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I hate to piss on your chips Paul, but this "exclusive" was covered in my book The Candidate three years ago. https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1298852196365357056
The real news from Patrick Heneghan's intervention is his admission that in 2017 senior staff in Labour HQ secretly channelled party funds to particular seats behind Jeremy Corbyn's back. "We ensured these constituencies continued to receive support," he says.
The Guardian, which has so far tried to pretend this allegation didn't exist, now reports Heneghan's admission sympathetically, explaining that he considered some of the seats in question “very marginal”. No context is provided or checks done. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/27/labour-official-denies-grand-plan-sabotage-corbyn-2017-election-bid-patrick-heneghan
But Paul Waugh has the list of MPs Heneghan says he was told to stop giving additional funds to, yet carried on anyway. It fits with what I reported in The Candidate. Here are pictures of the relevant bits. The detail is worth reading and comparing with the claims now being made.
Heneghan presents his choices of which seats to defend as evidence-based and rational, compared to LOTO which wanted to "funnel money on a factional basis". So how does that fit with extra resources being sent to Angela Eagle in the 39th safest Labour seat with a 16,000 majority?
How does it fit with Corbyn-critic Bridget Phillipson getting extra money while her neighbour in Sunderland, shadow front-bencher Sharon Hodgson, in an almost identical seat, didn't? How does it fit with Dan Jarvis, majority 12,435, being deemed marginal?
And how does it fit with seats that Labour lost in 2017, Stoke South and Walsall North, not getting maximum resources? Heneghan uses these losses to justify a defensive campaign, saying "we weren’t able to pull every seat over the line". But they aren't where the money was going.
Heneghan says claims of sabotage are "grand conspiracy theories" and a "deflection tactic", but that's a strange argument to make while simultaneously admitting there actually was a conspiracy to allocate money behind the leader's back. Pick one or the other; you can't have both.
