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Ex-Murdoch editor admits tweaking Labour manifesto while at TikTok

Keir Starmer’s outgoing director of strategic communications has admitted he was still working at TikTok while working on Labour’s 2024 manifesto. The former director of strategic communications is James Lyons, who previously worked as the deputy political editor at Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times. The revelation seems to be yet another example of Westminster’s revolving door between politics, media, and business.

James Lyons of the Murdoch Press

Murdoch is highly controversial with Labour members because he owns the Sun newspaper, which infamously blamed Liverpool fans for the Hillsborough disaster, leading to Labour banning the paper from certain events. Murdoch is a key supporter of right-wing politicians and political parties in the UK and abroad, particularly in America through his Fox News TV channel and website. Given Murdoch’s transparently right-wing political agenda, people understandably suspect that anyone who works for him must have some level of agreement with his world view.

Starmer has famously been on something of a journey with his relationship with the Sun:

When he needed left-wing votes to become Labour leader, he stood against the Sun; when the votes were in, he literally became an occasional contributor:

Sun article written by Keir Starmer on press freedoms

The above article from October 2024 saw Starmer talking about ‘press freedoms’. While that sounds like a good thing, in July 2024 Canary writer James Wright covered the sort of ‘press freedoms’ Murdoch might be interested in (namely the freedom to avoid scrutiny):

Rupert Murdoch family-owned News UK received “private assurances” that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party government would not carry out an inquiry into press standards, according to iNews. News UK-owned titles the Sun and the Sunday Times then endorsed Starmer, once they’d gotten assurances that Leveson 2 would not go ahead.

Leveson 2 is the would-be second part of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards. The first part was launched in 2011. That’s after Murdoch-owned and now defunct News of the World had been found to be hacking phones.

The second part would look further into the relationship between the press and the police to see if there’s complicity in transgressions.

How convenient that Labour had a former Times editor helping them with their manifesto that same summer.

In 2017, Steve Topple wrote an article for the Canary based on an overheard conversation between Lyons and Labour councillor Alice Perry. Interestingly, the conversation touched on one issue which has only become more relevant recently:

Perry told Lyons she repeatedly tried to get Islington Council to fly the St George’s flag. But that the Council avoided doing it. Lyons asked her if she would supply emails about this so he could run a “loony left council won’t fly the flag” story. He said he’d make sure Perry looked good. She did not dismiss the idea, but was worried about being exposed as the source.

In response to that conversation, a senior Labour source described Perry as a “disgrace”. Perry described the account of the conversation as “fake news”, which is a term popularised by Donald Trump – another politician Murdoch has supported (admittedly on and off).

The man from TikTok

Regarding his employment at TikTok, the newly-unemployed Lyons exposed himself on LinkedIn:

The ask to enter No 10 came out of the blue.
I had helped Labour during the election by rewriting the manifesto to make it more compelling (and remove bear traps where I could).
To ensure security this was done, in spare time over evenings and weekends, on a laptop that didn’t leave the party HQ.
Rightly, there was never any promise of a job.

Lyons says these measures ‘ensured security’, but this blatantly isn’t secure if you think it’s a conflict of interest to allow an employee of a controversial tech giant to shape the policy direction of a potential future government. Even if you do think it’s acceptable, you must think there should be some transparency. We all know unions contribute towards Labour manifestos, and we know that because they openly discuss it. People may not have voted for Labour if their manifesto came with the phrase ‘written in collaboration with TikTok’ on the cover.

While he supposedly worked on the manifesto in his “spare time over evenings and weekends”, he was still an employee of TikTok. He may have worked on the manifesto using a separate laptop, but he didn’t work on it using a separate brain; he didn’t work on it with separate interests, goals, or connections.

Interestingly, Lyons also said:

I was blown away by the election result. Keir had vanquished the hard left and delivered a remarkable landslide in a single term.

He describes Labour before Starmer as ‘hard left’, but as many have pointed out, the Corbyn platform wasn’t that different than the social democracies of Scandinavia.

Lyons also said:

The new government, however, suffered ‘teething troubles’.

‘Teething troubles’ is putting it mildly given what’s happened with Labour under Starmer and Lyons:

 

Gee, I wonder if there’s any correlation between Labour abandoning its traditional values to appeal to Rupert Murdoch and the party’s record unpopularity?

When Lyons says he was Labour’s ‘director of strategic communications’, that seems to mean he concocted communications which strategically directed Labour’s popularity down the toilet.


Hilariously, Lyons also used his LinkedIn post to play up his pride in what he achieved:

I go proud of what I achieved and pleased to have worked with old friends while making hugely gifted new ones.
It has been, as the cliche goes, an honour and a privilege.
And now, in another phrase popular on this platform, for the next adventure…

It’s like watching the iceberg spotter on the Titanic trying to network with the wealthy evacuees as the ship goes down.

All spun out

Arguably, it would be wrong to describe this latest revelation as an example of ‘revolving door’ politics. That phrase describes an individual who freely moves from politics, to business, to the media, whereas Lyons didn’t wait until he’d left TikTok to work on the most important document of the mid-2020s.

The fact that Lyons didn’t think it was a problem to announce this demonstrates how bad things have become. And as the Guardian reported, a spokesperson from Labour said:

Thousands of people volunteered their spare time during the general election to help Labour end 14 years of Tory chaos. All of this was done in their own time.

Labour clearly think they’re unaccountable.

Their poll numbers, delivered to you by their crack teams of comms geniuses, suggest otherwise.

Featured image via  Number 10 / Rupert Murdoch – Wikimedia

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.