Starmer replaces comms director with ex-Murdoch hack who plotted against Corbyn

Former lackey of ‘the worst person ever’ – though there’s stiff competition for that title – who helped antisemitism scam is now running red Tory ‘leader’s media strategy

Keir Starmer has replaced his communications director Matthew Doyle, who has ‘resigned’ from the position, with former Murdoch hack James Lyons as his head of ‘strategic communications’. Lyons was appointed last year by Starmer to run his ‘strategic communications’ – which have been disastrous, with Labour slumping catastrophically in polling and by-elections. He previously worked as political editor at Murdoch’s Sunday Times and played a part in promulgating the ‘Labour antisemitism’ smear, which Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney was confirmed last year to have orchestrated. Lyons wrote 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, a smear that hasn’t aged well given Israel’s Gaza genocide.

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 in a gross betrayal of smeared Hillsborough victims and families. Starmer’s red-Tory politics, worse-than-the-Tories austerity and rabid support for militarism and Israel will no doubt sit well with Lyons’s former boss.

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