The Fraud: how Reed’s Labour spied on Croydon councillors

Three years ago, Al Jazeera broadcast a series of films, called The Labour Files, based on information gleaned from one of the biggest data leaks in history. One episode was devoted to events that took place in Croydon in early 2021.

PAUL HOLDEN’s new book, The Fraud has been described as ‘the most damning portrayal yet of a political project at once proudly Machiavellian but entirely devoid of moral and intellectual substance’.

And here is that book’s chapter about the unlawful hack on Inside Croydon, as shadowy figures inside Labour spied on three Croydon councillors from their own party

On February 17, 2021, a hacker broke into the email and Twitter accounts of Inside Croydon, a local independent media outlet edited by an old-school, pound-the-pavement reporter named Steven Downes.

Croydon is the stomping ground for three central Labour Together figures: Steve Reed (the MP for Croydon North; from 2024, Streatham and Croydon North), David Evans (who ran his polling and political advisory outfit, The Campaign Company, from the borough), and Morgan McSweeney.

When Downes reported the hack to the Information Commissioner’s Office, he was told that the most likely explanation was that someone had bought a copy of Downes’ email and Twitter passwords from the dark web, effectively purchasing them from international cyber-crime syndicates.

The intent of the hack was obvious: to identify the sources used by the outlet in reporting on local matters and, by revealing them, to discredit those sources as well as the outlet that had failed to protect them.

The hackers used Inside Croydon’s Twitter account to post a single message, outing three of Inside Croydon’s confidential sources: Stephen Mann, Robert Canning, and Andrew Pelling. All three were local Labour councillors who had criticised the council leadership, run by local allies of Steve Reed.

While Downes was almost immediately able to recover control of his Twitter account, his entire email server, including all of the correspondence shared with local confidential sources, was downloaded. Within days, the hacked contents of Downes’ email account were injected directly into the Labour Party bureaucracy.

Some of the party’s most powerful bureaucratic figures, as well as Steve Reed, were not only aware of this astonishing fact but decided that the unlawfully obtained data should be used to target their factional opponents in the party.

As well as covering alleged incompetence and mismanagement in Croydon Council, Inside Croydon had also broken stories about David Evans’ political consultancy firm, The Campaign Company.

In July 2018, Downes reported that The Campaign Company had been awarded £200,000 in contracts by local Croydon government officials over a period of four years. He also reported that Evans had played a key role in overseeing Labour’s 2014 local electioneering that saw it take control of Croydon Council. That newly elected council then awarded Evans’ firm four contracts over the next four years.

A key figure in the local Croydon government over these years was Alison Butler, who was both a local councillor and the deputy leader of Croydon Council. Butler was also the former partner of David Evans, with whom she had a daughter. Butler failed to declare her conflict of interest regarding Evans or The Campaign Company, Inside Croydon reported, in relation to a £16,000 contract awarded to The Campaign Company.

Inside Croydon’s focus on Reed and McSweeney meant that it occupied a unique place in the UK media landscape. This was most powerfully illustrated in February 2021 when the Electoral Commission announced its investigation into Labour Together’s failure to declare donations. Inside Croydon was one of only two outlets in the entire country that reported on the matter. The only other UK publication to cover the Commission’s announcement was The Canary — the target of Stop Funding Fake News.

This means that both of the British media outlets that reported on Labour Together’s run-ins with the Electoral Commission were targeted by Steve Reed, either directly or through SFFN, the astroturf campaign he helped create as part of the Labour Together Project.

Internal Labour Party emails show that Steve Reed and his reputed ally Tony Newman, the leader of Croydon council, had long harboured an antipathy toward Downes.

On October 10, 2016, Newman sent an email to Dan Simpson, a regional Labour official. Newman noted that Downes had recently joined the Labour Party and wanted to find some way to prevent this happening.

“Ahead of meeting up this week, I want to send you some ‘articles’ from a guy called Steven Downes who writes a very bitter local blog site called Inside Croydon. Key issue Downes is now back as a party member [and has published] constant attacks on Steve Reed, councillors and unelected officials,” Newman wrote.

“Both myself and Steve R of the view he needs to go in terms of party membership, but we can’t risk him being reinstated and the subsequent martyrdom that will follow… Is this an OK email to send you some of his ‘work’ to?”

“Yeah, send it to this address and I’ll have a look,” Simpson replied. Simpson forwarded Newman’s email to another Labour Party official two weeks later, indicating that they had spoken about the issues raised by Newman. It is not clear what became of the complaint. Downes remained a party member.

However, the Labour Party bureaucracy, prompted by Reed and Newman, would play an important role in derailing Downes’ nascent party career after he had been selected by members in July 2017 to stand as a Labour councillor. Ironically, Downes had decided to stand primarily for journalistic reasons: to test the allegation from local party members that the party bureaucracy was interfering in selection processes. His own experience confirmed the accuracy of the claim.

On July 31, 2017, Reed wrote to Newman. He attached a dossier setting out Downes’ perceived wrongdoing. The document, Reed wrote, “was sufficient as a submission to the Local Government Forum”, which selected candidates, “to have him removed as a potential candidate, but also grounds for a complaint to have him expelled from the Labour Party.”

Reed was effectively attempting to get an independent media editor expelled from the party, based in part on the editor’s negative but accurate reporting on him.

Reed’s dossier amounted to very little besides an amusing list of all the occasions when Downes had dunked on him. The dossier listed a number of articles in which Inside Croydon had criticised Reed personally or commented on the dysfunction of Croydon Council.

Newman forwarded the dossier from Reed to the local regional organiser, Martin Tiedemann. Newman’s critique was even more strident, accusing Inside Croydon of peddling scurrilous misinformation. “Steven Downes uses his website, Inside Croydon, to run a consistent campaign of hostility, distortion and abuse against Croydon North Labour MP Steve Reed and Croydon’s Labour Council,” Newman alleged.

Downes’ reporting, the dossier claimed, “extends way beyond critical but legitimate commentary about elected Labour representatives. It is a conscious, active and occasionally libellous attempt to distort and misrepresent facts to undermine confidence and support in the Labour Party, the Labour Council, and the Labour MP.”

Downes has never been sued for libel with respect to the articles listed.

But Downes was not just a misinformation merchant, according to Newman’s email to Tiedemann; he was also a sexist bully:

“His personal and often sexist attacks on our Deputy Leader Cllr Alison Butler and senior female council officials, are bullying and intimidation of the worst kind, and any public message he had been panelled [selected as a potential council candidate], would rightly be greeted with outrage and horror, from both party members and many local residents.”

Butler, as noted, would go on to feature in Downes’ reporting on the award of contracts to The Campaign Company. “As Leader I absolutely share Steve Reed MP’s view, that the author of this often anti Labour [sic] hate site should have no place in the Labour Party,” Newman told Tiedemann.

Downes had responded to his nomination in another ward by sending an email to the local ward email list, refusing the nomination. The party found that Downes’ email was inappropriate as it looked like he was using the Labour Party’s local email list to promote his blog.

The person central to this complaint, and Downes’ eventual removal as a candidate, was a local Labour councillor named Clive Fraser, himself an ally of Tony Newman. When Inside Croydon’s email was hacked in early 2021, Fraser was one of the party representatives who somehow received a copy of the hacked material and, with the permission of a party official, used it to launch complaints against his local party enemies.

On February 23, 2021, a local Labour figure in a nearby borough, Ruth Bannister, wrote to the Labour Party. She copied in Fraser, Reed, and senior Croydon local government figures including Hamida Ali, [Newman’s replacement as] the leader of Croydon Council.

Bannister informed Reed and others that an unidentified person had approached her with the contents of the hacked emails, which she had started to review. It appears that she had already raised the matter with some of the email recipients, although the extent of this disclosure is not clear.

Bannister explained that she had come into possession of over two hundred files, which she had spent the previous week reading. Considering the date of her email to the party, this suggests that Bannister must have received the hacked emails shortly after the date of the illegal intrusion.

Bannister uploaded a zip file containing 77 megabytes of hacked emails and shared the link. She claimed that she had identified documents showing that four prominent local Labour members — Pelling, Mann, Canning, and a fourth left-wing member called David White — had been sharing information with Inside Croydon.

Bannister said that the contacts between the site and White “look to me to be a breach of party rules”. The other three were guilty, according to Bannister, of sending “emails providing Inside Croydon with quotes, tips, opinions, and full-blown copy of articles subsequently published.” These three, Bannister claimed, “have been the source of leaks to/authors of articles for Inside Croydon, and… they have been actively and consistently breaching party policy”.

There was no acknowledgment that the councillors could legitimately be seen as whistleblowers about a Labour council that was driving Croydon into financial ruin. Nor was there any acknowledgement that the information had been obtained unlawfully, such that reading and sharing it posed ethical as well as legal questions.

Outsiders may have expected that the Labour Party, its most senior bureaucrats, and Steve Reed himself would have baulked at handling material illegally hacked from an independent media website. Arguably, everybody who came into contact with the material should have contacted the appropriate authorities in the UK, as well as Inside Croydon, to inform them of the situation.

Instead, party officials decided to spread the hacked information far and wide.

Shortly after receiving the hacked material, Clive Fraser forwarded it on to a regional Labour Party official, Oliver Davis, copying in Hamida Ali and one other person. Fraser asked Davis whether he could legally use the documentation to start disciplinary proceedings.

Davis, who himself forwarded the information to another regional organiser, wrote back saying that it was fine to use the material.

“Essentially, there is a legal obligation to investigate into potentially criminal conduct, alongside a wider public interest argument that this matter requires investigation in order to mitigate potential harm to the wider public,” Davis explained. It is surprising that Davis and those who received the hacked data apparently saw no legal issue with the use to which this data was put.

Between February 28 and March 1, 2021, about two weeks after the hack, Bannister submitted formal complaints to the Labour Party about Pelling, Canning, White and Downes himself, using as evidence the emails hacked from Downes’ server. Ten days later, on March 10, 2021, Fraser launched disciplinary proceedings against Pelling, Canning and Mann, two of whom refused to participate because it was based on stolen data.

When the councillors received the disciplinary charges, they swiftly informed Downes.

Downes wrote to the leader of Croydon council [Hamida Ali] informing her that it was a potential criminal offence to handle the material and citing the case reference number he had been given by the Metropolitan Police. He says he did not receive a reply.

To recap: hacked data, taken from an independent local news site, was used to identify the site’s confidential informants, who were providing the public with details of Croydon’s poor governance. This stolen information was then used to launch Labour Party disciplinary proceedings against the site’s sources. All of this was known to some of the most powerful people in the Labour Party bureaucracy — General Secretary David Evans and Alex Barros-Curtis [the party’s executive director of legal affairs; since 2024, a Labour MP] most notably — who were copied in, allegedly with the approval of Steve Reed.

The kicker: at the time, Reed was the party’s shadow justice minister.

Click here to read Andrew Fisher’s review of The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy

READER OFFER: Get 20% off the cover price of the sensational new book, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy, by investigative journalist Paul Holden, which has already rocked Downing Street.

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You’ve read the chapter. Now watch the ‘movie’: Al Jazeera’s The Spying Game episode from their series The Labour Files. Click here

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