Labour’s Australian guru to open first Starmerite lobbying firm

Written by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund for The Times

The Australian strategist hired by Labour to help run its general election campaign is opening a British lobbying firm with another of Sir Keir Starmer’s senior party officials.

David Nelson, a polling and campaign guru who is close to Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, is expanding his corporate consultancy, Anacta, to Britain after helping to oversee Labour’s landslide.

He has hired Teddy Ryan — another McSweeney ally and a senior director for the party who is married to its new general secretary, Hollie Ridley — as the company’s managing director. Other leading Labour Party staff are likely to follow.

Nelson, whose work for Starmer inspired comparisons with Sir Lynton Crosby and Isaac Levido, the Australian strategists who oversaw election victories for David Cameron and Boris Johnson, hopes to deepen links between business and the new government.

The firm has secured office space near Mayfair, where he will offer government, polling and media advice to global corporations and wealthy individuals.

Insiders say that one objective the firm has is translating the mantra of Starmer and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, of being “pro-worker, pro-business” into concrete advice on investment decisions.

His arrival in Britain at the helm of the first consultancy to be led by former Starmer advisers is likely to lead to renewed interest in the relationship between senior ministers and the lobbying industry.

Anacta, founded in Australia in 2019, has close links to the Australian Labor government and Nelson was the mastermind of Anthony Albanese’s election victory in 2022 where, similarly to the UK, a centre-left leader won a ruthlessly efficient victory against an unpopular right-winger despite attacks on their economic policy.

Nelson was recruited to assist Starmer’s campaign by McSweeney in 2023 and is credited with helping the party refine its voter targeting, messaging and social media attacks on the Conservative Party in the local elections in May and later at the general election. He worked full-time in London for Labour this summer and was at the party conference last month.

Ryan worked for Labour for more than a decade. Between 2021 and 2023 he ran Labour in southeast England, where Starmer won a series of battleground councils and seats back from the Conservatives, before working alongside his wife, Ridley, and McSweeney on the national campaign this year.

He also launched Labour’s inaugural business conference two years ago which was credited with raising millions in funds and sanitising the party’s image among big corporate firms.

Labour sources who have worked with both Nelson and Ryan said their pitch to businesses would play heavily on their work for Starmer. Another senior party adviser said: “Lots of agencies are claiming to understand the political landscape, but it’s the guys from Anacta who actually helped build it.”