WHAT happens to former Labour general secretaries when they retire? It turns out they join up with former Tory ministers to work for lobbying companies that regularly represent corporations and foreign authoritarian regimes.

At least that is what happened to Iain McNicol. He was general secretary of the Labour Party from 2011 to 2018.

Last December he got a new job as an “adviser” to what he calls a “strategy consultancy” called Actum. It is a relatively new US-controlled lobbying firm. McNicol was hired alongside former Tory minister Ed Vaizey.

McNicol’s time at the top of the Labour Party was not glorious. Doing a double act with a Tory lord for some US-owned lobbyists seems like a fitting end.

Then-Labour leader Ed Miliband didn’t want McNicol to be the general secretary in 2011 — he got the job more out of “office politics” and “Buggins’s turn” than any recognised talent.

McNicol then tried hard to undermine the next Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who won the Labour leadership in 2015.

In 2016 Labour MPs called for a new contest and McNicol tried to stop Corbyn from being on the ballot, even though he was the sitting leader.

This McNicol plan failed and Corbyn won again, trouncing his pathetic and forgotten opponent, Owen Smith.

McNicol was then painted in the press as a loyal Labour servant trying to stop the growth of anti-semitism in the party under Corbyn.

However, a 2020 leaked internal report into governance under McNicol, based on extensive quoted communications between senior managers, said otherwise.

The report showed McNicol’s team was not, as it claimed, undermined as it tried to deal with anti-Jewish prejudice among Labour members.

Instead, the report suggests it allowed anti-semitism cases to pile up because it was more interested in trying to exclude large numbers of Corbynist members that might have once liked a Facebook post by the Green Party.

The report says it was especially busy with schemes to remove Corbyn, including an “operation cupcake” and the creation of a secret fund to divert party money to fund campaigns in safe seats held by anti-Corbyn MPs.

The report also found that the senior management team, including McNicol, ran a secret Whatsapp group where members used extremely bigoted and right-wing language about other Labour people.

They had an unhinged attitude to Diane Abbott, calling her “truly repulsive,” saying: “Abbott literally makes me sick,” and described another prominent Labour woman as a “smelly cow,” “fat” and “pube head.”

There were wild right-wing fantasies, like a discussion about “hanging and burning” Corbyn.

A second, official Labour report, the Forde report, released in 2022, looked at some of the same evidence and confirmed many of its findings.

Forde said: “We find that the messages on the senior management team Whatsapp reveal deplorably factional, insensitive and at times discriminatory attitudes expressed by many of the party’s most senior staff.”

While McNicol was the leader of this network of Labour staff that secretly tried to undermine Corbyn, even they didn’t respect him.

The history of the Corbyn years written by Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire sums up their views like this: “Staff harboured doubts over his ability to lead. They also had trouble navigating [McNichol’s] eccentricities.

“He spent much of his time in the office shoeless and was averse to using his computer. To his staff, he was not the decisive presence they needed in a crisis.”

In 2018, Labour’s new leadership finally got rid of McNicol, although it had to arrange his place in the House of Lords to make it happen.

 At the end of 2022, Actum hired McNicol and Vaisey to head up its “advisory board.” Actum is the new lobbying consultancy founded by Kirill Goncharenko and Fabian Nunez — they used to run another lobbying firm, Mercury Public Affairs, but in 2021 they fell out with Mercury’s owner and split.

Actum has taken over a lot of Mercury’s business and consultants, including the London office. It is obviously interested in expansion in Britain, with the high-profile recruitment of McNicol and Vaizey.

Actum doesn’t reveal its British clients — but US rules on listing lobbying clients are stronger than British ones. Official documents dating from June 2022 show that Actum — through its London office — represented the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Zimbabwe, currently under the presidency of long-time Mugabe ally Emmerson Mnangagwa.

The same US documents show Actum also represented the Libyan “government of national unity,” which, despite the name, is one of two rival Libyan governments, with another would-be government in the east of the civil-war-wracked nation.

The “national unity” group which Actum represented is run by Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, a former associate of Gadaffi who has been accused of corruption by some commentators.

Actum also represents various medical and industrial firms in the US. While the main lobbying registry in Britain is voluntary, and Actum has declined to use it to list any clients, it does say it will offer corporations help with “lobbying and government affairs” and “political consultancy.”

On his appointment, the firm said: “Lord McNicol brings to Actum deep and extensive ties inside the Labour Party.”

McNicol said: “Actum is one of the most dynamic companies in the strategic advice sector,” adding: “I am excited not just to join their impressive international team but to be part of enhancing their insightful and intelligent approach. I have been lucky to be part of brilliant leadership teams in the past and cannot wait to join one of the best.”

McNicol’s appointment is part of a wider pattern of leading lobbyists trying to get Labour-connected figures on board as the prospect of a Labour government looks increasingly likely.

McNicol might like to believe he has been hired because of his history of “brilliant leadership teams,” but in reality, lobbyists want to buy people’s connections more than their talent.