Who really funds the Jewish Chronicle? Why it’s troubling that we don’t know…
Four years ago, a mysterious consortium came to the rescue of the beleaguered publication—and nobody is really clear about who is behind the scenes. But openness matters, especially when politics is involved
MPs, peers and journalists recently got very excited over who should be allowed to own a newspaper in the UK. The Telegraph, for the moment, seems safe from falling into the officially designated wrong hands. But what happens if we aren’t sure who is behind the owner of a newspaper—when the ultimate funder of a respected UK media company is a closely guarded secret?
This is not a hypothetical question. Almost no one has any idea who currently funds theJewish Chronicle, which is both the oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper in the world and the most influential paper serving the Jewish community in Britain.
The paper was founded in 1841 and for 180-odd years its proprietors have been a matter of public record. But that changed four years ago when a mysterious consortium swooped in to rescue the title from threatened liquidation. It was, according to the outgoing chair, Alan Jacobs, “a shameful attempt to hijack” the paper.
The consortium was led by Sir Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former spin doctor, now a government-appointed BBC director. In his declaration of interest on the BBC website, Gibb states that he holds a 100 per cent holding of Jewish Chronicle Media.
He is the only person on the register of Persons with Significant Control (which notes that he owns 75 per cent or more of the company) and the sole named officer in filings at Companies House. He signs off the company accounts.
But Gibb himself doesn’t appear to have the kind of money that was needed to rescue the JC. From the latest accounts, filed in March 2024, it looks as if a person, or persons, unknown had loaned the new company £3.5m, which has now been written off. It seems Gibb was, in colloquial terms, the frontman.
But for whom might Gibb be the frontman? He won’t say. I sent a number of questions to the paper’s editor, Jake Wallis Simons, who replied politely, if oddly: “The questions you ask aren’t really for me.” I asked a number of prominent people in the Jewish community. No idea.
Wrack your brains for any precedent in the last century or more where the people behind a takeover of a significant UK newspaper are unknown. I can’t think of one.
It’s easy to see why it matters, and why MPs got so worked up about the “wrong” sort of person being allowed to take control of the Telegraph. Rich men (nearly always men) generally buy media organisations for one of three reasons: profit, influence or philanthropy.
With the JC we can discount profit: it’s safe to say it loses a large six-figure sum each year. So the person, or people, who pumped money into the ailing company in 2022 were either doing so from the goodness of their hearts or because they wanted to exert influence on the JC—and thus on whoever might read it and/or be swayed by its coverage and arguments, especially in relation to Israel.
Well, we don’t know. But imagine a mystery foreign backer with a plausible British frontman buying the Telegraph, on condition that his identity be kept schtum. There would, rightly, be a parliamentary hue and cry about their background and motives.
One of those involved in the Gibb-led consortium told me he now regretted ever being involved because of its “incredibly opaque” nature. He said he and another consortium member had asked directly who the other backers were and found it was “an absolutely closed door”.
Three sources told me they believed that a large slice of the money for the JC came from a right-wing American billionaire, Paul E Singer, sometimes referred to as a “vulture capitalist”. Singer is the founder of Elliott Management and made a fortune—estimated at $6bn—by buying distressed debts and selling them for high value.
He has been described as “a longtime supporter of hawkish pro-Israel causes” and is one of the major funders of the conservative thinktank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose positions, according toSlate, “have closely tracked those of the Likud party and its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”.
“During the debate over the Iranian nuclear deal, Singer used his fortune to support opponents of the agreement, including by founding an anti-deal Christian group,” reported the Forward, an influential American Jewish newspaper.
If Singer had been involved in the funding of the JC, and had influenced the editorial line, that would be surely a matter of public interest. But a spokesperson for Singer’s hedge-fund company said it was nonsense.
Another person who, it was suggested to me, was involved in the deal is a man named Davis Lewin, who has been attached to various right-wing thinktanks or organisations, including the Henry Jackson Society, the Friends of Israel Initiative and the High Level Military Group. But he is an elusive fellow, so who knows?
It’s hard to see why bailing out a newspaper should be a secret—and there are lots of reasons why it shouldn’t be. The Leveson Inquiry in 2011-12 did its best to work out how assorted owners and proprietors attempted to influence the news. It didn’t get very far—but at least it was working with real faces and real names.
In March, the JC announced it was turning itself into a charitable trust—though without any details of its structure, or details of editorial control. Given the paper’s pungent line during the Israel-Gaza war some doubt that it could plausibly present itself as a charity. In any event, the crucial question is how independent the editor is of the trust. To date: no answers.
The consortium member I spoke to described the JC’s recent coverage of Israel as “my country, right or wrong”.
“My own view is that it does a disservice to the Jewish community because it consolidates this idea that, you know, the Jewish community abroad is in some way sort of complicit by their silence with the excesses of the IDF.”
The consortium member said that he now felt that Wallis Simons, especially in his behaviour on social media, “is behaving like a political activist, not a journalist.”
The coverage of Israel-Gaza—and its editor’s often uninhibited behaviour on social media (“onward to victory!” in posting a video of a huge bomb killing untold people in Gaza city in December)—sits oddly with the impartiality its nominal owner, Gibb, urges when wearing his BBC hat.
In addition to impartiality, Gibb is, along with his fellow BBC directors, signed up to the Nolan principles of accountability and openness. The board’s own website commits them to “submit themselves to whatever scrutiny is appropriate to their office”. They should restrict information “only when the wider public interest clearly demands”.
But it seems Gibb doesn’t believe this applies to him beyond his BBC role: he has flatly ignored any of my questions about his role as the sole named director of the JC. Nor will he tell anyone whose money is behind the paper he “owns”.
You wonder how he grapples with the potential conflict of interest.
Firstly, Gibb sits on the key committee looking at editorial standards at the BBC—the coverage of the war in Gaza is about the hottest editorial potato imaginable for the BBC just now. Secondly, his editor, Wallis Simons, has been bitterly critical of the BBC’s reporting of the war. He actively campaigned for a parliamentary inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of Israel and wrote a piece headlined (if not by him): "The BBC’s Israelophobia is out of control, with a subhead explaining that “its distrust of the Jewish state is bordering on pathological”.
How can Gibb possibly back his own editor while sitting on the board of the BBC which is said by the same man to actively hate Israel? Does Gibb, as “owner” of the JC have any control over his editor? Can Gibb, recently re-appointed to the BBC board for four years, seriously ride two horses at one time? Does whoever funds the JC really call the editorial shots? Can parliament veto one category of a named newspaper owner while shrugging at the idea of nameless people backing another?
“Democracy dies in darkness” runs the slogan of one venerable American newspaper. It’s odd that a venerable British newspaper should choose to avoid the light.
This piece has been amended to make it clear that Jake Wallis Simons has been bitterly critical of the BBC’s reporting of the war as well as campaigning over the organisation’s coverage of Israel; and that he did not himself write the headline on the article he contributed to Spiked. A further update makes clear that the unknown consortium rescued the Jewish Chronicle from threatened liquidation four years ago rather than two.
‘Corbyn had flown too close to the sun’: how Labour insiders battled the left and plotted the party’s path back to power
Exclusive extract from new book says Corbyn’s appearance at Glastonbury was a key moment in the party’s long way back to power. And as one anti-Corbyn group tried to build a moderate coalition, it also needed a credible leader …
‘O
oohhh Jer-emy Cor-byn!” The chant rang out across the huge crowd, tens of thousands of people in the shadow of Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage. Pacing slightly, dressed in a blue linen shirt and loose beige trousers,Jeremy Corbynhollered into the microphone. “The commentariat got it wrong!” he declared, to a deafening rolling cheer. “The elites got it wrooong!”
A camera swung across the crowd and the image of a child sitting on his father’s shoulders, clapping his hands above his head, flashed up on the screens flanking the stage. Corbyn finished by quoting Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy:
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.
The chant from the crowd bubbled up again, spreading across the elated throng, as Corbyn, who had just turned 68, waved out at the sea of bodies, and Glastonbury’s founder, Michael Eavis, joined him and wrapped an arm around him.
It was 24 June 2017 and the Labour leader had never been stronger. Some in Labour make fun of the idea that Corbyn supporters treat the 2017 general election like a victory when, in fact, it was a loss. But in reality, the Labour leader had defied his detractors who were expecting a repeat of Michael Foot’s 1983 election drubbing and instead watched Corbyn strip Theresa May of her parliamentary majority. Moreover, Corbyn had won 40% of the national vote, more than the 35% that handed Tony Blair a significant majority in 2005. In the short term at least, this unexpected result muzzled Corbyn’s most vocal internal critics, who had claimed that voters would always reject his brand of leftwing politics.
Meanwhile, some 130 miles away in a south London park, Morgan McSweeney was sitting on a bench, thinking about what the scene at Glastonbury meant for his new job. The day after the 8 June general election, he had left the Local Government Association to run a new parliamentary group funded by two donors: businessman and philanthropist Trevor Chinn and hedge fund owner Martin Taylor.
Labour Together, as the operation became known, was explicitly not about trying to defeat Corbyn through any internal coup – they now considered that to be impossible. But it would try to defeat Corbynism – and the Corbynite who would inevitably run in any future contest to lead the party.
Morgan McSweeney, now chief adviser to Keir Starmer. Photograph: Shutterstock
Sitting on that park bench, McSweeney was among those who took the 2017 result very seriously and believed that Corbyn, whose politics he despised, could win the next election. Counterintuitively, he found the Glastonbury scene reassuring. McSweeney later told a friend that he saw this as Corbyn’s “Icarus moment”, in which he imagined the Labour leader standing backstage at Glastonbury with a choice: take that election result and turn to the country to cement the deal; or walk into the warm embrace of festivalgoers, who (McSweeney believed) were unrepresentative of the wider electorate. To him, Corbyn had just flown too close to the sun.
McSweeney made clear his mission to those gathered in [the Labour Croydon North MP Steve] Reed’s parliamentary office: “to move the Labour party from the hard left when JC steps down as leader and to reconnect the Labour party with the country [and] build a sustainable winning electoral coalition…” He then pointed to a slide of soldiers holding up huge shields, completely covering their bodies. “Operation Red Shield,” he said. The first job, he argued, was to protect supportive MPs from accusations of disloyalty. The next slide zoomed in on a Greenpeace logo. This would be their model, McSweeney told the gathered MPs: soft branding that made them seem warm and cuddly.
[Dagenham MP Jon] Cruddas and McSweeney even arranged a meeting with Corbyn himself to present the project as consensual. Sitting in the boardroom of the leader of the opposition’s offices, they told him about Labour Together, saying they were planning a “renewal” project. Reportedly, one of Corbyn’s aides leaned back in his chair, scrolling through social media and not paying much attention to what they were saying. Early plans focused on building a relationship with at least one trade union, positioning themselves on the left, and thus able to reach out to Corbyn supporters.
So, how much funding did this small parliamentary group attract, and why? Sources tell me that Reed met Chinn and Taylor through Cruddas and [the political thinker] Maurice Glasman, who were already receiving financial support for their “Blue Labour” ideas. Before 2017, Chinn and Taylor decided to “take a punt” and offered £75,000 to cover the cost of some early research and the first member of staff. When McSweeney took over the director role after the election, the group bid for more backing, winning around £150,000 over three years, with perhaps half a million by the time the Labour leadership campaign of 2020 got under way, after Corbyn’s resignation post the 2019 election.
It was also helped with the implicit backing of the deputy leader, Tom Watson, who told funders he was keen that a number of groups focused on Labour renewal should flourish. Watson’s association lent the group credibility with donors and attracted some of its early MPs into the fold.
But there were mistakes. Early on, Labour Together failed to declare £730,000 in donations from millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen, resulting in an Electoral Commission investigation and a fine, though the group blamed “human error” and said they themselves had self-reported.
All involved were always clear that they would “need a candidate to win a future leadership election on the political platform we are developing”, but they each put a different level of emphasis on that motivation. For McSweeney and Reed, choosing the best person to try to win Labour back from the left was absolutely central. Reed wanted to draw in reams of data and apply rigorous analysis to decide who they should put forward; McSweeney wanted to find the character most likely to win a general election. But to Cruddas, who had led policy reviews for the former leader Ed Miliband, Labour Together was far more of an intellectual pursuit, to build a policy platform that could unite the party in the future.
Interestingly, in a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, McSweeney claimed that one of the key problems the group might encounter was “a Labour government” – making explicit that his concern was not whether Corbyn could win, but that if he were to become prime minister it would prevent the renewal they were focused on.
One of McSweeney’s obsessions was the Canary, an alt-left website that had seemed to appear from nowhere and grown to a peak of 8.5m hits a month. Moreover, Corbyn supporters trusted the site equally to the Guardian, their other favourite source of information. And so McSweeney had an aim – to schmooze the Guardian and kill the Canary. “Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us,” he told the Labour Together MPs.
After a few months working from a park bench, the group funded a small office in Vauxhall, and soon it reached out to former Labour advisers to work alongside them with a focus on online antisemitism. In an early review, they identified problem posts in hundreds of Facebook groups with links to either the party or leftwing politics. Some of these were aimed at Labour’s female Jewish MPs. They then farmed out the posts they uncovered to journalists who were themselves reporting on rising evidence of antisemitism on the left. Together with a row over whether the party would adopt all the examples linked to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the scandal was becoming increasingly destabilising for Corbyn.
Keir Starmer, then shadow Brexit secretary, with party leader Jeremy Corbyn in December 2017. Photograph: PA
One source said the aim was to “shame” people out of being part of Facebook groups with unacceptable content but argued that it wasn’t really working. So, next they took aim at news websites they considered to be either alt-left or alt-right, including, perhaps not surprisingly, the Canary. As part of a “Stop funding fake news” campaign, they took screenshots of articles they felt had either racist or fake content, then posted messages on Twitter aimed at brands that were advertising on the websites’ pages. Unquestionably, the readership of the Canary took a hit. In an editorial, the website noted that “people who don’t like our politics have encouraged our advertisers to blacklist us. That’s come at a cost”. Its contributors’ coverage, it argued, had been targeted at Israel and not Jewish people and it said it had been “smeared with accusations of antisemitism”. However, the result would be a “much leaner” Canary newsroom with a dedicated team of seven staff members, rather than a network of freelance writers.
As for the Guardian schmoozing, I witnessed that first-hand. At the time, I was the joint political editor at the newspaper and found myself invited with colleagues to a dinner in a private dining room in the basement of Browns in Covent Garden. We sat on red chairs with gold trimming, set around a long, thin table covered with a white tablecloth, listening to McSweeney, Cruddas, Reed, [Wigan MP Lisa] Nandy and [Birmingham Ladywood MP Shabana] Mahmood tell us about Labour Together’s plans for renewal.
They had brought with them another MP who was just starting to do more with the group – Keir Starmer. The project was pitched, as planned, with the soft, cuddly Greenpeace framing. They neatly side-stepped our more cynical questions about their plans for a future leadership. Alongside me that night was Guardian news editor Dan Sabbagh, who has since told me he immediately wondered if Starmer was their candidate. Even if McSweeney was wondering about Starmer as a possible leader as early as 2017, it was not spoken about and another hopeful also later emerged from the same group. Back then, the mere prospect of an opportunity to either take control of Labour’s leadership or win a general election still felt very distant.
But McSweeney was clear about the type of coalition he would need to build within Labour to support a future leadership bid and was already reaching out to figures on the left of the party. In November 2017, sources describe a quiet and unassuming McSweeney turning up at Dartington Hall in Totnes for an awayday organised by the soft left group Compass, run by Neal Lawson. There were people there linked to the socialist magazine Red Pepper, and others closely allied to Corbyn.
Soon after seven MPs left [in February 2019, they resigned over Corbyn’s leadership and founded a new party, Change UK], Labour Together sent a document to prospective donors, which has since been leaked to me. It warned that the Labour party was “politically and morally in a crisis”, claiming the “Hard left […] will divide our party, condemn us to electoral defeat, attempt to drive out democratic socialists and corrupt our moral purpose in the interest of ideological aims.”
Whether it was written by McSweeney or not, I’m unsure. But the document set out three potential options for Labour’s “moderates”. The first, to set up a new party, was rejected because the paper argued that every option to keep Labour together should be exhausted first. “Once it is attempted there is no way back,” it warned, arguing there was insufficient evidence that a new party could flourish in the UK’s first-past-the-post system.
The second, to try to attract 220,000 new members to Labour and to challenge Corbyn, was also ruled out because by then Corbyn’s 68% support among members, while slightly down, was still too high to be challenged. And so, to the final option: to “win a majority position from within the current Labour party when Jeremy Corbyn leaves his position and/or is defeated in a general election. […] The route we are travelling is the third one”, the paper declared, before setting out why Labour Together believed it could find a winning candidate.
The document made clear what these moderates saw as their problem: a “hard left” in control of the party machinery, including Labour’s national executive committee and most regional boards. To achieve their aims, they would need to dominate the communication channels that members most trusted; capture the political territory that the “soft left” cared about most – for example, social justice; and avoid the looming threat of sympathetic politicians facing deselection by a membership that had lost trust in MPs.
Keir Starmer and his wife, Victoria, being clapped into No 10 on 5 July this year after Labour’s election victory. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/Reuters
On the fragile majority
What might the result at this summer’s general election have looked like without the surge from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK? At the time of writing, there is more analysis to do, but YouGov’s Patrick English tells me that Labour would have still won big, but with a much-reduced majority. Around 60 Conservative MPs would have been saved, he reckons, leaving Starmer with a majority of around 80 – closer to Boris Johnson in 2019 than Tony Blair in 1997.
Paul Ovenden’s jobas director of political strategy in Downing Street will be to think relentlessly about voters. In the early weeks, he delivered a briefing to cabinet ministers arguing that working-class voters in marginal seats who switched to Labour from the Tories had delivered Starmer’s majority, but it was the 20% of 2019 Conservatives who switched to Reform UK who had turned the win into a landslide.
He also explained that Labour had slumped three points (from the 37% predicted by Labour’s own pollsters) to a 34% vote share in the final days of the campaign because of those who opted to vote “tactically” for the Lib Dems where they could beat Tories, but also others deciding to go with their “hearts” by voting for the Greens or independents in the certainty that Starmer would be prime minister either way.
The result is that Labour’s voter coalition is far more fragile than the overall numbers suggest. Academic Rob Ford described Labour’s 2024 strategy as a “masterpiece of electoral Jenga” in which Labour withdrew the blocks from its safer seats close to the base to throw everything at the marginal constituencies and build up the height of the tower. However, Ford warned that: “It will not take much to bring this teetering tower tumbling down.”
Labour understands only too well how stretched its majority is, and how quickly the political mood can change – the question now is whether, and how, these factors might affect the way in which the party governs.
Ovenden has told ministers that they must put Labour’s majority out of their mind and imagine that they are “nil-nil” in the next political race. Jonathan Ashworth, who lost in Leicester South and now leads Labour Together, agreed, warning of a massive shift in how much voters change their minds. “I am the talking, breathing proof that there is no such thing as a safe seat. We have gone from the red wall collapse in 2019 to a landslide victory in parliamentary seats – there is huge volatility these days and we cannot assume we will win the next general election,” he said.
And that is why Keir Starmer’s first speech to the Labour party conference as prime minister is about urging “no complacency”; arguing that, however big their 2024 win, there is no guarantee of a decade in power. If Labour fails to repair and rebuild trust, then, when it comes to 2029, they could well lose.
