LUCY POWELL’S Labour deputy leadership campaign was helped by a £10,000 donation from Martin Taylor, the multimillionaire who funds key Starmer group Labour Together — suggesting Powell’s run for the job was even less of a rebellion against Labour’s rightward move than it seemed.

Taylor is a hedge fund multimillionaire and leading funder of key Starmer-supporting group Labour Together. Taylor gave Labour together another £175,000 this September, bringing his donations to the group over £4 million.

Labour Together is a key Starmerite group, which posed as “soft left” then helped him move the party under Starmer firmly to a Labour right position. Taylor runs hedge fund Crake Asset Management, where he paid himself £10 million in 2024, according to the latest accounts, so has a personal interest in lower taxation.

Crake’s bigger investments include US firm United Health, which is interested in NHS privatisation, and Amazon, which has interests in government outsourcing and holding back labour rights regulation.

Taylor’s support for Labour Together as it helped divert Labour away from a tax-the-rich, stop privatisation position is understandable.

Lucy Powell, seen as a member of Labour’s “soft left,” stood as the “outsider” campaign in the Labour leadership race against Starmer’s favourite Bridget Phillipson, winning by arguing she was the voice of “dissent” against Labour’s rightward moves. Starmer would have undoubtedly preferred Phillipson over Powell, who he sacked from Cabinet, but her reliance on Taylor’s money suggests her “dissent” will be very limited.

I asked Powell’s office if Taylor funding her campaign showed that her campaign was more of an “inside-the-tent” move than a rejection of Labour’s rightward turn.

Their spokesperson said: “The generous donors of Lucy’s campaign — including Martin and others — fully supported Lucy’s vision and pitch for the role which the membership strongly endorsed in electing her. Lucy has a strong mandate to make the changes the Party needs so the Labour government can be more successful.”

Looking at the figures, it is obvious that Phillipson was even more of a figure of Labour’s millionaire-backed centrists: overall Phillipson’s campaign was better funded, wasting £94,000 on their losing bid compared to Powell’s £66,000 winning campaign.

Phillipson’s campaign was largely run for free by Labour First, the “traditional” right-wing Labour group that is led by Luke Akehurst, according to the Register of MPs’ Interests. Phillipson also got £40,000 from long-term Labour right “sugar daddy” Lord David Sainsbury and £15,000 from his daughter Fran Perrin.

Sainsbury has a long history of funding the Labour right. He was one of Tony Blair’s biggest backers, and more recently put hundreds of thousands of pounds into Stamerite group Labour Together and individual members of Team Starmer.

Lord Sainsbury’s life went something like this: Eton, Cambridge, job in the family supermarket, inherited billions. So he is unsurprisingly against Labour actually challenging power, wealth and privilege, or giving any real power to the kind of low-paid people who work in his family supermarket.

Phillipson also got £10,000 from Jim Murphy, the Blairite former Labour minister-turned-lobbyist, for her campaign. Murphy owns and runs his own lobbying company called Arden Strategies. Arden says it is a specialist in helping clients “navigate” the Labour Party and “shape the conversation and drive impact within Labour spaces,” so giving money to a Cabinet minister’s key political campaign is an understandable move by Murphy.

Arden’s current clients include British Gas owner Centrica; catering giant Compass Group, which profits from outsourced public services and low-paid workers; Atos, the French tech firm who chase privatisation contracts, British data farm developer Ark Data Centres and engineering giant AECOM.

Praful Nargund: Mum’s the word

LABOUR’S biggest back-bench organisation, the Labour Growth Group, has formed a “partnership” with a think tank entirely controlled by Praful Nargund, the Labour candidate who lost to Jeremy Corbyn. Nargund relies heavily on his mum for his position.

The Starmer-loyalist Labour Growth Group, with over 90 supporters, is larger than any “rebellious” Labour MP’s organisation. After Labour’s national conference in October, the group’s co-chair, Chris Curtis MP, announced a “partnership” with the Good Growth Foundation to “bring together the political reach of the largest back-bench grouping in Labour with the research firepower and policy capacity of one of the fastest-rising think tanks on the progressive left.”

Praful Nargund is the sole and controlling director of the Good Growth Foundation (GGF). Nargund was imposed as Labour’s candidate against Corbyn in the 2024 election, without consulting local members. Despite claiming he “mobilised a huge campaign,” Nargund embarrassed Labour by losing to Corbyn in Islington North.

The Good Growth Foundation was launched shortly after this defeat.

Nargund’s mother, Professor Geeta Nargund is a doctor who built a multimillion-pound business employing 150 people around her private fertility practice, which she sold off in the 2020s. Praful Nargund boasts about his business career as CEO of “Create Fertility” on his biography on the GGF website, without saying this was his mother’s company.

In the same biography Nargund says: “he is also co-founder of Social Impact Enterprises,” without admitting the other co-founder and owner of this investment firm is also his mother.

The GGF also gets support from one of Praful Nargund’s mother’s organisations The GGF held 11 meetings in a dedicated — and expensive — “pod” inside Labour’s recent annual conference in Liverpool. Two were funded by the Create Health Foundation, founded by Geeta Nargund. I asked the GGF if they got other funds from Geeta Nargund’s organisations but got no response.

Chris Curtis MP claimed the Labour Growth Group’s partnership with GGF showed it was “bold enough to confront vested interests” and stop the “radical right” growing because “faith in the democratic contract” is “draining away.” But the GGF looks like a vested interest — a vanity project for Praful Nargund, a vote-loser who is fuelled by family money.

Nargund’s GGF took on some key Labour insiders to ensure its own growth: veteran Blairites Lord Roger Liddle and Tim Allan joined the GGF advisory council (Allan left this September to become Starmer’s communications director).

Some former assistants to Starmer-supporting MPs were employed as staff. The foundation was also able to attract some corporate support at Labour’s conference to add to the family cash, with TikTok paying for the GGF’s Labour conference invite-only party and Visa and Vodafone funding a couple of meetings.