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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
The UK’s ruling Labour party paid for one of Sir Keir Starmer’s top aides to attend the Democratic National Convention this summer, party officials said, as Donald Trump’s campaign accused it of interference in the US election.
Morgan McSweeney, now the UK prime minister’s chief of staff, travelled to Chicago in August on a trip paid for by the central party, the officials said on Wednesday.
But they denied that McSweeney, at the time a political adviser in Downing Street, advised Kamala Harris’s campaign team.
Trump’s lawyers alleged in a lawsuit this week that Labour party help for Harris constituted “illegal foreign campaign contributions and interference”.
As UK ministers sought to head off a potential transatlantic spat, Britain’s defence secretary John Healey said earlier on Wednesday: “These are individuals and they’re there . . . at their own expense.”
He added: “It is very different to the determination of the Labour government to work with whoever the American people elect next month as their president.”
Starmer is not blocking or discouraging any Labour staffers or MPs to go out to US for the final days of the campaign. “It’s up to individuals,” said one aide on Wednesday.
The delegation to the DNC included Labour MPs, party staffers and other senior figures, including Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s then director of communications. Doyle’s travel was funded by a think-tank and Labour officials said he did not provide advice to Harris’s team either.
The party has yet to confirm the funding arrangements for the Labour MPs also on the trip.
Labour insiders insist that the party always sends a delegation to the DNC.
In response to Trump’s allegations, Starmer said party workers campaigning for Harris were “doing it in their spare time . . . as volunteers”.
The furore threatens to disrupt Starmer’s effort to cultivate ties with Trump, with whom he held a two-hour dinner in New York last month.
Some Labour MPs who had been planning to take part in the final fortnight of campaigning before the US presidential ballot on November 5 have said they are now thinking twice. “The row puts me off,” one told the Financial Times.
It is not only Labour officials who have crossed the Atlantic to help campaign in the US election. Alex Cole-Hamilton, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and an MSP, posted on X on Monday that he was “taking a week’s leave to go knock doors for Kamala in Pennsylvania”.
A Labour spokesperson said: “It is common practice for campaigners of all political persuasions from around the world to volunteer in US elections. Where Labour activists take part, they do so at their own expense, in accordance with the laws and rules.”
