The left-wing activist lawyers at Bindmans released an extraordinary statement yesterday, urging the Labour Party to “provide further details about its recruitment” of Assaf Kaplan, a Jewish Labour Party member who previously worked for the Labour Party of Israel and before then the IDF as a spy. Bindmans say they are pursuing this on behalf of a Palestinian member of the Labour Party:

“A British Palestinian member of the Labour Party has called upon the Party to provide further details about its recruitment of former officer of the Israeli Defence Force, Assaf Kaplan, to manage the Party’s digital campaigning. Bindmans LLP has written to the Party on behalf of Mr. Hmidan regarding its recruitment of Mr. Kaplan to the position of Social Listening and Organising Manager in January 2021.”

Last month, Guido asked the Labour Party about a rumour going around that Kaplan had left the Leader’s office but was steered away. By the sounds of things, Sir Keir is sticking with Kaplan. Looking at the latest Labour polling, Starmer will need all the help he can get…

Keir Starmer’s desire to win the next election is not in doubt, to help him he has hired a former Israeli Defence Force cyber-warfare intelligence officer to help his campaign. This is something of change of hiring policy for the Labour Party since Corbyn was laying wreaths for PLO terrorists.

Assaf Kaplan’s background was revealed by The Electronic Intifada, website, exactly the kind of online operation that in his previous role Kaplan would have been countering. He worked in Unit 8200 – the Israeli military’s equivalent of GCHQ – generally considered among the elite of the world’s cyber-warfare operators. Kaplan later got some handy experience of politics from being the deputy head of the Israeli Labor Party’s digital campaign in the April 2019 election. An election that saw the party collapse from holding 19 seats to 6…

The appointment of Kaplan as Labour’s “Social Listening and Organising Manager” will, according to the job specification, see him “help to move the social media listening framework of the party to be laser-focused on those we need to win over to form the next government”. Not unexpectedly, the appointment has predictably outraged the hard-left, particularly as it is claimed that Kaplan is going to be based in the Leader’s office. On national security grounds alone, it will make a welcome change for that office to contain former agents of an allied power…