Paul Holden
 Paul Holden  ( author, investigative journalist) | |
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Investigative journalist who uncovered "The Secret Plot To Destroy Zack Polanski" |
Paul Holden is a British investigative journalist, originally from South Africa, who helped to expose the corruption of the post-apartheid government led by Jacob Zuma. In the UK, he is best known as the author of "The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy", published in 2025.[1]
In May 2026, Double Down News published Holden's latest work: "The Secret Plot To Destroy Zack Polanski".
Contents
"The Fraud"
On 13 October 2025, Paul Holden explained why he had given exclusive extracts of "The Fraud" to The Canary and Inside Croydon:
Last month, I started releasing exclusive stories from my upcoming book, "The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy".
The results were immediate.
In the first week, Paul Ovenden, Number 10’s director of strategy, resigned after I revealed his role in problematic chat messages, conducted via his Labour Party messaging system, about Diane Abbott.
Labour Together
The following week, I put out documents and stories that led to calls for the re-opening of investigations into Labour Together related to its failure to report donations totalling close to £740,000 to the Electoral Commission. Between mid-2017 and early 2020, Labour Together was the vehicle through which Morgan McSweeney, now chief of staff to the Prime Minister, waged a covert campaign to destroy the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. This was done as a precursor to hand-picking a successor more to the liking of McSweeney’s right-wing faction: Sir Keir Starmer.
Not long after, I revealed that, starting in November 2023, Labour Together had hired a reputation management firm to investigate me, my family, and my colleagues. Labour Together hired the firm, and even reported me to the UK’s security services, after it became public that I was investigating McSweeney, Labour Together, its undisclosed donations – and what they were used for.
CCDH and SFFN
This week, I’ve released stories from "The Fraud" that expose how McSweeney and his close ally, Imran Ahmed, used their dodgy astroturf projects, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN), to launch a pan-Atlantic war on free speech in the US and UK while also intervening in the 2019 European Elections.
Part of this story, now told in full and without caveat in my book, involved SFFN launching a genuinely despicable campaign to demonetise The Canary, behind the veil of anonymity, because The Canary posed a threat to McSweeney’s political ambitions.
But The Canary was not the only outlet targeted by the people who now occupy major positions of power in the Labour government. Also targeted was an indefatigable local news outlet called Inside Croydon and its editor Steven Downes.
Inside Croydon reported on the politics of the borough of Croydon, the stomping ground of Steve Reed MP. It reported critically, but I believe accurately, on Reed and his local political allies, as well the Labour-led Croydon Council. Croydon Council declared effective bankruptcy in 2020 while under the control of the very same people Inside Croydon was reporting on.
Reed, as my book shows, was one of McSweeney’s closest collaborators, in addition to serving as a director of Labour Together for seven years between 2016 and 2023.
Targeting independent media
The stories of the targeting of both Inside Croydon and The Canary are genuinely shocking. I believe they speak believe to a disturbing hostility towards independent media outlets, and independent journalists, conducting public-interest investigative journalism.
In the spirit of restorative justice, I have decided to release exclusive extracts from my book to The Canary and Inside Croydon. They are the first and only outlets I have granted the right to reproduce material from my book. I feel it is important that The Canary and Inside Croydon both get to relay their full stories, on their own sites, without any paywall, free for the public to read.
Personally, I can think of no better way for The Canary and Inside Croydon to finally get a modicum of much-delayed justice: by using journalism to speak truth to power.[2]
Plot to destroy Polanski
On 4 May 2026, Double Down News released the video "The Secret Plot to Destroy Zack Polanski", narrated by Paul Holden:
Damning indictment of Steve Reed, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government The Green Party under Zack Polanski has lit a fuse under British politics. They're surging in the polls. Their membership has rocketed and they now pose a real threat to the Labour Party, the government of Keir Starmer and the wider political establishment.
The response has been predictable. Smears, innuendo, and bad faith attacks:
- “Are we going to be put in internment camps? Are we going to be killed?”
- “That's the Green Party now. High on drugs, soft on Putin.”
- “A poisonous vessel for extremism and antisemitism.”
- “Zack Polanski shamefully has turned himself into probably British politics’ foremost mouthpiece for antisemitism.”
The same playbook that was once used to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party has been dusted off once more. This time it is the Greens and its Jewish leader Zack Polanski who are presented as a safe haven for anti-semites. After the horrifying attack on Jews in Golders Green, the Labour Party attacks have taken an ugly but familiar turn, inflaming community fears and ethnic tensions to score political points. Back then, the campaign against the Labour left succeeded because we had no idea who was masterminding it. This time, we've got receipts.
Leading those attacks for the Labour Party is Steve Reed MP, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government:
- “People will remember when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party. A lot of racists and anti-semites joined the party. We had a real problem with it until Starmer became leader and he kicked them out. Well, a lot of those people didn't leave politics. They walked through the open door of the Green Party straight into the waiting arms of their new leader, Zack Polanski.”
I've been investigating Reed for close to 5 years now. He's a central character in my book, “The Fraud, Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy”. He is one of the most concerning characters I encountered in my investigations. Reed's position of influence in the government of Sir Keir Starmer stems from his long association with Morgan McSweeney.
McSweeney was until recently the Chief of Staff to Sir Keir Starmer. He's also a longtime associate, confidant, and protege of Peter Mandelson. McSweeney and Reed were united in their hatred of the anti-war, pro-Palestine and socialist politics that for a brief time took over the party. Together, they set out to destroy the possibility that this sort of progressive politics could succeed.
The vehicle through which this project was carried out was an anodyne seeming think-tank called Labour Together. In July 2017, Morgan McSweeney was appointed the Managing Director and Company Secretary of Labour Together. Reed was also a company Director.
In secret, McSweeney and Reed hatched a two-phase plan which they would execute through Labour Together. First, Labour Together would undermine the democratically elected leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, even if it meant that the Labour Party would lose the next general election.
One of the ways they did this was to inflame the antisemitism crisis that was undermining Corbyn's reputation. Starting in at least 2018, McSweeney and other Labour Together associates worked to place alarmist stories in the media. At no stage, no stage, was their role disclosed.
Second, with Corbyn defeated, they would handpick a pliant successor who would erase all remnants of the left from the Labour Party. The man they eventually chose was Sir Keir Starmer. Starmer's fraudulent, mendacious campaign to become Labour leader, was very much a Labour Together project, something they denied at the time, which they couldn't help bragging about thereafter.
But that sort of skullduggery was expensive. Between 2017 and 2020, Labour Together took in over £800,000 in donations. The money mainly came from two sources. The first was Martin Taylor, a millionaire hedge fund owner with interest in private healthcare. The second was Sir Trevor Chinn, a wealthy businessman, a pro-Israel advocate.
By law, Labour Together was required to report these donations to the Electoral Commission. But between February 2018 and 2020, Labour Together failed to report £730,000 in the donations it received. I think there's good reason to question whether this failure to report donations was intentional. But let's make this very clear. Steve Reed was a director of Labour Together for years. He was Director of Labour Together while it was failing to report the donations, while it was breaking the law. And not just any law. This is the law that governs the health and well-being of our democracy, which is designed to guarantee transparency and accountability. The law that is supposed to enable us as ordinary citizens to see who was funding who, and why. Because Labour Together broke the law, nobody knew they were lavishly funded by a hedge fund owner and a pro-Israel lobbyist. And all the while, Reed and McSweeney’s Labour Together project was secretly inserting itself into the Labour Party antisemitism crisis. The effect of their work was to wreck the credibility of their opponents they could not defeat through open legitimate democratic contestation.
Steve Reed is also a supporter of Labour Friends of Israel. In fact, in 2013, Reed travelled to Israel on a fact-finding mission. That trip was paid for by Labour Friends of Israel. In early 2026, as the government's secretary for local government and communities, Reed wrote to local governments and warned them that if any of them adopted boycott campaigns against Israel, they could face a legal challenge. Of course, it is up to you to judge the Greens and Zack Polanski on these matters. But I can say this for sure, the one person who cannot be trusted on these issues is Steve Reed. Because on nearly every issue that matters, good governance, respect for the law, and the vitally important issue of antisemitism and community cohesion, Reed's record is deplorable. Sadly, this is not the only red flag when it comes to Reed and issues of good governance.
See, Reed's local political base is the London Borough of Croydon. He is currently the MP for Streatham and Croydon North. Party files that I reviewed show that he was a close political ally of the Labour figures, the Councillors and the Mayors that ran Croydon Council between 2014 and 2022. Sorry, what I meant to say was he was a close ally of the people who ran Croydon Council into the ground between 2014 and 2022.
In November 2020, the Labour-run Croydon Council declared effective bankruptcy amidst concerns of serious financial mismanagement. For years, one dogged investigative journalist, Steven Downes, the editor and founder of Inside Croydon, had tried to blow the whistle on the factionalism and incompetence of Reed's crew.
In response, Reed repeatedly tried to get Downes kicked out of the Labour Party because it was accurate public interest journalism. Reed and his allies described Downes’ revelatory reporting as a form of hateful abuse. But things would turn sinister, genuinely sinister in 2021 when Inside Croydon's email and Twitter were hacked by unknown actors. Within days of the hack, Inside Croydon's stolen emails were sent into the Labour Party bureaucracy. Emails showed that Steve Reed was copied into the messages, sharing the stolen emails at his personal and parliamentary address. Amazingly, the party did not report the situation to the police. Instead, the party used the emails to identify Inside Croydon’s confidential sources. Four of the confidential sources were Labour Councillors who were blowing the whistle on a collapsing council. All four of them were subject to disciplinary proceedings based on the hacked emails.
These Labour Councillors were not able to stand. But who has been allowed to stand for the Labour Party? A woman by the name of Ruth Bannister, who had also handled the stolen emails. Oh, and Sir Keir Starmer's niece, Ellie Sandover, who was selected into the second safest ward in Croydon after two senior sitting black Councillors were blocked by Labour Party bureaucrats.
Now, Reed has claimed he did not see the messages showing the hacked emails, but in at least one message, a Labour Party official says that Steve Reed had asked that a complaint attaching hacked emails be sent to the party's general secretary, David Evans. So, let's make this clear. In response to credible, fact-based journalism blowing the whistle on a council careening towards bankruptcy, Reed and his allies did not reflect. They did not act to right the ship. No. Reed and his allies attacked the journalists and whistleblowers trying to stop the rot.
Sadly, this is not the only time people associated with the Labour Together project have gone after journalists. Indeed, as I've previously revealed on Double Down News, I was one of several journalists targeted by Labour Together. I was even reported to the UK security services. My crime, writing factually accurate stories exposing the sordid political project.
Then there's the vexed issue of antisemitism. Now, let's be clear here. Antisemitism is a real and serious issue. It must be fought wherever it emerges. It must be handled with sobriety and with the full respect for the enormity of the crimes caused by anti-semitic beliefs. We must condemn the horrors of the recent Golders Green attacks, just as we must condemn the far-right protesters throwing Nazi salutes at a Green Party rally addressed by Zack Polanski himself. But on this, Reed has failed on nearly every account. Indeed, Labour Party files show that Reed has a deplorable habit of making promiscuous and reckless allegations of antisemitism, including against left-wing Jews. As I revealed in my book, in May 2020, Reed wrote to the Labour Party's disciplinary team. Reed submitted dossiers of evidence against 10 individuals. Reed said the dossiers, which he had not written, were profoundly worrying and appear highly credible. He urged the party to immediately suspend those individuals and investigate them for antisemitism. It was a genuinely extraordinary list. Of the 10 individuals Reed accused of antisemitism, four were Jewish. Reed, for the record, is not Jewish himself.
Labour's disciplinary team were put under immense pressure to find any evidence they could use to suspend the people on Reed's list. The party could turn up nothing on three of the individuals Reed complained about. But one individual was not so lucky. Jonathan Rosenhead, an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics. The party's disciplinary unit dug up a complaint about how Professor Rosenhead had once recounted the ludicrous story of how a Jewish Labour Councillor Jo Bird had been suspended for making a pun on the phrase “due process”. A pun that portrayed Jewishness in a positive light. Rosenhead was forced to answer the charge that he was an anti-semite on this flimsy accusation. He wrote a devastating response to the party. He explained how many of his family members had been killed in the Holocaust and how outrageous, genuinely outrageous it was to be accused of a crime so immense and heinous as antisemitism. Rosenhead resigned in disgust, effectively harried out of the party at the behest of Steve Reed.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Party files show that Reed repeatedly made contentious allegations of antisemitism, often against his local political opponents. In one case, he complained about a young black woman. She had argued that antisemitism, while a deplorable form of discrimination, expressed itself differently to anti-black racism. She was immediately suspended and like Rosenhead, resigned in disgust.
Sadly, Reed has continued in this vein in government. Late last year, Reed addressed the annual conference of the Jewish Labour Movement. Reed claimed that a Jewish Labour MP, Damien Egan, had been banned from visiting a school in Bristol because of inflamed teachers, upset by Israel's plausible genocide in Gaza. Egan, in addition to being Jewish, was the vice chair of Labour Friends of Israel. The story of how Egan was banned from the school was denounced in the international media. The Times reported that a Jewish family in Bristol was so upset by the story that they decided to move out of the city. Starmer addressed the House of Commons:
- “All Members of Parliament should be able to visit anywhere in their constituency, schools, or other places without any fear of antisemitism. We do take this seriously. We're providing more funding for security and support we're putting in across the country. and we will be holding those to account who prevented this visit to this school.”
But it was nonsense. In response to the allegation, the school was inspected by Ofsted, the school regulator. Unlike Reed's comments, Ofsted's sober, factual report was barely mentioned in the media, but it showed that Egan was not banned. Instead, the school had found out that some parents had intended to protest his appearance, upset by Egan's support for Israel. But Egan's visit was set to coincide with the school pick-up, and the school feared it would become chaotic. They suggested that Egan's visit be scheduled for another time. Indeed, by the time Reed told the story to the world, the school had already started arranging for Egan to visit at a more convenient time. He would eventually visit the following month. Remarkably, the Ofsted report noted that the federation that ran the school, the Cabot Learning Federation, had already hosted Egan on four different occasions at different schools in the area. The Ofsted report found that the school Bristol Brunel Academy was a diverse and inclusive community school. It found that teachers had expressed deep hurt at how their school was being portrayed. The teachers explained to Ofsted that they were proud of the inclusive nature of the school and it seems with good reason. Then the school was cleared in yet another detailed report, a report actually concerned with the facts. They found the decision to ask Egan to visit on another day was based entirely and solely on safeguarding concerns. Nothing to do with antisemitism.
But Reed had dropped a bomb on this tolerant, inclusive, successful school. He did so by telling a scare story about antisemitism that bore little resemblance to reality. Reed's reckless intervention created massive local turmoil, threw the school into crisis, and even prompted a Jewish family to leave Bristol in fear. Is this the sort of behaviour of a man who takes antisemitism seriously? Is this the sort of person who has a care about local government, local communities, and local schools? Is this the sort of man that should be listened to at all? Not just about antisemitism, but about good governance, respect for the law, and community cohesion? Is this a man who should even be in government, let alone wheeled out as the attack dog of Starmer's failing, unpopular, scandal-prone government? For me, the answer is clear. Hell no.[3]
