Republican election claims expose Labour’s blind spot

Donald Trump’s accusation of “blatant foreign interference” in the US presidential election by the Labour Party has proven to be a useful and effective stunt — and the party’s mistakes have only made it more so. After Trump’s presidential campaign filed a six-page legal complaint claiming Keir Starmer’s team had meddled in the election by “sending” almost 100 aides to help the Democrats, Labour reluctantly confirmed that it had paid for Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, to attend the Democratic National Convention in August. This undermined the line taken by Angela Rayner at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, which was that “people go and campaign, and they do what they want to do in their own time with their own money”.

There is of course nothing unusual in Labour people volunteering to learn from and to help sister parties’ campaigns in other countries — and America has always been the big draw.  During the 1992 presidential election, Yvette Cooper, then a Labour staffer working for Harriet Harman in Gordon Brown’s Treasury team, volunteered at the Clinton campaign HQ in Little Rock, Arkansas. Philip Gould, the Labour Party pollster, was there, too, along with a gaggle of other staffers and the occasional MP.

Nor is it unusual for parties to send visitors to each others’ conferences and conventions. Bill Clinton himself, after he was president, addressed Labour’s annual conference in Blackpool in 2002. I don’t think he paid for the trip himself.  The Trump campaign’s legal letter is a piece of mischief. As my colleagues report, sources close to Trump admit that the claims are “not being taken seriously at all”, but they are an effective distraction from the allegations of Russian funding that have dogged Trump in the past. They divert attention, too, from the rather more visible interference in US politics from Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, who is constantly trying to get himself on American TV supporting Trump even though most Americans have no idea who he is.

Even fewer Americans have heard of McSweeney — or indeed Starmer — but some bright spark in the Trump campaign spotted a Federal Election Commission regulation saying that a “foreign national shall not direct, dictate, control, or directly or indirectly participate in the decision-making process of any person, such as a corporation, labor organisation, political committee, or political organisation with regard to such person’s federal or non-federal election-related activities”.  It is a clever complaint, and I should not really be falling into the trap of devoting any further media coverage to it — except that it does highlight a weakness in the Labour Party: too many supporters assume that when they do something, their motives are pure and the greater good is served. It tends not to occur to them that, if the other side did the same thing, they would be outraged.

We have had a recent example of this with the fuss over Starmer and his ministers accepting gifts. But it has always been a danger in dealing with foreign politicians. When Barack Obama told the British people how to vote in the EU referendum, Remainers cheered him on and said how right he was to point out that Britain would be at the “back of the queue” for a US trade deal if we left the EU. He was right, of course — but that is not the point. He was trying to interfere in the politics of another country, and it was worse than a mistake; it was counterproductive. If anything, being told how to vote — by everyone from Obama to the Pope — strengthened the resolve of Leavers.

It is hard to believe that this Trump campaign stunt will have any effect on how people vote in Pennsylvania. Its main effect will have been to cheer up the junior lawyer and Trump staffer who obviously had a great time drafting the letter of complaint. But if Starmer and the Labour Party learn a lesson about how some of their actions in engaging with foreign parties might be seen, so much the better.