JUN 15, 2024
Will Keir Starmer come to regret backing David Evans to be Labour’s general secretary?
Evans, the party’s top official, is facing a series of problems:
— the controversial public relations firm he founded more than two decades ago is in deep trouble.
It was nearly struck off the Companies House register earlier this year for failing to file accounts on time …
… and the last figures, for 2021, show a massive hole in its finances. It was £186,000 in the red.
— Evans faces criticism that he was in possession of unlawfully obtained documents and did not inform the Information Commissioner’s office.
They were obtained when the email account of a website that was highly critical of Labour’s policies in Croydon was hacked.
— Evans is also under fire after awarding a controversial contract without competitive tendering to a company owned by two Croydon Labour politicians.
The firm provides the voting software used in the selection of Labour candidates for Parliament.
Last year, Labour’s selection for the new Croydon East constituency was abandoned after allegations that the software had been misused in an attempt to rig the vote. A police investigation is under way.
David Evans did not answer our letter asking for a response to these issues.
His problems beg the question — has sleaze seeped into Keir Starmer’s party even before it takes power?
***
In 2001 David Evans left his job as assistant general secretary of the Labour Party.
The party’s head of Corporate Development, Jonathan Upton, left at the same time.
The two men set up The Campaign Company (TCC) and each held 45 per cent of the shares.
The remaining ten percent were taken by the Lancashire millionaire, Labour donor and former Trotskyite, Len Collinson.
TCC began trading in October 2001 “to work with private sector bodies and voluntary organisations to enhance their ability” to provide “services and products …”
One of its early clients was the Labour MP Tony Banks in his unsuccessful bid to become Labour’s London mayoral candidate
TCC ran into trouble in November 2002 when it was revealed that its company secretary, Evans’ wife Aline, was also Labour’s head of the governance and legal affairs unit, overseeing the selection of candidates.
For the Labour post she used her maiden name, Aline Delawa, but in Campaign Company documents she was Aline Evans.
She had not disclosed her involvement in the company in her Labour declaration of interests.
Labour’s then general secretary Len Triesman said:
I was obviously aware of David’s involvement … For those reasons I just simply wouldn’t have put [Aline] in a position where there could have been a clash of interests.
There is no evidence that Aline Delawa / Evans was involved in any of TCC’s work for candidates.
She resigned her position a month later.
The company prospered during the years of the second Blair government. Turnover jumped from £162,000 in 2001 to £1.4m in 2007.
(In October 2007 it hired Morgan McSweeney — today Labour’s campaign manager — as its Director of Communities. He remained in the post for two years.
The Times said last year that “nobody without elected office wields as much power in British politics as McSweeney.”)
By the end of 2009 the Campaign Company had a healthy balance sheet surplus of £350,000.
In 2010, with the Conservatives now in power, the business began to suffer.
By the end of 2014 its balance sheet had plummeted to minus £191,000.
The situation improved in the years that followed, partly helped by a series of contracts from Croydon council worth £200,000.
By 2018 the company had cut its deficit to just £11,000.
By then David Evans was the sole director and held 90 per cent of the shares.
In 2020 he was Keir Starmer’s preferred candidate to replace the pro-Corbyn Jennie Formby as general secretary.
He won the election by 20 votes to 16.
Evans then transferred his shares to his wife and resigned as a director.
By 2021 TCC was showing a balance sheet deficit of £186,000.
The company is supported by a secured loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Earlier this year the company was nearly struck off the Companies House register for failing to submit its accounts on time.
In March the action was discontinued but the company’s 2022 accounts, due to be submitted by the end of December last year, are now long overdue.
There have been reports that the company has given up its offices and is now working online. There was no response to the email we sent yesterday.
If the company does go bust — potentially owing large sums in unpaid tax and national insurance contributions — it will be a blow for Keir Starmer’s attempts to show that Labour is fiscally sound.
Yesterday Press Gang put a series of questions to David Evans:
— is the company planning to go into liquidation?
— does its deficit include money owed to HMRC in unpaid tax and national insurance contributions?
— is the move to avoid being struck off earlier this year designed to delay any liquidation until after the general election?
He did not reply.
The Hack
In February 2021 the email account of Inside Croydon, a local internet website, was hacked and nearly 78 megabits of confidential information were illegally obtained.
Inside Croydon is a vocal critic of the local Labour party.
These documents were used to take disciplinary action against Labour councillors.
Some of the leaked documents were also circulated to senior Labour figures including David Evans and Steve Reed, then Starmer’s shadow Justice Minister.
Evans did not inform the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) that the party was in receipt of illegally obtained data.
Yesterday, the ICO told us:
Inside Croydon reported an incident to us.
After reviewing the information provided, we gave data protection advice and closed the case with no further action.
Steven Downes, the editor of Inside Croydon, says the ICO did not investigate the way Labour politicians used the material.
The identity of the hackers remains a mystery.
The Anonyvoter Controversy
Evans is also involved in another controversy.
In 2021 the Labour Party chose a software package called Anonyvoter to handle voting for Parliamentary candidates.
Although there are other well-tested and reliable online voting systems available — many of them used by other political parties and trade unions — Evans appears to have picked the system without any competitive tendering.
Anonyvoter is owned by Henson IT Services, a Croydon-based company owned by Labour councillor Maddie Henson and her husband Mark.
Maddie Henson defended the contract. She said:
The process was Labour’s business and was the party’s ‘normal procurement’.
We had conversations, we proposed a contract and they accepted it, that’s how it works.
Last November the selection process for Labour’s Croydon East parliamentary candidate was abandoned amid allegations of vote rigging.
It appears that the problem may lie in how the Anonyvoter software was used rather than any fault in the system itself.
Yesterday, the Met told us:
We have received allegations of computer misuse in relation to an internal selection process for a political party in Croydon during October and November last year.
The Met’s Cyber Crime team are investigating and enquiries are ongoing.
In March the general secretaries of four trade unions —ASLEF, CWU, TSSA and the FBU — wrote to David Evans asking for a “moratorium” on the use of the software.
They said they wanted Labour “to operate at the highest level of transparency and integrity”.
David Evans did not respond to our questions about the Anonyvoter contract.
Note
This article was originally. published on the Press Gang Substack platform. To see articles as they’re published, follow
https://paddyfrench.substack.com
RECOMMENDED
Article
Rabea Eghbariah Towards Nakba as a Legal Concept Columbia Law Review
Eghbariah is the Palestinian lawyer at the centre of a massive row at the Columbia Law Review which went offline as soon as his article was published. After protests, it was restored.
Eghbariah divides his time between the US and the Israeli city of Haifa where he works for Adalah, a legal organisation representing Palestinians. Israel operates a fragmented judicial system which treats Palestinians living in Israel differently to those living in the West Bank.
One report noted:
To articulate that fragmentation in his legal research, [Eghbariah] realized he needed a new terminology. Just as the genocide convention emerged after the Holocaust, and the word apartheid entered everyday speech amid South Africa’s systemized segregation, Eghbariah was finding that analogies to other seemingly comparable situations were insufficient. In the article, he argues that the term Nakba, in use by Palestinians for decades, encapsulates the layered and overlapping legal entanglements of Palestinian life in the absence of self-determination.
Website
Edited by veteran journalist Steven Downes for the past 14 years, Inside Croydon is one of Britain’s most effective online community websites. Although primarily local, its investigative work — especially in relation to the scandal-ridden Labour machine in the borough — has regularly featured in mainstream media, most notably in Private Eye. The Press Gang article above is largely based on its detailed research …
Book
Shlomo Sand The Invention of the Jewish People Verso, 2020
Sand’s controversial and groundbreaking book claims the idea that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans is a myth. He argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Sand fought in the Six Day War but became disillusioned by the Israeli Defence Forces’ treatment of Palestinians.
CORRECTIONS Please let us know if there are any mistakes in this article — they’ll be corrected as soon as possible.
RIGHT OF REPLY If you have been mentioned in this article and disagree with it, please let us have your comments. Provided your response is not defamatory, we’ll add it to the article.
PRESS GANG 
Leave a comment