Starmer and Mandelson: Labour Together is the real, almost hidden story

JVL Introduction

The media has been paying attention to the links between Starmer and Mandelson and his claim of “not knowing” until days before the 20th April debate in Parliament are universally derided.  However, there is a story that the legacy media is doing its best to ignore and that is the story of Labour Together.

“Mandelson was one of the driving forces behind Labour Together, famously alluding to his role in a 2017 comment that “every day, I try to do something to save the Labour Party from his [Corbyn’s] leadership”.”

A very obvious question is why has Paul Holden not been invited by any legacy media outlet to outline what he uncovered about Labour Together while researching for his book “The Fraud”?  Is this because it shows a real conspiracy to bring down Corbyn and that this was seen as more important than winning an election?  As Cook notes here, other information has been available but also largely ignored, including the Forde Report commissioned by Starmer, whose team obstructed the work, which was then ignored because it did not draw the conclusions that Starmer wanted. In addition, there was Al Jazeera’s documentary “The Labour files”  that showed “how the party’s right wing – loyal to Mandelson and McSweeney – purged the party’s left wing based in most cases on false accusations, fabrications, misrepresentations and smears.”

This matters, not least because the same tactics are being tried in relation to the Green Party as it has moved to the left.

LL

This article was originally published by Substack on Thu 23 Apr 2026. Read the original here.