‘No rules’ to prevent Labour donor and peer getting Number 10 pass, party chair says
There were “no rules” to stop Labour giving donor Lord Waheed Alli a Downing Street pass, the party’s chair has told Sky News.
Lord Alli, who is a Labour member of the House of Lords, has given more than £500,000 to the party over two decades.
Speaking to Sky News this morning, Ellie Reeves – who is also a Cabinet Office minister – was asked if it was right to give Lord Alli a pass despite him not having a formal job in government.
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She claimed the peer only had access to Downing Street for “a period of a few weeks” – and the “proper processes” were followed.
Pushed on whether it was reasonable for someone who donated large sums of money to be given access to the seat of power in the UK, Ms Reeves said: “There are no rules that prevent someone who has made a donation or had a political job in the past… having a role.
“There are rules that have to be followed, there are processes that have to be followed – and it’s important that those rules are respected.”
It is still unclear why Lord Alli had a pass to get access to Downing Street.
Ms Reeves said the peer and donor was “not involved in policy” – but could not provide further clarity on why he was in Downing Street.
Labour previously said he attended a small number of political meetings with no civil servants, and said he gave back his pass at the end of July.
Lord Alli was ennobled by Tony Blair in 1998. He also worked as the party’s chief fundraiser for the general election, having been hired by Sir Keir in 2022.
And he also donated £100,000 to Sir Keir for his leadership campaign in 2020, according to the Sky News Westminster Account project.
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John Glen, the Conservative shadow paymaster general, said over the weekend: “Starmer’s sleaze is engulfing this new government and it’s time Labour came clean on all the people they’ve parachuted into top civil service jobs and the donors they’ve returned favours to so the independence and integrity of the civil service is maintained.”
Ms Reeves was also asked if the cabinet is fully behind the government’s decision to means test the winter fuel payment for pensioners.
She said: “This is an incredibly tough decision and not one that the chancellor wanted to be taking.
“But it’s because of the economic mess that we’ve inherited from the previous government.
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“We got into government and found that there was a £22bn black hole in the country’s finances, and that requires tough choices.”
She added that the “cabinet are behind the chancellor” after being asked several times if there was unity on the decision in government.
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Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has told Sky News that councils that believe they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs are “idiots” – as she denied Elon Musk influenced the decision to have a national inquiry on the subject.
The minister said: “I don’t follow Elon Musk’s advice on anything although maybe I too would like to go to Mars.
“Before anyone even knew Elon Musk’s name, I was working with the victims of these crimes.”
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Elon Musk. Pic: Reuters
Mr Musk had called Ms Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” in one of a series of inflammatory posts on X in January and said she should go to jail.
Mr Musk, then a close aide of US President Donald Trump, sparked a significant political row with his comments – with the Conservative Party and Reform UK calling for a new public inquiry into grooming gangs.
At the time, Ms Phillips denied a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham on the basis that it should be done at a local level.
But the government announced a national inquiry after Baroness Casey’s rapid audit on grooming gangs, which was published in June.
Asked if she thought there was, in the words of Baroness Casey, “over representation” among suspects of Asian and Pakistani men, Ms Phillips replied: “My own experience of working with many young girls in my area – yes there is a problem. There are different parts of the country where the problem will look different, organised crime has different flavours across the board.
“But I have to look at the evidence… and the government reacts to the evidence.”
Ms Phillips also said the home secretary has written to all police chiefs telling them that data collection on ethnicity “has to change”, to ensure that it is always recorded, promising “we will legislate to change the way this [collection] is done if necessary”.
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Operation Beaconport has since been established, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA), and will be reviewing more than 1,200 closed cases of child sexual exploitation.
Ms Phillips revealed that at least “five, six” councils have asked to be a part of the national review – and denounced councils that believed they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs as “idiots”.
“I don’t want [the inquiry] just to go over places that have already had inquiries and find things the Casey had already identified,” she said.
She confirmed that a shortlist for a chair has been drawn up, and she expects the inquiry to be finished within three years.
Ms Phillips’s comments come after she announced £426,000 of funding to roll out artificial intelligence tools across all 43 police forces in England and Wales to speed up investigations into modern slavery, child sex abuse and county lines gangs.
Some 13 forces have access to the AI apps, which the Home Office says have saved more than £20m and 16,000 hours for investigators.
The apps can translate large amounts of text in foreign languages and analyse data to find relationships between suspects.
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