The corporate lobbyists behind new defence secretary Dan Jarvis

New defence secretary Dan Jarvis has previously received around half a million pounds in donations from corporate lobbyists. So, as mainstream media outlets say the Labour right-winger “once looked like the future” and “is a fine choice“, let’s look into the dark money that’s been fuelling his political career.

Jarvis and his local Labour Party in Barnsley have done such an awful job at countering Tory damage to the town in recent decades that it turned to Reform in the 2026 local elections. And when you look at where Jarvis’s funds come from, you can understand why the people of Barnsley might not exactly be his top political priority.

1 — Labour Together millionaires

One major source of donations to Jarvis has been key Labour Together donor Martin Taylor. Taylor runs a hedge fund that invests in private healthcare.

Fellow Labour Together donor and proud pro-Israel lobbyist Trevor Chinn also gave thousands of pounds to Jarvis. It seems likely that such support was at least in part because Jarvis was a parliamentary supporter of Labour Friends of Israel who even received money from the lobby group.

Labour Together was a prominent vehicle for undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and forcing vacuous corporate lackey Keir Starmer onto the country.

Other beneficiaries of money from Labour Together or its donors have included high-profile cronies such as Yvette Cooper, Wes Streeting, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood, and Rachel Reeves.

2 — The “multimillionaire recruitment tycoon” with interests in private healthcare

EveryDoctor explains that “multimillionaire recruitment tycoon Peter Hearn“:

made his fortune through recruitment firms PSD and Odgers Berndtson

Odgers Group Limited, where he resigned as a director in 2025, has offered:

headhunting services to the NHS as well as the private healthcare sector. The firm has faced criticism for some of the senior executives it has helped recruit to the NHS. Former TalkTalk executive Dido Harding was headhunted by Odgers Berndtson to lead the NHS Test and Trace programme during the pandemic, which was later deemed to be ineffective by MPs.

A fellow director at Odgers was Tory peer Virginia Bottomley.

While Hearn clearly has a massive soft spot for Labour right-wingers Wes Streeting and Yvette Cooper, Dan Jarvis has been the other key recipient of Hearn’s money. They’ve all received money from Hearn’s OPD Group and MPM Connect Ltd. Labour campaign group Momentum once called MPM “dark money“, and Sky reported that:

The company has no staff or website and is registered at an office in Hertfordshire where the secretary says she has never heard of them.

EveryDoctor says Hearn’s OPD Group also “provides services to the NHS“.

With Dan Jarvis, the lobby’s grip on government continues

In 2016, Blairite strategist John McTernan said Jarvis:

so clearly wants to be Leader of the Labour Party.

Many on the right of the party mentioned his name “as a potential challenger to Jeremy Corbyn” early into Corbyn’s time as leader, with some of them even seeing him as “the party’s greatest hope“. Jarvis also reportedly had links to Blue Labour, whose whole argument is basically that Labour should be ‘more conservative‘.

Jarvis has largely remained quiet in the last ten years, just accumulating corporate money and doing little of note for people in his constituency. But his move into the role of defence secretary may be a sign that his star on the Labour right is rising yet again.

Considering that lobbyists’ empty vessel Keir Starmer has pushed Labour far to the right as leader, it’s unsurprising that Dan Jarvis fits neatly into the project.

The question now is, exactly how much will Jarvis’s deep links to the corporate lobby influence Ministry of Defence policy at a time of already increasing military spending?

Featured image via Carl Court/Getty Images