Emma Revell: His past acts in Labour Together might see McSweeny forced to leave Starmer on his tod in Number 10

Emma Revell is External Affairs Director at the Centre for Policy Studies.

When you have worked in think tanks for as long as I have, you’ll often get the question: ‘Who funds you?’

I’ve been asked it when giving talks to student groups, by new MPs who are finding their feet in Westminster for the first time. I’ve even been asked it on dates.

It’s usually asked with sincerity, often by people who aren’t entirely sure what a think tank is in the first place.

But sometimes it’s less a question being posed and more a missile being thrown. Many on the left appear to believe that think tanks on the right can only advocate for certain policy positions because they are paid to do so by their nefarious paymasters, rather than because they believe – and indeed have evidence to show – that such positions lead to positive outcomes for the economy and the country. (Indeed, the deeply boring answer to the question ‘Who funds you?’, for think tanks as with political parties, is: people who believe in this stuff.)

Before the election, there was a lot of talk on the left about the need for Labour to cleanse democracy of the taint of the right-wing think tanks. Which is why it’s darkly amusing that the person making most of those speeches, Angela Rayner, has been fired over a financial scandal – and the prime minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has been caught up in a transparency row over the think tank he and his allies set up as a vehicle for the Starmer project, Labour Together.

It remains to be seen what the impact of these revelations will be on the Prime Minister or his chief adviser. But the fact that this has come to light in the first place does tell us a great deal about how CCHQ intends to make headlines in the next few months.

From the start of her leadership, Kemi Badenoch made it clear that she wouldn’t be announcing much of the party’s policy platform until at least 2027 and that her focus would be on regaining the public’s trust. Commentators are still debating the rights and wrongs of that approach, but it is something she has stuck to – believing there is no point announcing technical details about tax reforms if the public aren’t willing to listen to what you’ve got to say.

The problem with that approach, however, has been that it has been difficult for the party to generate headlines. Badenoch and several other shadow Cabinet ministers have made set piece speeches on key topics – immigration, welfare, and the economy – but beyond that it has at times been hard to point to ways the party has been leading the news agenda. Until now.

And this isn’t the first example of Conservative politicians going above and beyond in recent weeks to highlight examples of Labour hypocrisy or wrongdoing.

Hollinrake also pushed hard for an investigation into whether Angela Rayner had broken ministerial rules around her tax liabilities. David Davis secured the excruciating three-hour long parliamentary debate about what No 10 did or did not know about Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. That came after Badenoch put the issue at the top of the agenda by devoting every question to it at Prime Minister’s Questions, and Neil O’Brien persuaded the Speaker to agree to an Urgent Question on the issue, forcing No 10 to wield the axe rather than spend more parliamentary time defending the indefensible.

All three occasions generated many, many clips of Labour frontbenchers looking increasingly uncomfortable. And all three stories – Rayner, Mandelson, McSweeney – have piled pressure on Keir Starmer and are no doubt contributing to the existing feeling among his backbenchers that he isn’t doing a very good job of being Prime Minister.

Drumming up strong headlines, holding the government to account, and exposing hypocrisy worked well for Labour in Opposition. Now the Conservatives are giving them a taste of their own medicine. It’s too early to tell whether this will have much effect on the polls – as my colleague Robert Colvile has argued, pushing these kinds of stories will no doubt knock Labour down a peg or two but it is unlikely the public will give Tories the credit.

However, seeing green shoots of a recovery from CCHQ is very welcome.

As this website’s own survey found back in February, 64.4 per cent of the readers’ panel either ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ believed CCHQ was doing a bad job. After lots of headlines about low morale and lay-offs, 4 Matthew Parker Street was being compared to a sinking ship. But figures released in June this year showed that in the first quarter of 2025, the Tories had raised almost £3.4 million – twice as much as Reform UK – and seeing a drumbeat of activity from the centre will help keep things ticking over as Badenoch continues her mission to try to regain the public’s trust.

Yes, as someone who works at a think tank, I’m always going to believe policy development matters more than Punch and Judy politics. That’s one of the reasons why think tanks exist – including Labour Together, which whatever the ins and outs has produced a lot of interesting work, and helped refresh Labour’s thinking.

But even we ivory-tower wonks have to admit that sometimes, there’s nothing to cheer the troops up like a little bloodsport.