Fergus Shackers

My dear James. There is a look particular to men like you. The swept fringe. The good posture. The slightly startled expression of a man who has just been asked a question he did not draft the answer to. You have been wearing it in public for ten years. And in ten years you have never won an election. Not a ward. Not a selection. Not a hopeless by-election nobody else wanted. No returning officer has ever had to read your name out loud. You are, of course, the son of a company man. Brian Schneider, chief executive of a listed Soho property firm, who died at forty-eight leaving a five million pound question mark over the family accounts. Daddy's dusty legacy, except in your case it was not dust. It was a writ. And you would still like to be thought a radical. Radicalised by Iraq. Radicalised by the crash. This is the story. Bless. You were at Winchester. WHERE RADICALISATION COMES WITH A CHAPEL Dragon. Winchester. St Paul's. Trinity College, Oxford. Theology. Winchester has been producing the men who run Britain for six hundred years. It does not teach you to think, it teaches you to sit in a room full of powerful people and behave as though the room belongs to you, because for six centuries it has. One of its recent outputs became Prime Minister. It is not a school. It is a factory with a waiting list. Then the house. Five storeys on Regent's Park Road, Primrose Hill, later valued at seven million. A second at Glen Tanar, near Balmoral. The fees. Cricket at the Gaieties, Pinter's club, where you were vice-captain. This is the man who promised to take on "the old and corrupt ruling elite." He was not taking them on. He was commuting from them. AND THE MONEY WAS NEVER ENTIRELY CLEAN Spring 2004. You are sixteen. Your father dies. Days later a bailiff arrives at night with a writ freezing every account the family holds. The company's case, in the High Court: hundreds of cheques written to himself over seven years, using a rule that let him sign alone below twenty thousand pounds. Over five million pounds. Half the value of the firm. Books allegedly falsified to disguise it as payments to two shell companies in Gibraltar and Panama. Two point three million into joint accounts at Coutts and Lloyds. Four hundred and seventy-four thousand to a mistress, for jewellery. Settled 2008. Two point three million paid. No liability admitted, which is the civil way of saying everyone agreed to stop discussing it. So the fees, the house, the estate and the cricket were funded, on the public record, out of money your father was accused of taking from a company that was not his. You were thirteen when the writ landed. You have never had to explain a word of it. It is not in the Wikipedia entry. It is not in the Verso biography. Funny, that. FOUR MONTHS You read theology, chaired the university Liberal Democrats, and left the party when it broke its tuition fees pledge. Not over Iraq. Over a policy that would have cost you money. You were nineteen. Then journalism. Think Africa Press, then New African. Writing about African poverty from a desk in London. You learned to explain the poor to the poor. May 2015 you joined the Labour Party. June, Corbyn declared. October, you co-founded Momentum. Four months, from new member to founding father of a national insurgency. Credit where due. It was quick. THE SOOTHING THING "We are not campaigning for any deselection." You told the Huffington Post that. And Sky. And the Express. And the Mail on Sunday. All while Neil Kinnock was warning on the record that the party was being turned into a sectarian ultra-left branch. Meanwhile your people were pulling the triggers in constituency after constituency. You were not quite lying. You were doing something more useful. Saying the soothing thing while the machine did the other thing. You have never stopped. October 2016, the reward. Director of Strategic Communications to the Leader of the Opposition. Twenty-nine years old. No seat, no branch, no union, no service. Just a good telephone manner and the correct opinions at the correct moment. THE ROOM 7 March 2018. The Telegraph puts a 280-page dossier on the Palestine Live Facebook group to the party. Three members suspended within hours. One is Glyn Secker, secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour. At 17:12 that afternoon you text the party's head of disputes. Why Secker? What about David Birkett? Birkett was an actual Holocaust denier. Milne follows within the hour. Then Andrew Murray. Then Corbyn. Three days later Secker is restored. The denier stays out in the cold. When Panorama pointed at this, the Leader's Office issued a flat denial. "The Leader's Office did not intervene." You had worked, in your own words, "very closely" on that rebuttal. Asked whether you approved the wording, you declined to answer. The emails show you intervened first. John Ware called the denial "thoroughly disingenuous." Your reply was to go on Twitter and take the whistleblower apart by name, within hours of Labour apologising to him in the High Court. You also wrote a thread on the seventeen days it took to suspend Birkett, and left out the seventeen days of officials begging Milne and Murphy by email. PLEASE can we get agreement. PLEEEEEEASE. All of it sitting in your own timeline, unmentioned. Ware's phrase for the performance was "pinhead dancing." It is hard to improve on. In 2019 you primarily wrote the party's pamphlet on antisemitism. Deleted under Starmer. In April 2018 Momentum formally conceded the problem was "more widespread than many of us had understood" and not "rightwing smears." By 2023 you were calling it a smear campaign. December 2019. 32.1 per cent. 202 seats. Worst since 1935. Your considered view afterwards was that Labour should have learned from Dominic Cummings. The man who beat you. ELEVEN WORDS January 2025. A quarter of a million girls. Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Bradford, Oldham. Decades of it. Charlie Peters asked whether you regretted how the Corbyn period had handled it. "I don't think we did very much." Eleven words, and the only fully honest ones in the file. Then you explained that successive governments were to blame. All of them. Including yours. TEN WEEKS 2024, field operation for Corbyn in Islington North. 2025, architect of Your Party. It launched to 800,000 sign-ups and within days the co-founders were briefing against each other and exchanging legal threats. September, you walked. Ten weeks. Twenty candidates at the May 2026 locals. No seats. The party split. In October the Met opened a criminal investigation into its founding and arrested a man in his twenties under the Computer Misuse Act. You were gone by then. You are always gone by then. THE WIFE In 2024 you married Sophie Nazemi. She is the Downing Street Press Secretary. The voice of Keir Starmer. You are the voice of the movement built to bury Keir Starmer. There is no register of interests for a marriage and no disclosure duty on a private citizen, so nothing has to be declared and nothing ever is. THE PATTERN Join, found a faction, four months. Leader's office at twenty-nine, no mandate. Restore an ally, deny intervening. Attack the whistleblower. Worst defeat in eighty-four years. Out, and straight into an unaccountable international network. Call it a smear. Marry the government's press secretary. Build a party, admit the movement did nothing on grooming gangs, quit in ten weeks. Four vehicles. Four collapses. One constant. And never once the man who has to face the count. That is not luck. Insurgents who take seats become answerable for them. Insurgents who only write the script keep the reputation and the bookings. Thirty-nine years old. Six hundred years of Winchester behind you. Not one vote. Do carry on, James. The green room is that way.