Keir Starmer’s team claim ‘dirty tricks’ by party insiders after being accused of hacking into Labour’s membership database

Source close to leadership frontrunner blames ‘factional attack’ by party supporters of rival Rebecca Long-Bailey

Sources close to Labour leadership frontrunner Sir Keir Starmer have claimed dirty tricks by party insiders, after members of his team were reported to the Information Commissioner over an alleged breach of data protection rules.

Two members of the shadow Brexit secretary’s team are understood to have been accused of hacking into the party’s membership database.

The move came after general secretary Jennie Formby launched an investigation into claims that Rebecca Long-Bailey’s campaign had shared with its volunteers links to a Labour phone-banking system called Dialogue, potentially allowing them to contact more than half a million party members.

Her team insist they have done nothing wrong and it is understood that party officials have so far found no evidence to substantiate allegations against them. Suspicions of breaches by the Starmer team are thought to have emerged in the course of this investigation.

BBC 5 Live’s Pienaar’s Politics reported that members of the Starmer team were accused of “data-scraping”, by hacking information from the membership database which could have been used to lobby activists for their votes in the ballot to choose a replacement for Jeremy Corbyn.

A spokesperson for the Starmer campaign denied any wrongdoing.

“We categorically reject these nonsensical allegations and are incredibly disappointed that they have been leaked to the media,” said the spokesperson.

“We are still awaiting the party’s formal response to the serious concerns we and others had about access to Labour Party membership data.”

A source close to the campaign said that the supposed breach had in fact arisen as a result of Starmer officials checking out an allegation that Ms Long-Bailey may have broken the rules.

After following links sent out by the Long-Bailey team to establish what had happened, they reported a potential breach of GDPR data protection rules to party authorities, only to find themselves accused of breaking the same rules through their investigation, said the source.

“This is a factional attack by the party machine on our campaign,” said the source. “This contest was always going to be a David against Goliath struggle because we have the entire party machine on the side of one candidate.”

The chair of the Starmer campaign, former Labour MP Jenny Chapman, told BBC Radio 5 Live's Pienaar's Politics: “What happened was another campaign sent out an email to thousands of their supporters saying 'Please follow these links and you can make phone calls on behalf of our candidate'."

She said that members of the Starmer team found that a click on the link provided gave them access to the party phone bank.

"We were alerted to this and couldn’t quite believe it, so we looked at it and then wrote to the Labour party and said 'We think there’s something’s wrong here'," she said. "And then the next thing we know is people on our campaign get letters saying 'Actually, we think you’ve done something wrong. It’s utter, utter nonsense.”

Ms Chapman said: "This is supposed to be a clean fight. This sort of thing it doesn’t do the Labour party any favours.

“Whoever decided to send these threatening letters to people on the Kier Starmer campaign and then leak it the BBC really isn’t doing the Labour party or their preferred candidate any favours here. We need to move on and we need to look like a credible party of government and this is doing the opposite of that.”

The row has laid bare the growing bitterness of a contest which has seen Sir Keir establish a strong lead in polling and nominations over Ms Long-Bailey, who is widely viewed as the “continuity Corbyn” candidate supported by left-wingers around the current leadership and the influential Unite union.

Labour general secretary Jennie Formby (Alamy)

Under the rules of the leadership contest, candidates will be allowed access to party membership and supporter databases only when they have secured their place on the final ballot paper on 14 February. Rivals of Ms Long-Bailey complain that this has given her an unfair advantage because they claim she is able to make use of separate lists maintained by the Corbyn-backing Momentum movement.

A party spokesperson said: “The Labour Party takes its legal responsibilities for data protection – and the security and integrity of its data and systems – extremely seriously. We have written to all leadership candidates to remind them of their obligations under the law and to seek assurances that membership data will not be misused.”

But Labour’s former justice secretary Charles Falconer was critical of the party’s actions.

“An original complaint about one campaign’s access to data has been dealt with by attacking the complainant by the Labour Party, who are supposed to be neutral trusted arbiter of leadership campaign not the untrusted leaker and attacker of whistleblowers,” said Lord Falconer.

It is understood that Sir Keir has not yet been contacted by the Information Commissioner’s office.