriel Pogrund’s Jewish background in terms that drew widespread criticism.

Harper’s wife, Caroline Wheeler, was the Sunday Times’ political editor for nine years.

By Lucas Amin, Adam Bychawski and Peter Geoghegan

Another day, another news story about Ed Miliband being “under pressure” over North Sea oil and gas.

The energy secretary was on the Today programme yesterday morning defending his refusal to follow Reform and the Conservatives’ demands to “drill, baby, drill”. His critics argue that the war in Iran and spiralling energy costs mean the UK should do everything it can to increase oil and gas production.

Numerous experts point out that more drilling in the North Sea will do “vanishingly little” to reduce energy costs for Britons. Why? Because the price of oil and gas in the UK is set by global markets.

But something has been missed in the endless North Sea headlines. While conflict in the Middle East has been the spark for the renewed interest in drilling, behind the scenes fossil fuel firms have been heavily lobbying ever since Labour returned to power.

A Democracy for Sale investigation has found that the main North Sea industry lobby group, Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), has spearheaded a campaign to overturn the ban on new North Sea drilling and to end the windfall tax on energy profits.

Documents obtained under Freedom of Information legislation and our analysis of public records found that:

• Lobbyists for OEUK and its members, which include BP, Shell and a host of major oil and gas firms, have met UK and Scottish ministers 96 times since July 2024 – a rate of more than once a week.
  

• OEUK has developed a sophisticated playbook for influencing decision-makers in Westminster. This includes running the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the British Offshore Energy Industry, which gives the group access to MPs. The APPG does not declare OEUK’s financial support, saying it does not reach the reporting threshold.
  

• OEUK’s head of public affairs is a former Tory special advisor who has repeatedly met with parliamentarians. On at least two occasions, MPs have made parliamentary contributions echoing OEUK talking points a day after being briefed by the lobby group.

• Lobbyists have been pushing for more North Sea drilling. Two days after Labour’s election victory, BP vice-president Louise Kingham had a phone call with Miliband in which she called for “new exploration licenses” in the North Sea and also raised “concerns on the energy profits levy” introduced in the wake of soaring profits after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
  

• In a subsequent meeting with energy minister Michael Shanks, BP’s Kingham warned that the windfall tax would “kill off” BP’s investment in renewables – even as the company was already scaling back its energy transition plans. In another meeting, a Shell UK executive called for “continuous drilling in the North Sea.”

While Miliband has refused to backtrack on Labour’s manifesto pledge, the pressure on the energy secretary is growing. Rachel Reeves recently told BBC radio she would be “very happy” to back new North Sea exploration.

Tessa Khan, executive director of climate action organisation Uplift, told us that OEUK’s “noisy lobbying” was aimed at creating “a sense of the inevitable, in a bid to pressure the government into making a decision on drilling.”

“New drilling won’t make any difference to the price we pay for gas,” Khan added. “It is a distraction from the genuine solutions, like more renewables, and upgrading homes with solar power and heat pumps, which are the only way to insulate ourselves from energy shocks.”

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At the end of 2025, the UK’s oil and gas industry was reeling. OEUK described it as the sector’s “worst year on record”: Reeves had confirmed the windfall tax would run until 2030, and campaigners had won a Court of Session ruling against permits for two new North Sea fields, Rosebank and Jackdaw. OEUK’s chief executive David Whitehouse wrote on LinkedIn that the decisions were “personal” and “not over”.

The industry’s focus shifted from policy to shaping the political debate, with OEUK listing “influence a change to the UK government narrative” among its priorities for 2026.

The influence campaign has been extensive. Ahead of November’s autumn budget, OEUK held a parliamentary reception attended by ministers and MPs. The government simultaneously softened its position on North Sea oil and gas, allowing new production on or near existing fields, so long as it doesn’t require new exploration.

Offshore Energy UK'’s pre-budget event was hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the British Offshore Energy Industry, whose chair is Mary Glindon, the Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend. Another member is the Conservative peer Colin Moynihan, who has previously called net zero a “children’s crusade” and owns shares in an offshore energy engineering firm.

OEUK has helped run the parliamentary group since its establishment in 1991. While the group lists OEUK’s external affairs lead as its secretariat, it has not declared this support as a financial benefit. Neither OEUK nor the APPG responded to our questions about this, but have previously said the arrangement was worth less than £1,500, the threshold for mandatory reporting.

In March, OEUK’s head of public affairs, former Conservative Cabinet Office SpAd Mark McClelland, briefed Labour MP Glindon and the Conservative Harriet Cross, on energy security, according to a LinkedIn post.

The following day, Cross called on Miliband to overturn his ban on new oil and gas licences during a Commons debate. Glindon then asked whether keeping the energy windfall tax risked reducing investment, an argument that OEUK has repeatedly made. Neither the parliamentary group nor Glindon responded to a request for comment.

OEUK’s lobbying effort has been bearing fruit across the British media. “We’re sitting on a goldmine!” So WHY won’t Red Ed drop his Net Zero madness?”, the Daily Mail reported this month, citing OEUK research.

The Mail story was one of 788 stories in the British media in the past year to mention the trade group, according to press cuttings database Factiva.

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OEUK has also targeted Scotland, where the future of the Aberdeen-based industry remains politically sensitive. It secured 44 meetings with MSPs and ministers after the Scottish government introduced a presumption against new offshore fossil fuel licences in 2023.

Over time, the Scottish government’s position appears to have softened considerably. By 2025, Scottish ministers were echoing industry concerns about an “unhelpfully polarised” debate at roundtable meetings with oil companies. First Minister John Swinney described the sector as “overtaxed”.

OEUK boss Whitehouse subsequently wrote to thank the first minister for his “willingness to engage directly” with the industry in September, according to correspondence released under freedom of information laws. Earlier this month, Swinney hinted that the Scottish National Party would support new drilling in the North Sea.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said that: “Ministers have previously made clear that people throughout the country would expect the Scottish Government to engage constructively with these industries, many of whom are involved in renewable energy in addition to traditional energy sources.”

​​An OEUK spokesperson said: “We are an apolitical organisation regularly engaging with parliamentary parties across the UK. Our sector contributes billions of pounds to the UK economy, supports thousands of good jobs and safeguards energy security while driving down carbon emissions. We will continue to represent it with pride.”

Commenting on our findings, Green MP Sian Berry said “the scale and depth of access OEUK has been given to government ministers is absolutely shocking”, adding that it would be “beyond reckless” for the British government “to be swayed by the fossil fuel lobby whose interests lie in profit but whose influence results in chronic dependence on volatile global markets, crippling energy insecurity, and devastating climate breakdown”.

A spokesperson for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero said: “The lesson of yet another fossil fuel crisis is the UK needs to get off the fossil fuel rollercoaster and onto clean homegrown power we control.

“Issuing new licences to explore new fields cannot give us energy security and will not take a penny off bills. We remain focused on supporting a fair, orderly and prosperous transition for the North Sea.”

Democracy for Sale exists to shine a light in dark places. Today we’re doing exactly that - in court.

Last March we filed a Freedom of Information request for the crucial ministerial briefings sent to health secretary Wes Streeting about Palantir’s £330m NHS contract.

Palantir isn’t a healthcare company. It’s a defence and surveillance firm owned by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, wired into Trump’s White House and its ICE deportation machine. Doctors and the British Medical Association have warned against handing sensitive health infrastructure to a company like this.

The government’s response? Trust us. No, you can’t see the papers.

So we’ve teamed up with lawyers at the Good Law Project and Landmark Chambers to fight this secrecy at the Information Tribunal. We deserve to know what taxpayers’ money is being spent on - and how our critical health data is being used.

We have just filed our appeal. We have been pushing for these documents for over a year, but the case has a long way to run - but we will keep fighting for transparency.

The legal case comes out of our ongoing investigation into Palantir. As part of this, we have been seeking access to internal government documents about Palantir’s software, which were prepared by civil servants for health secretary Wes Streeting and his ministers.

On 18 March 2025 we made a request to the Department for Health and Social Care for the “ministerial submissions” about the Federated Data Platform (the software Palantir is commissioned to build) sent to health ministers.

The department confirmed that two submissions exist. But it refused to provide them, claiming that disclosure “could prejudice good working relationships and the neutrality of civil servants”.

We appealed and DHSC refused, again, so we then lodged a complaint with the Information Commissioner in August.

Last month the commissioner sided with DHSC, claiming that ministers needed a “safe space” to develop policy.

We disagree. We think the public interest in understanding what Palantir is doing with taxpayer money and sensitive NHS data is exceptionally strong. Full disclosure is urgently required.

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If a week is a long time in British politics, then a fortnight is an eternity. Especially when it comes to regulating the wild west of political funding.

In late March, Keir Starmer announced an immediate £100,000 cap on political donations from Britons based abroad. The move, which followed recommendations made in the Rycroft review into foreign political interference, was clearly aimed squarely at Reform UK.

Barely two weeks later, Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency billionaire Ben Delo revealed that he had donated £4 million to Nigel Farage’s party – and that he planned to return home so he could keep donating. “I will move back to Britain early so I can contribute more to Reform,” Delo wrote in the Telegraph.

Delo certainly seems to have cash to burn. Since the Telegraph piece, Delo’s solicitors have been busy sending legal threats to social media accounts that reported his conviction in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money-laundering controls in his crypto business. (He was pardoned by Donald Trump last year.)

Delo’s story is symptomatic of a much wider problem in British politics: the rise of “mega donors”. A decade ago, when I first started writing about political funding, £50,000 was an eye-catching donation. Now donors are small-fry unless they’re giving millions.

Even before Delo’s blockbuster donation, 75% of Reform’s funding had come from just three men. Thailand-based crypto tycoon Christopher Harborne has given Farage more than £20 million. The Tories and Labour have had their fair share of mega donors, too.

We only have to look across the Atlantic, at the naked “pay-to-play” in Donald Trump’s White House, to see what happens when politics is captured by big money. The UK is no stranger to influence peddling in public office, too. Think of the billions of pounds in contracts doled out to politically-connected VIPs during the Covid pandemic, or the party donors that pepper the House of Lords’ red benches.

The law has proved little impediment to bad behaviour. History shows that parties don’t mind breaking election legislation when the punishment comes after the count. The puny fines doled out to rule breakers are chalked off as “the cost of doing business” by political insiders.

Labour came into office promising to clean up this rotten system. The Elections Bill currently going through Parliament contains some useful measures – a moratorium on donations in cryptocurrency, for example – but is timorous and piecemeal where it needed to be bold and ambitious.

Politicians talk a lot about trust. But the Elections Bill will do little to tackle one of the biggest sources of distrust in British politics: the rise of big money.

In less than a decade, the share of private political donations coming from individuals and companies giving £1 million or more has surged 35-fold, from just 1% in 2015 to over a third in 2024, according to research by Transparency International. At Democracy for Sale, we found that corporate donations have tripled over the past three general elections.

So what can be done? Housing secretary Steve Reed has warned that “it is our patriotic duty to safeguard the British people’s right to freely choose their own government.” But are we only worried about foreign money? Shouldn’t we be concerned that anyone able to vote in the UK can give unlimited amounts to politics?

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There is a tidy solution to this conundrum: a cap on all political donations, whether from individuals or companies, regardless of where they live.

Caps on political donations are hardly a new idea. Numerous countries already have such limits, including Australia, France, Canada, and Belgium. Even the United States has a ceiling on campaign contributions of just under $1 million. (The problem, of course, is the limitless cash funnelled through Super Pacs.)

In the UK, experts and transparency campaigners have long advocated for a cap, but successive Labour and Conservative governments have seen more self-interest in keeping the money flowing in. But calls for a cap on political donations are growing louder.

Philip Rycroft, the former civil servant who led the independent review into foreign interference in British politics, explicitly suggested parliament should consider a cap on all individual donations “if it wishes to restore confidence in the political process and to keep big money out of UK politics”.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections – the largest cross-party group in parliament – has called for caps on political donations. Its membership includes dozens of backbench Labour MPs.

Senior Labour figures have broken cover, too. Last year, David Blunkett told me that Starmer “should get on with” a donations cap to prevent British politics being bought by a handful of billionaires. More party grandees could join the former home secretary’s call as the Elections Bill winds its way through parliament in the coming weeks.

The question of the level at which a cap should be set has been much debated. There is a strong argument for making it as low as possible. Some have suggested tying it to the median income, which feels inherently fair. But having established £100,000 for donations from Britons abroad, the government could simply set that as the annual limit for all donations.

Capping donations would also deliver that rarest of things in politics: a low-cost policy that is wildly popular. Polling by YouGov found that just 13% of people think that individuals should be allowed to give as much as they wish to political parties. Even among Reform voters, a cap is widely supported.

Critics ask how politics would be funded if private money was curtailed, but here, too, there are options. Spending limits, ridiculously inflated by the last Conservative government, can be radically reduced. Small donations could be match-funded. Public funding for parties, long a taboo, could be revisited.

Ben Delo has shown how easily Labour’s curbs on foreign money can be circumvented. Rather than playing party politics, Starmer needs to put the integrity of British democracy first and use his Elections Bill as what it is: a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take big money out of our politics.

A version of this story appeared in the New World.