Labour has become a weapon in Trump’s campaign

Republicans are accusing the UK’s governing party of election interference – but what’s really going on?

The Trump campaign seemed delighted. When a Labour official took to LinkedIn to call for activists to campaign for Kamala Harris, after years of allegations from Democrats that Russia was interfering on Donald Trump’s behalf, the former president could finally throw the accusation back. Here was an opportunity to call Harris a hypocrite and rib the leftists across the Pond. “The British are coming!” a Trump press release screamed on 22 October. “In two weeks, Americans will once again reject the oppression of big government that we rejected in 1776,” the Trump campaign co-manager Susie Wiles said in a statement.

Prominent Labour figures have indeed been a fixture in this campaign. Keir Starmer’s former top aides Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley were active in Washington over the summer advising the Democrats on strategy. (When I met with Mattinson in September, she saw no problem with her presence given she no longer worked for Labour.) Top Starmerite Jonathan Ashworth was prominent at the Democratic Convention in August, as were Starmer’s now chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and communications director, Matthew Doyle.

Labour rightly says it is normal for activists to campaign for the Democrats, arguing no rules were broken because they were volunteers and therefore the party didn’t expend resources on the campaign. Nonetheless, the Trump campaign has since filed a complaint to the Federal Election Commission, accusing Labour of making illegal contributions to the Harris campaign.

(There’s no mention of Nigel Farage, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and the other Conservatives who have flown to the US to attend the Republican National Convention or campaign for the party. The trio are keeping their heads firmly down.)

UK government sources have downplayed the rift with Trump as election mischief, suggesting that Trump’s desire to attack the Democrats was the motivating factor. They argue Starmer’s two-hour dinner with Trump in New York in September, and the ties the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, has forged with Republicans such as JD Vance show the relationship is strong. British diplomats remain in contact with both campaigns.

If this is within the rules and merely political games, what’s really going on?

This story is about the American right’s long-held hatred for Labour. Starmer in particular has become a bête noire for the online right, who saw him as an authoritarian megalomaniac during the far-right riots in the UK over the summer. Elon Musk got into a spat with Starmer, accusing the Prime Minister on X of failing to protect all communities and persecuting those critical of the government. Musk and his followers have since used Starmer’s Britain as a political football to warn against Harris’s America. As Trump spokesperson Wiles said this week: “The far-left Labour Party has inspired Kamala’s dangerously liberal policies and rhetoric.” Despite the accusations of interference, Starmer lacks agency: he is being used by the Republicans as a political weapon.

The day after the Trump campaign filed its complaint against Labour, the American journalists Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker opened another front in the war on Starmer. They published internal documents that showed a British disinformation think tank wanted to “Kill Musk’s Twitter”. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has long been a target for the right. It was set up by McSweeney and Imran Ahmed in 2018 to campaign against online hate, but is now pilloried as a vehicle for the anti-free-speech establishment. In 2023, long after McSweeney had left to join Starmer’s team, Elon Musk sued the CCDH for allegedly exaggerating the rise in hate speech on X. Even though McSweeney is no longer associated with the CCDH, Taibbi framed McSweeney as masterminding a network that is planning to dismantle Musk’s empire. On 22 October, Musk posted about Taibbi’s story on X, along with a large picture of Starmer and the comment: “This is war”.

This story could distract from Musk’s own potential interference. The US justice department has warned Musk that his scheme to pay $1m to swing-state voters who sign his petition supporting the first and second amendments could be illegal. Anthony Scaramucci, who was on Trump’s campaign in 2016 and briefly served in his White House as director of communications, thinks Trump is blowing up the Labour story to divert attention from Musk’s scheme. He told me: “That is classic Trump. So it doesn’t break the rules but he’s trying to call attention to it to galvanise his base. This is the doppelganger of what Elon Musk is doing, right? Elon Musk is offering millions of dollars [to voters]. It’s not clear that it breaks the rules. It feels like he’s at the line, but he hasn’t crossed the line. This is classic Trump deflection – stuff is going on in his campaign. He’s very good at whataboutism.”

Whether deflection or not, Musk and the Trump campaign are in sync. Praise for the tech tycoon is rarely absent from Trump’s stump speeches. His proximity to the former president could be a greater problem for Labour than Trump’s erratic behaviour. If Trump becomes the next president, Starmer will have to manage this hostility from the White House as well as a brewing hatred for Labour within the Trumpian right at large.