1/14 Labour's governance crisis

Last week it was confirmed that in GE2017 rogue officials secretly channelled party funds to their political friends in defiance of official campaign decisions.

Patrick Heneghan has defended this blatant breach of party rules. This is a response.

2/14 I was a member of the official campaign committee (GECC).

As elections director, Heneghan was accountable to us.

But it says a lot that his blog (quoted as I go along) refers to the GECC as 'Corbyn's team' and talks about us 'asking' for things and him 'agreeing' to them.

3/14 The GECC wanted to target enough seats to win, and this was finally 'agreed' by these officials on May 15 when 93 'offensive' seats were added to the list.

The list still included 139 Labour-held seats, of which the GECC queried 14 very safe ones - average majority 11,117.

4/14 Heneghan has now confirmed that he and Gen Sec Iain McNicol secretly set up a rogue operation at Ergon House to continue to support these 14 safe seats (which had already had fulsome funding for five weeks).

As the spending was not approved by the GECC, it was ultra vires.

5/14 Heneghan names five other seats supported by his rogue operation and implies they were also among those taken off the list.

This is untrue and looks like an attempt to take credit for holding vulnerable seats when all of them had official support right through to polling.

6/14 In attempting to take credit for holding seats like Barrow and Dudley North, Heneghan rather stupidly draws attention to the hole in his argument: The GECC can hardly be accused of political bias when it wasn't querying and continued to support Ian Austin and John Woodcock!

7/14 Heneghan was slow to appreciate how rapidly the polls were narrowing.

He wasn't helped by hopelessly inaccurate data coming from the party's pollsters, but he could have listened to Prof John Curtice who pointed out that the local elections were not so great for the Tories.

8/14 Heneghan was still arguing for a defensive strategy even as Matt Singh was writing in the FT (May 16) of a Corbyn surge.

It's a measure of his judgement that the Ergon House operation was apparently set up three days after that to support strongholds with huge majorities.

9/14 Having portrayed himself as the master of targeting and said that 'without the defensive campaign we would have lost many more (seats)', Heneghan then deploys some political gymnastics to assert that the money siphoned off to Ergon House wouldn't have made a difference.

10/14 Would the money diverted into this rogue operation have made a difference? In a piece for @LabourOutlook I explain how the £135k we know about could have been used on a GOTV mailer to 15,000 voters in 35 more marginals. This is my conclusion. Link to full piece at the end.

11/14 Heneghan's mention of three newspaper adverts for Jon Trickett's seat is laughable.

- It was ONE advert in 3 editions of the same newspaper.
- Its reach included the seats of Mary Creagh and Yvette Cooper.
- We funded 48 newspaper adverts, each covering multiple seats.

12/14 Heneghan throws in an old story about my conference call with the candidates. My first general election experience was in 1966 (I was 12), and I've never known one where a Labour leader was universally loved. I may be wrong but IMO canvassers should look for common ground.

13/14 Heneghan's deflections are designed to obscure the main issue: UNAUTHORISED use of party funds.

There was an unprecedented £3m in the pot at the start of the campaign - and £9m came in from members/affiliates during it.

We have a right to know exactly how it was spent.

14/14 Footnotes:

Heneghan's blog (quoted in the thread):
https://patrick91053.wixsite.com/website/post/labour-s-2017-campaign-and-the-myth-of-the-stab-in-the-back

My @LabourOutlook piece (one extract above):
https://labouroutlook.org/2020/08/19/dont-let-labours-right-do-any-more-wrecking-steve-howell/

Also above are three extracts from Game Changer & an email about the Wakefield ad.

My previous thread: https://twitter.com/FromSteveHowell/status/1298941000841297921?s=20