Welcome to the first edition of Dark Arts under a Labour government. Is the sky not bluer? The air not warmer? Is the sweet sound of birdsong not now even more beautiful? Etc etc.
A couple of weeks back I shared a piece of work that has been months in the making. Lovebombed by lobbyists: How Labour became the party of Big Business was the culmination of some of the reporting that has appeared in these newsletters and much more beyond. It highlights the mammoth lobbying effort that has taken place almost completely out of view over the past 18 months, as powerful interests attempted to shape Labour’s platform in anticipation of the party forming a government.
Dark Arts would like to think it was a pretty comprehensive piece of investigative journalism. But it’s important to highlight what wasn’t in that piece. To borrow a concept from former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, within this huge lobbying effort were known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. We know about hundreds of the meetings that have taken place between frontbenchers and lobbyists, and we know things were discussed at these meetings that we do not know about. But because our investigation was, for the most part, reliant on a wide range of open-source data, we do not know how many meetings have taken place that we don’t know about – nevermind who was there, or what was said.
