Sainsbury gave Burnham £140,000 the day Starmer quit
Burnham's first financial register as PM shows £350,000 in pre-No10 donations, tracing back to the network behind Labour Together's undeclared funding and a smear operation against journalists.
Andy Burnham’s first register of financial interests since entering No 10 shows he took almost £350,000 in donations, gifts and in-kind support in the year before he became prime minister. The single biggest tranche, roughly £140,000 in campaign staff and contractors, was the Sainsbury donation Burnham received from Lord Sainsbury on 22 June, the same day Keir Starmer announced he was quitting.
Burnham could not have been in the room to receive it without help. He needed a Commons seat to stand for the leadership, and he didn’t have one until Josh Simons, the sitting Labour MP for Makerfield, resigned on 14 May specifically to trigger the by-election that let Burnham in. Burnham won it on 18 June with 54.8% of the vote.
Simons had left government two months earlier under a cloud. Labour Together, the party faction group he had worked for, had already been fined £14,250 by the Electoral Commission in 2021 for failing to declare £730,000 in donations between 2017 and 2020 under the directorship of Morgan McSweeney, who went on to become Starmer’s chief of staff. When the Sunday Times revisited that funding history, Labour Together paid the PR firm APCO Worldwide at least £30,000 to dig into the personal and political backgrounds of the journalists asking the questions. Simons resigned as Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office on 1 March, cleared of a Ministerial Code breach by the PM’s standards adviser but found to have caused “potential reputational damage.”
None of that has kept him out. Simons is now reported to be a key part of Burnham’s operation and tipped for a big government job, while Labour Together itself rebranded in May as ThinkLabour and gave Burnham a further £22,186 in staffing and IT support.
The rest of the register reads like a map of the same network. Gary Lubner gave £25,000, Sacha Lord £35,000, Charlie Parsons Creative £50,000, Ernst & Young a £16,500 staff secondment. The FBU, CWU and Unison gave a combined £20,000 between February and April, months before the leadership contest was even public. Labour’s response is that “it’s right that political campaigns are funded by the generous support of party donors, rather than via the public purse.” Every donation was registered within the rules. As Green leader Zack Polanski put it: “People will often retort that this is all legal, and that’s true. But that’s the point. How can it be OK?”
Burnham’s leadership was built on unions giving money before there was officially a contest to give it to.
