Dan Jarvis really doesn’t like it when you ask him about his hedge fund backers – trousering cash from City tycoons doesn’t fit with his carefully crafted image as a man-of-the-people who can unite Labour. Well, Action Dan has just banked another £20,000 cheque from Martin Taylor, a shady Mayfair hedgie and anti-Corbyn Labour moderate. Jarvis has had almost £60,000 off Taylor and a total of nearly £100,000 from City and business donors over the last few months, which is a lot of money for a lowly backbench MP. Ammo for the Corbynistas when Jarvis ends up spending hedge fund cash on his future leadership bid…

The mysterious hedge fund manager who gave Ed Miliband £600,000 before the election appears to be bankrolling Labour’s next great hope, Dan Jarvis. Martin Taylor was the shady Mayfair hedgie who was outed as one of Miliband’s biggest donors last year. A “Martin Taylor” has written a £16,800 cheque to “support Jarvis’ office and work as an MP”. Both Jarvis and his ‘press officer’ have declined Guido’s repeated requests for comment over the last five days. Labour sources cattily suggest that Jarvis – not considered Westminster’s greatest thinker – needs the money for a policy unit. Trousering a hefty wedge from a City tycoon doesn’t exactly go with his carefully crafted image as a man-of-the-people who can unite the Labour Party.

Guido hears various other Labour moderates have also been meeting potential City backers in recent months. When the war comes, expect the crowd-funded People’s Momentum to make a stink about Dan Jarvis and his hedge fund backers…

In his speech to Scottish Labour this morning Ed Miliband has just attacked tax avoidance by hedge funds. It is a regular theme, he was attacking the Tories as “the party of Mayfair hedge funds” at PMQs last month only for it to be revealed last week that one of Labour’s biggest donors after the unions was in fact a Mayfair based hedge fund trader. Martin Taylor has given a whopping £600,000. Ed’s embarrassment will have increased even more after Guido revealed in The Sun yesterday that his bitter 2010 Labour Party leadership campaign was funded by Lawrence Staden, another Mayfair based hedge fund trader. After the unions Staden was the biggest funder of Ed Miliband’s campaign to take control of the Labour Party…

Ed, desperate to beat his brother David, quietly took £27,000 from GLC, a billion dollar Mayfair hedge fund run by the Cambridge educated maths genius Lawrence Staden. Staden also gave another £100,000 of his profits to the Labour Party – £80,000 to Labour HQ, £10,000 to the ultra-marginal Eltham Labour Party and another £10,000 to neighbouring Greenwich and Woolwich, the constituency which includes his £3 million home in affluent Blackheath. Small change to a man who paid himself £3 million in the same year.

Staden’s hedge fund’s profits meant he could well afford it, having personally made an estimated £35 million from trading during the credit crunch, even boasting of ‘sailing serenely’ through the economic crisis that so devastated the British economy. He jokingly referred to the period leading up to 2008 banking collapse which saw many of his rival arbitrageurs go bust as “arbageddon”. 

In parliament, during a heated PMQs, Ed Miliband accused David Cameron of failing to tackle tax avoidance “for the simple reason that too many of his friends would get caught in the net. They’re the party of Mayfair hedge funds and Monaco tax avoiders.” So it will add to Ed Miliband’s embarrassment that his friend and backer Lawrence Staden’s hedge fund, GLC Diversified Fund, was registered in the offshore tax haven of Bermuda where income tax is not levied on hedge fund profits, allowing his fund to accumulate millions offshore without paying a penny in tax. Maybe Ed will unfriend his financial backer?

Coming on top of the revelations last week about Martin Taylor donating £600,000, many traditional Labour supporters will be feeling increasingly uneasy that the money might come with strings or appear to compromise their policies. Labour has just launched hard-hitting scaremongering billboard posters warning against the privatisation of the NHS. Supporters will be astonished and disgusted to learn that Martin Taylor’s Nevsky Capital fund has $15 million invested in the shares of the US private healthcare giant United Health, which is bidding for NHS contracts…