This Book Just Ended Starmer's Top Aide – And It’s Only Page One

Right, so integrity. That was Keir Starmer’s big word, wasn’t it? The lawyerly promise to rise above the sleaze, wipe the floor of Westminster clean, and give us politics we could actually respect again. But integrity in Starmer’s world lasts about as long as a wet paper bag in a rainstorm. Because now his Director of Political Strategy — Paul Ovenden, a man planted right at the heart of Number 10 — has resigned in disgrace after his vile remarks about Diane Abbott finally surfaced. Remarks that everyone seems to have known about in the mainstream media, but which were buried for eight years until one man, Paul Holden, dug them up. And if one page of Holden’s new book can bring down a senior aide, you have to wonder: what happens when the remaining 500 pages get published?
Right, so Keir Starmer came into office selling that one word above all: integrity. It was the line that stuck. After the circus of Boris Johnson, the implosion of Liz Truss, and the long Tory decay of sleaze, here was the grown-up lawyer who promised to clean things up. He would be serious about power, serious about responsibility, and serious about honesty. That was his shield against critics and his pitch to the public.
But integrity is fragile. Once people see through it, you don’t get it back and what many of us as former Labour members have known about Starmer since 2020, soon became public knowledge more widely, sadly not until he entered Number 10 though. Amid many ongoing scandals battering this man of zero integrity right now, the latest one that has once again torn the word out of Starmer’s hands is the resignation of Paul Ovenden, his Director of Political Strategy, brought down not by policy failure or electoral defeat, but by his own words, words that had been hidden for eight years.
Ovenden’s downfall has opened the door on something bigger. It’s exposed Labour’s culture of double standards. It’s forced the question of why evidence of misconduct was buried for nearly a decade. It’s validated the explosive claims of Paul Holden, whose new book The Fraud is already shaking Starmer’s government before it’s even hit the shelves. It’s collided with Labour’s other scandals — Mandelson’s disgrace, authoritarian purges, those arms industry links of the Labour General Secretary — to form a pattern of rot. It’s also going to be amplified further by the symbolism of Liverpool, not because Starmer today is trying to bury his scandals beneath an announcement over the Hillsborough Law and not just because Labour’s Annual Conference is coming from there as well, but where a counter-conference is about to indict Labour more ferociously than the official one can praise it, not least because Paul Holden himself is taking part in it. And all of this sorry spectacle has revealed once again the complicity of the mainstream media in protecting the establishment while savaging dissent.
This is not just one man’s career ending, though that very much appears to be where we are heading now. It is the first crack in the mask of integrity that Starmer built his entire project upon. And cracks, once they start, only widen and he is now learning that to his cost, and not even Morgan McSweeney can save him now.
The bare facts of this latest Starmer mess are straightforward. In 2017, Paul Ovenden made sexually explicit and racist remarks about Diane Abbott in an internal Labour Party communications forum. He reduced Britain’s first Black woman MP — a woman who had endured crushing racist abuse on a scale no other MP has ever faced — to a crude punchline in a puerile game. Labour likes to attack progressiveness as so-called 6th form politics, but this behaviour came straight out of a college common room. Abbott herself described the comments as “very unpleasant.” That understates it, but she is rather polite. They were degrading, racialised, and misogynistic.
Now here’s the part that matters. Ovenden wasn’t disciplined. He wasn’t suspended. He wasn’t even publicly named. He carried on, and he didn’t just carry on — he climbed, because he was the right faction to be undermining the then Corbyn project. By the time Keir Starmer entered Downing Street in 2024, Ovenden had been promoted from a junior position then as he was, to Starmer’s Director of Political Strategy, sitting at the very heart of power.
Contrast that with what happened to Labour members and MPs on the left. Councillors were expelled for retweeting slogans. MPs were suspended for appearing on the wrong panel. Jewish socialists were hounded out for criticising Israel. Diane Abbott herself was suspended not once but twice. In each case, the punishment was swift, public, and merciless.
So what do we learn? We learn that loyalty bought protection. Ovenden was shielded because he was useful to Starmer’s machine. Abbott was punished because she wasn’t. The culture of integrity Starmer promised was nothing of the sort. It was a culture of double standards. Protect the loyal, purge the dissenters, elected or not. Shield those on the inside, sacrifice those on the margins.
And it isn’t just factional. It’s racialised and gendered. A Black woman MP is degraded and her abuser is promoted. Meanwhile, she herself is suspended. That isn’t bad luck. It’s a reflection of who is valued and who is expendable inside Starmer’s Labour.
Ovenden’s abuse of Abbott, and the trajectory of his career, are the clearest window we’ve had into the hypocrisy at Labour’s core.
But there’s a second question: why now? Why 2025? Why not in 2017 when the remarks were made and Ovenden was in a junior post? Why not in 2020 when Starmer became leader if he’s so full of integrity? Well he’s full of something. Why not in 2024 when he became Prime Minister?
The answer is simple. Inside Labour, the leadership had every incentive to bury it. Ovenden was loyal, and loyalty mattered more than principle. He was part of the machinery that secured Starmer’s control. He was not going to be sacrificed and even now some unnamed Labour mouthpieces are braying that he still shouldn’t have been sacked. The Labour right, they truly are such lovely people.
But the media’s role is worse. Because they knew too. Insiders and journalists were aware of Ovenden’s comments. Yet they stayed silent. For eight years, they stayed silent.
Compare that to how Corbyn was treated. Every dubious Facebook like. Every out-of-context photo. Every wreath, every tweet. Splashed across the front pages, amplified into a national crisis. The press shouted itself hoarse at Corbyn. At Starmer’s people, it whispered nothing.
This isn’t a watchdog press. This is a guard dog for the establishment. Stories that damage the left are amplified. Stories that damage the centre or right are buried until it’s safe to publish, or they have no choice because an actual journalist outside of their Westminster clique, with real integrity did their job for them. That’s not journalism as accountability. That’s journalism as management.
And the proof is in the cause-and-effect. Ovenden’s resignation didn’t come because The Guardian or The Times dug in. It came because Paul Holden decided to print the evidence in his book The Fraud. Holden publishes a short excerpt, Ovenden falls. It really is that simple.
That silence — that eight years of complicity — is itself a scandal.
So who is Paul Holden? Why does his book matter so much? And why has one page of it already brought down a senior aide?
Holden is not a partisan insider or a factional gossip. He is a corruption investigator with a very heavyweight record. In South Africa, he was part of the Zondo Commission into state capture, submitting a 7,000-page forensic report on corruption in the arms deal. He co-wrote Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, a book and documentary that exposed the corruption at the heart of BAE, Lockheed, Elbit, and others. He has made a career out of following the money, exposing dark networks, and presenting evidence that stands up in court.
So when Holden calls Labour under Starmer a fraud, it isn’t bluster. It’s backed by documents, testimony, and investigation.
His book The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy, to give it its full title, argues that Labour’s transformation wasn’t natural. It was engineered. A small faction around Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together plotted to undermine Corbyn, flood the party with dark money, and centralise control. They weaponised antisemitism not to protect Jewish people but to silence the left. They used dossiers, hackings, and anonymous smears. They concealed funding and manipulated party structures.
In other words, Starmer’s rise wasn’t clean politics. It was fraud dressed up as integrity.
And the Ovenden resignation proves the point. A single page of Holden’s book has already toppled a senior figure. If that’s what one page can do, what happens when the rest is released?
The Ovenden scandal didn’t fall into a vacuum either. It landed on a government already staggering under its own contradictions as the bill for their lack of integrity comes due.
Peter Mandelson, long-time ally and fixer, forced to resign after Epstein emails came out. Labour’s authoritarian streak drawing fire for suspending MPs and members for the mildest pro-Palestine remarks. And most explosively I my view, since I covered this yesterday, the revelation that Labour’s General Secretary has financial links to an Israeli arms lobbying firm at the very moment Israel faces genocide charges in The Hague and a UN Commission today officially announces they have found Israel guilty of genocide.
Each of these stories on its own could be dismissed as an embarrassment. Together they form a pattern. Sleaze. Hypocrisy. Complicity. Authoritarianism. They don’t look like accidents. They look like symptoms and that is what they are. Symptoms of the fraud Holden describes in his book.
The narrative of integrity is collapsing under the weight of evidence.
Now add the timing. Labour is about to hold its official conference in Liverpool. Starmer wants to look statesmanlike, to project authority, fat chance in light of all of this sunshine and in the reddest city in the country, he’s got a brass neck. But across town, a different stage is being set.
The Your Show event is staging a counter-conference. And one of its headline panels just happens to be called “The Fraud, Labour’s ‘crimes’ and the right kind of Jew.” And on that panel will be Holden himself, along with Jenny Manson of Jewish Voice for Labour, Martin Abrams, a Jewish ex-Labour councillor who this past week has defected to the Greens, and Stephen Kapos, activist and Holocaust survivor.
For years, Starmer has weaponised antisemitism to purge the left, silencing Jewish critics while elevating those who toe the line as “the right kind of Jew.” Now Jewish voices themselves — including a Holocaust survivor at that — will give Starmer the treatment from just across town.
The optics are going to be devastating. Starmer in a conference hall, talking about integrity. Across town, Jewish critics and survivors holding up the receipts of his deceit. Its an event you do not want to miss, broadcast online as it will be, shameless plug time, check out yourshow.uk for more details, I know which stage deserves to be remembered.
And Liverpool isn’t just any city. It’s a city scarred by establishment betrayal — from the lies of Hillsborough to the Sun boycott. A city with a radical streak, hostile to Starmer’s machine, steeped in pro-Palestine activism. A city where a counter-conference feels like the real debate, while the official one looks like theatre.
This is political theatre at its sharpest. And Starmer’s Labour is on the wrong side of it.
And through it all, the role of the media looms large. Because the Ovenden scandal isn’t just about what he said. It’s about who kept it buried.
The same press that crucified Corbyn’s Labour over trivia buried direct evidence of misogyny and racism inside Starmer’s. For eight years. That isn’t failure. That’s complicity. It’s the press acting not as watchdog but as gatekeeper. Protect the establishment. Savage the dissenters.
And this points to the bigger stakes. If Holden is right, and with his reputation I have zero doubt he absolutely is, Labour’s rise wasn’t just hardball politics. It was fraud. Manipulation. Dark money. Cover-ups. And if one of the two main governing parties can be captured like that, then what’s left of democracy?
History gives the warning. John Major’s Conservatives rotted under sleaze until they were swept away. Boris Johnson was finished by Partygate, the lies too obvious to forgive. Tony Blair never recovered from Iraq, his legacy permanently stained by deceit though he still won’t go away. But each time, the leader fell. Each time, trust in politics took another hit. Each time, the scar grew deeper.
Starmer promised integrity. What he’s delivered is hypocrisy, sleaze, and authoritarianism. And now the receipts are rolling in.
Paul Ovenden’s resignation is not the end. It’s the beginning. It’s the crack in the mask. Holden’s book will almost certainly widen it, could it actually be what finally finishes Starmer? Well the Your Show counter-conference in Liverpool will hammer it open. The silence of the press has already been exposed.
And the question now isn’t whether more will fall. It’s how high the fraud goes, and how long Starmer can keep pretending before the whole façade collapses.
For more on that story of Labour’s General Secretary Hollie Ridley – the only candidate for the job, Starmer and McSweeney’s sort as she is – and he husband’s lobbying ties to state owned Israeli arms firm Rafael, check out this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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