Do you remember that time in 2011 when Jacob Zuma, fed up with all the positive news emerging from the island nation of Cape Verde, summoned his advisors and spies, then financed and organised them into hi-tech units, then despatched the group into the north Atlantic where they began advising opposition to the incumbent President Pedro Pires? 

No? Because it never happened. But the opposite did; insofar as sovereign interference was concerned, the ANC sought to establish precedent, and one morning in November that same year, Derek Hanekom – dressed as if he’d just been playing the piano for Nataniel at an instant coffee promotion at Cresta Mall – announced that Julius Malema was bang to rights for shooting his mouth off about regime change in Botswana. 

Britain’s Labour Party wants to meddle in America’s domestic affairs, in particular its most important affair: the election of November 5th. Last week on Thursday, a Labour staffer posted on LinkedIn – the platform founded by an Epstein-islander – that the party was intending to send 100 current and former MPs to the US to campaign on behalf of the Democrat candidate, Kamala Harris. “We’re looking for 10 more volunteers to campaign in battleground states,” Ms Sofia Patel declared. “Accommodation will be sorted.” 

The post was picked up by Order Order, the UK’s pre-eminent political gossip website, before Andy Ngo posted it onto X. Then Marjorie Taylor-Green got hold of it, and then it didn’t matter that the west’s prestige media outlets were clearly ignoring it, because Elon Musk waded in. “This is illegal.” 

Expressly forbidden

He is right. The Federal Elections Code Act takes the view that things like “accommodation will be sorted” are forms of compensation, thus expressly forbidden. You would expect a government headed by a man with a solemn declaration of loyalty to the London left-wing lawyer complex to – at the very least – seek counsel’s opinion on matters involving sovereignty, but the expectation would ignore the profiles involved in these sorts of calamities: invariably over-educated, over-promoted and over-entitled. 

By Friday Ms. Patel’s post had been hurriedly scrubbed, but something about Labour’s attitude caught the attention of some independent journalists in the US. They got the scent, and the scent led them to something more sinister. 

The word “centre”, when applied to an initiative, is supposed to hint at technical authority. You’ve heard it plenty in the last four years. There’s the Southern Poverty Law Centre in the US, which spends most of its donor’s cash settling litigation brought against it by parties it has smeared. Many universities in the UK and the US have a ‘centre for digital information’ or ‘centre for digital awareness’,  all of which appear obsessed with ‘fake news’.  You mustn’t confuse these with the ‘Centre for Information Resilience’, which is headed by a forever-war enthusiast called Nina Jankowitz – herself a prolific circulator of fake news. Finally, we get to the “Centre for Countering Digital Hate” or, CCDH, which is different from Leicester University’s “Centre for Hate Studies”. 

The CCDH has offices in London and Washington, and just as with Ms. Patel’s LinkedIn post, it hasn’t bothered to conceal its trail. Some of the group’s working documents, accidentally leaked earlier this week, indicate an annual priority of (sic) “Killing Musks Twitter”, and notes from a conference attended by Democrat staffers and State Department officials where the same objective was discussed, alongside pleas for sanctions against X from the European Union and for companies to pull their ads from the platform. 

Now, this would all be just another noisy troop of self-hating, paranoid data monkeys but for one detail: Morgan McSweeney, a founding partner of the CCDH, just happens to be Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s recently appointed Chief of Staff. 

Charlie foxtrot

A full-blown diplomatic Charlie Foxtrot has now detonated, and Labour, already dripping in sleaze after barely 100 days in office, is scrambling to create space between the Prime Minister and the interference strike crews. 

But Starmer knows. He knows about the volunteer monkeys, and he knows about the CCDH monkeys. He knows, he approves and whilst ideally, he’d prefer the monkeys not to leave their tracks everywhere, the stakes are too high for him not to support their attempts to cajole Americans to vote for Kamala Harris. This goes beyond virtue-signalling, one of the few things Starmer excels at, and beyond luxury beliefs, which lie at the foundations of his party. 

People who share Starmer’s views are diminishing across the continent, in both number and influence, primarily because they choose to insult or censor those with whom they differ. So those people, tired of being dismissed by so-called respectable leaders like Starmer, have approached so-called less respectable leaders, like Geert Wilders, or Austria’s Herbert Kickl, or even Nigel Farage. 

Starmer is not brave enough to go it alone – people with his condition require constant validation and ideological solidarity, which is why he’s gone so long on Harris. 

But a Trump victory on November 5th will trap the UK in the most precarious of diplomatic binds. By my count, 18 of its most prominent (and current) MPs and officials have gone on record to insult him. The former British Ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch, resigned when his own incendiary remarks about Trump were leaked. Starmer’s current Minister for North America has a rich history of describing Trump as a “racist” and “offensive to civilised values” dating back nearly a decade. 

The degeneration of the western mind – no better viewed than in the British liberal-left loathing of Donald Trump – has to cease, and common sense must return. If the cost of that includes “centres” running out of funders, or Britain being isolated because everyone is just too shagged out to deal with their tilty-headed scolding and sneering about “values”, then entertaining one or two blatant democratic infractions will have been worth it. 

The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.

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contributor

Simon Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. Today he manages a fund based in London, is a trustee of an educational charity, and lives between the UK and California.