Starmer appoints ex-Murdoch hack as ‘strategic communications’ chief

Plus a Conservative think-tanker for good measure

Hot on the heels of promoting the hard-right saboteur of Jeremy Corbyn, Morgan McSweeney, to be his recycled chief of staff after the (induced?) resignation of the controversial Sue Gray, Keir Starmer has appointed former Murdoch hack James Lyons as his head of ‘strategic communications’. Lyons worked as political editor Murdoch’s Sunday Times and played a part in promulgating the ‘Labour antisemitism’ smear, which McSweeney was confirmed recently to have orchestrated, writing for the Sunday Times in 2016 that Jeremy Corbyn’s son Tommy was ‘at the centre of a row over anti-semitism at York University’ because he had organised a play about Israel’s bombing of Gaza.

In early 2017, Lyons was also ‘caught plotting against Corbyn‘ in a conversation, on a crowded train, with one of the most notorious right-wing councillors (at that time) on Labour’s national executive.

Starmer has been widely and rightly condemned for his cosiness with Rupert Murdoch, including allegedly killing part two of the Leveson Inquiry into press wrongdoing at his behest and writing repeatedly for the hated, anti-working-class S*n.

For good measure in his back-office ‘reshuffle’, Starmer has also appointed Vidhya Alakeson as his deputy chief of staff. Alakeson previously worked on a project for Conservative think-tank ‘Onward’ with Claire Ainsley, briefly Starmer’s ‘executive director of policy’.

The reshuffle seems to be an attempt to create an appearance of change and action, while ensuring that Starmer will continue on the same appalling, red-Tory policy route and complicity in genocide that have made him the least popular prime minister, after three months in office, in the last three decades.

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