LABOUR’S leadership expected to be able to fundraise from the rich to replace income lost because Keir Starmer’s rightward march turned off members and trade unions — but it hasn’t really happened on any scale.

One exception is banker Anthony Watson, who is one of Labour’s few returning rich donors.

In March the Politico website reported “senior figures around Keir Starmer” want Labour general secretary David Evans sacked — reasons for ditching Evans including being “too slow” to “raise funds from private donors.”

Labour has gone from being financially comfortable, thanks to the huge membership under Jeremy Corbyn, to financially in trouble. Starmer junked his leadership election promises, moving right and attacking members instead. Consequently thousands have resigned from Labour, leaving a financial hole.

Starmer’s bland politics also put off unions, who cut “top-up” payments to the party. Evans has been sacking staff to deal with the self-inflicted financial crisis and now some in Labour’s leadership want to sack him. Evans is a rightwinger, appointed because he fits in with Starmer’s shift back to a kind of new “New Labour” position.

However, he has been unable to do the second part of the New Labour formula — getting millionaires’ money to replace disenchanted members.

While Team Starmer are cross at him, it is not really Evans’s fault. Their calls to sack him seem like a way of avoiding responsibility for their own actions; the party attacking its own members and reneging on promises has consequences in lost dues

The second part of the formula — let the rich donors replace the members — is not taking off because just going through the motions of New Labour doesn’t attract the millionaire money.

The big donors came to Blair’s Labour either after Labour won power, or when they thought Labour was close to power, so rich people wanted to give money to make sure a ruling party was, as Blair promised, more business-friendly. They wanted to back Blair’s attempts to permanently shift Labour away from socialism.

It looks like today’s millionaires, while they no doubt approve of Starmer’s renewed attempt to exorcise socialism from Labour, either don’t think he is leading Labour to victory, or don’t think he needs extra finance to do the job.

So far, most of the handful of rich donors who have been attracted back have tended to fund individual members of the shadow cabinet rather than the party as a whole.

However, Watson is a rare case of a City donor putting himself behind Labour nationally. Watson was a Labour donor back in 2015 and during the Corbyn years sunk £75k in Angela Eagle’s useless 2016 leadership campaign and £67k into Owen Smith’s equally useless leadership challenge.

The latest figures from the Electoral Commission, published this month show Watson also donated £50k to Labour in December 2021 — this was one of only two £50k donations from rich supporters that quarter.

Watson is a former Barclays banker who has now set up his own bank — the new Bank of London. It is a “clearing bank,” so intends offers a service for customers to make payments or money transfers rather than hold accounts. The bank promises to be a “disruptor” and has been described as more like a “fintech” company.

There are already many fintech — meaning financial technology — firms that specialise in money transfer, like PayPal, Wise, Revolut or Xoom, so it’s not completely clear how new or disruptive Watson’s bank will be.

Watson’s bank is linked to Labour’s right wing by more than just his donations. Watson has also recruited Peter Mandelson as a director of the Bank of London. Richard Reed, the businessman who made millions from Innocent smoothies and helped fund one of the anti-Brexit “people’s vote” campaigns is also a significant investor in Watson’s Bank of London.

There is nothing obviously wrong with Watson and his new bank — although it is early days. The fintech-y “payment” companies are arguably underregulated, placing a lot of financial activity outside established rules. In the past where businesspeople have got close to Labour, the results — the bank deregulation, privatisation, PFI of the New Labour years — has not been great.

Turn the party right? I’d do it for free...

Electoral Commission figures also show that Starmer’s director of strategy, Deborah Mattinson, has given a £21,500 “non-cash” donation in “staff costs” every quarter since last July. It looks like Mattinson is either working for Labour for free, or supplying an £86,000 a year assistant to the party for free.

Mattinson made a lot of money through her “focus group” and polling firm, called BritainThinks. The company, which she still partly owns, made money doing focus groups for both the Tory government and corporations like McDonalds.

Her company’s government work includes running the Tories 2021 consultation on their New Plan for Immigration — a consultation which refugee-supporting charities described as a “a thinly veiled public relations exercise with a pre-determined outcome.”

Refugee Action, the charity which organised protests against the government consultation run by Mattinson’s firm, said it was “not a process designed by a government that genuinely wants to listen or has any interest in being challenged or changing its approach” and instead was designed to usher in plans which “take a wrecking ball to the very principle of asylum.”

You can get an idea of Mattinson’s approach to focus group-driven politics in a report she and BritainThinks gave to Labour in 2015.

Mattinson advised the party to try to change its politics by having a “review of Labour’s economic performance” that would be “headed by a Tory” and to immediately start “focusing on middle-class” voters — not what they called the “(undeserving) poor.”

Mattinson giving free staff time to Labour will be one more way of embedding these kind of politics into the party.