ONE of the few innovations of Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership is allowing multimillionaires to bypass the Labour Party and directly choose who gets ahead in the party and who doesn’t.

The latest example of this appears in the Register of MPs’ Interests: Josh Simons, Labour MP for Makerfield, says hedge fund boss Martin Taylor has given him £47,000 “to support my work as a member of Parliament.”

That’s a lot of money which will help Simons build his profile and get more noticed in the party. Taylor, who is a multimillionaire, is just bypassing all those annoying Labour Party meetings and conferences and throwing a load of money to build up one of his favourite centrist MPs. 

Simons probably needs the cash because he is not very good at raising his own profile. He was director of key Starmer-supporting organisation Labour Together from 2022-4, so he already had a big position on the Labour right before becoming an MP. But while his rather strangulated centrist technocrat persona worked well as a “back-room boy,” he has done less well in Parliament, only managing to become a parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to Environment Secretary Steve Reed. 

PPS is an unpaid role as a minister’s assistant, a sort of political school prefect. It is the very lowest rung in government. Taylor’s extra big wodge of “promote yourself” money might help Simons climb higher.

Taylor is already one of the most generous “sugar daddies” behind Starmer’s leadership. He gave £95,000 to Starmer for his Labour leadership bid in 2020, but his most significant contribution is as a key funder of Labour Together, the political machine behind Starmer’s rise. 

Taylor has given £3.2 million to Labour Together since it was founded in 2015 as a tool to oust the Corbynite left and put the Labour right back in charge of the party. Labour Together picked out Starmer as their main hope for this restoration because he could more convincingly pretend to be left wing when running for leader, unlike more transparent rightwingers like Wes Streeting. 

The privately managed Labour Together is not an official part of the Labour Party, but financially supported and provided personnel to many of Starmer’s Cabinet. While many Labour MPs and members are deeply disappointed with Starmer’s performance so far, Taylor seems happy with how things are going, donating another £325,000 to Labour Together in September 2024, according to Electoral Commission records.

By giving his latest cash boost to Simons, Taylor is trying to build up one of the Labour Together personnel. Taylor certainly has the spare cash. He paid himself £10m in 2024, more than doubling his 2023 earnings. 

The latest accounts for Taylor’s hedge fund, Crake Asset Management, covering the year to March 2024 were filed at Companies House in December. They show Crake paid its 13 partners a combined £36m from profits, with £10m attributable to the “member with the largest entitlement” — Taylor himself. That’s a big jump on his 2023 entitlement of £3.8m.

Taylor made his fortune investing in Russian businesses like Gazprom up to 2012. His new firm, Crake, which he founded in 2018, invests in much more mainstream US companies. 

Latest US filings for Crake show the firm’s top investments include $171m — around 20 per cent of Crake’s holdings — in Amazon: Labour’s stated aim to favour outsourced public-sector digitisation, AI and data centres are Amazon-friendly. Whether Labour’s proposed workers’ rights laws will threaten notoriously anti-union Amazon remains to be seen. Crake has smaller investments in US health giant HCA Healthcare ($10m), which also runs private hospitals in Britain and hence an interest in NHS outsourcing, and “gig employment” firm Uber ($2.7m). 

With his personal wealth unchallenged by Starmer’s labour and his business interests also ticking along nicely, it’s not surprising he seems happy with the government, even if nobody else is.

Simons does need the extra help, because the former “back-room boy” of Labour Together has struggled since he became a more public politician. Maybe a public school education, top marks at Cambridge, an arrogant persona and jargon-laden, bloodless technocratic politics aren’t so useful for being a Labour MP. 

Simons first got in the national news in 2024. Just before the Scottish Labour conference Simons told LBC that the best way to deal with illegal migration was to put “people-smugglers” on a barge and “ship the barge up to the north of Scotland for all I — you know, who cares?” Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar was forced to say Simons was “cringe” and “doesn’t represent the Labour Party.”

In 2024 Simons also told a meeting that Labour has a “strong political incentive to seek out the perspectives of the median voter,” who are the “the millions of voters who matter” and are “disproportionately economically secure.” 

By contrast Simons said the “extreme wings” like “people who are on the encampments” protesting for peace in Gaza — this was when many students had set up these protest encampments — are “not the people that matter.” 

Simons went further and said Labour should make efforts to “not only to ignore, but sometimes deliberately make a point of confronting the people in those encampments” because that, “by the way, is exactly how democracy is supposed to work.” 

Just to cap it off Simons demonstrated his loyalty to Labour by saying that in 2019 he “hoped that Labour would lose that election” and that, “in the end, the thing I trust is not the Labour Party. I’m not going to die on a hill for the Labour Party. If the Labour Party goes mad, does what it did again, drifts from my values, I will ditch the Labour Party.” 

This is precisely the kind of politics that attracts millionaires, but it doesn’t seem attractive to Labour members. The idea that this “median voter” strategy aiming at the “economically secure” makes Labour popular also looks very questionable now.