Reed’s loyal Streatham SPAD gets transferred into No10

Political Editor WALTER CRONXITE on a Whitehall transfer which may have considerable significance

Steve Reed, the MP for Streatham (and Croydon North if he can be bothered), who has been implicated in spying on his colleague councillors in Lambeth and in Croydon, now has eyes and ears inside the Prime Minister’s office at a crucial point in Keir Starmer’s premiership.

Oscar Harman, the chair of the Streatham and Croydon North Constituency Labour Party while also working as a SPAD – a political appointee special adviser – at Reed’s Ministry of Housing , Communities and Local Government, has had a New Year transfer, and reports suggest he has been seconded to “the No10 political team for a month to cover for Prentice Hazell”.

Since 2020, Hazell has worked as diary manager for Keir Starmer – the role that Harman is now expected to take on.

In No10, Harman will be in close contact with Starmer’s chief of staff. Morgan McSweeney, a former colleague of Reed’s when he was a councillor at Brixton Town Hall in the first decade of this century.

It was when leader of Lambeth Council that Reed ordered council officials to spy on his fellow Labour councillors’ emails.

The investigative book The Fraud, published in October 2025, contained an entire chapter about the hacking of Inside Croydon’s email and Twitter accounts, with files of internal Labour correspondence, some of which referenced Reed or was addressed to him.

In The Fraud, journalist Paul Holden lays out how McSweeney and Reed used nearly £1million of undeclared donations to get Starmer selected as Labour’s leader in 2020.

Harman is expected to be named as a Labour Party council election candidate, most likely in a safe ward in Lambeth, for May’s Town Hall elections.

Reacting to the news that Harman will, for a month at least, have oversight of the Prime Minister’s diary, a Katharine Street source said: “So the spymaster has his Downing Street insider.”

In other news, former Croydon Labour councillor Mike Bonello has announced on social media that he has joined the Green Party.

Bonello, a social worker, lasted just three years as a councillor for Woodside ward. He was elected at a by-election in 2021 following the resignation of the discredited Tony Newman, the Labour council leader who bankrupted the borough.

After a brief spell (and extra allowances!) as shadow cabinet member for children and young people, Bonello quit the council in 2024, just halfway through his first full term as an elected councillor.

There has been a surge in membership of the Greens since Zack Polanski was selected as party leader last autumn, reaching 180,000 by the end of 2025, up from 70,000.

This has been accompanied by a slew of defections by Labour councillors in London boroughs to the Greens – six in Southwark alone – as Starmer’s party’s popularity nationally, and the PM’s personal poll ratings, have plunged. Concerns over the stance on Gaza, the party’s authoritarianism, the lack of a wealth tax and the handling of the economy, have all been factors.

Yet in Croydon, there have been no defections by Labour councillors to the two-strong Green Party group at the Town Hall.

With local elections now just three months away, a Katharine Street source told Inside Croydon: “If Labour are confident of winning the Croydon mayoralty, and having the largest group of councillors, maybe a few carrots have been dangled, with the promise of cabinet posts or other jobs after May 7, which the Greens won’t be able to provide, to focus the attention of any councillors having a crisis of conscience.”

More Reed: MP Reed spent Christmas tweeting link to Inside Croydon

More Reed: Steve Reed’s aide blocks members’ vote on Mandelson scandal

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