Hello, it’s been a while. Dark Arts enjoyed a break while Parliament was in recess, but as MPs return to Westminster so too does this newsletter return directly to your inbox.
Firstly, an update on our story from a few weeks back, which revealed several senior lobbyists had volunteered with Labour for the duration of the general election campaign, many of them in influential roles at the heart of the party. At the time of publishing, Dark Arts had been able to identify 11 senior public affairs professionals who’d worked with the party. Since then, we’ve found out about one more lobbyist who pitched in, so it seems only fair to name them too. Samuel Riley works for Hanbury Strategy but spent the election campaign working with the press team at Labour HQ. Now he’s back to the day job and has written a post on LinkedIn reflecting on his experience, saying: “I’m using the lessons I have learned to help clients find better ways of working with the government in its mission to get Britain growing!” Hanbury’s clients include investment manager Blackstone, Citibank and gambling giant Flutter, among others.
Secondly, an update on a story I didn’t publish. Regular Dark Arts readers will know that Hakluyt, the corporate strategy firm that spun out of MI6, has long been of interest to me – particularly since Keir Starmer appointed the ‘spooky’ company’s former chairman, Varun Chandra, as his business adviser. For some time, I’d been following up on a tip from one of this newsletter’s readers, who told me Chandra can be seen in the background of the infamous shot of Boris and Carrie Johnson, Dominic Cummings and various government Spads drinking wine in the Number 10 garden during the first Covid lockdown in May 2020. The reader suggested Chandra had been in Downing Street at the time for talks with civil servants on behalf of one of Hakluyt’s big clients. I had intended that story to lead this week’s newsletter but awoke on Saturday morning to find that I’d been scooped by The Sun. You win some, you lose some.
