THE rancid core of the clique running the Labour Party and the country is laid bare in Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, published this week.

It spotlights the deceit, disloyalty, duplicity and dirty tactics which brought Starmer to the leadership of the party and eventually Number 10 Downing Street.

The public is already aware that Starmer has abandoned every progressive pledge he made when seeking election as Labour leader. And they know he has proved just as slippery as Prime Minister.

But Holden’s meticulously researched book sets out the potential illegalities and the abuses of power the whole right-wing gang grouped around Labour Together have indulged in.

Starmer’s right-hand man, Morgan McSweeney, has questions to answer, including over the possibility that he deceived the Electoral Commission while running Labour Together.

So too do cabinet members Mahmood and Steve Reed, and former Labour legal chief Alex Barros-Curtis, now an MP.

New Labour, headed by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, staged their own coup in the party in the 1990s. But their main weapon, at least initially, was winning the argument for their right-wing policies.

Starmer and his gang have instead engineered a coup by fraud, as the book shows. To recover its values and its democracy, the labour movement must act to clear them out.