LABOUR’S campaign chief faced questions today over breaches of electoral law when he was running the right-wing pressure group Labour Together.

Morgan McSweeney, one of leader Sir Keir Starmer’s key aides now in charge of the party’s election campaign, failed to declare donations of £700,000 from sundry capitalists to Labour Together, earning a rebuke from the Electoral Commission.

Labour Together played a vital role, which has only gradually emerged, in Sir Keir’s ascendancy to the party leadership.

It was fined more than £14,000 for failing to declare the donations in 2020, having previously been instructed by the commission that it needed to do so. 

Mr McSweeney ran the organisation until 2020 when he left to become Sir Keir’s chief of staff.

Independent MP Angus MacNeil has urged the commission to reopen its investigation into the failure given the sums of money involved.

“If people are going into Downing Street with this sort of track record, it doesn’t bode well,” he told the Telegraph, which broke the story.

Labour Together has said it fully co-operated with the Electoral Commission probe and expressed unevidenced concerns that the latest revelation arose from a hack of the commission’s systems.

The commission was indeed subject to a hack in 2021 but pointed out that its investigation of Labour Together long preceded that.

Mr McSweeney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Telegraph report is based on freedom of information documents obtained by investigative journalist Paul Holden, whose book, Keir Starmer, Labour Together, and the Crisis of British Democracy, is forthcoming.