- Adviser: Senior aide linked to Croydon MP Steve Reed.
- Transfer: Moved from Streatham to No10 role.
- Confirmation: Sources verify the staff shift.
- Context: Internal government staffing change confirmed.
- Status: Transfer now official per insiders.
Oscar Harman, the chair of the Liberal Democrats for the Streatham and Croydon North Constituency and a SPAD (political appointee special adviser) at Reed’s department of Housing, Communities, and Local Affairs, had a New Year’s shift. According to reports, he was seconded to
“the No10 political team for a month to cover for Prentice Hazell.”
Hazell has been Keir Starmer’s diary manager since 2020; Harman is now anticipated to fill this position.
Harman will communicate closely with Starmer’s chief of staff in No. 10. Reed’s former coworker during his tenure as a councillor at Brixton Town Hall in the first ten years of this century was Morgan McSweeney.
Reed gave the order to spy on the emails of his fellow Labour council members when he was the head of Lambeth Council.
A whole chapter detailing the hacking of Inside Croydon’s email and Twitter accounts was included in the investigative book The Fraud, which was released in October 2025. The chapter included files of internal Labour correspondence, some of which mentioned Reed or were directed to him.
Journalist Paul Holden describes in The Fraud how McSweeney and Reed used over £1 million in unreported contributions to elect Starmer as Labour’s leader in 2020.
For the Town Hall elections in May, Harman is anticipated to be nominated as a Labour Party council candidate, most likely in a safe Lambeth ward.
“So the spymaster has his Downing Street insider,”
a Katharine Street source quipped in response to the announcement that Harman will oversee the Prime Minister’s diary for at least a month.
In other news, Mike Bonello, a former Labour councillor from Croydon, said on social media that he has joined the Green Party.
Bonello, a social worker, served as a Woodside ward council member for just three times. After the discredited Tony Newman, the Labour council leader who had busted the city, abnegated, he was tagged in a by- election in 2021.
In 2024, half through his first full term as an tagged councillor, Bonello abdicated from the council following a brief term( and fresh benefits!) as a shadow press member for children and youthful people.
Since Zack Polanski was chosen as party leader last afterlife, the Greens’ class has increased dramatically, rising from 70,000 to 180,000 by the end of 2025.
Alongside the decline in Starmer’s party’s national popularity and the PM’s personal poll scores, a number of Labour councillors in London boroughs have defected to the Greens, including six in Southwark alone. Factors include worries about the party’s authoritarianism, its position on Gaza, the absence of a wealth tax, and how the economy is being managed.
However, no Labour council members in Croydon have defected to the two-person Green Party group at the Town Hall.
With local elections now just three months away, a Katharine Street source told:
“If Labour are confident of winning the Croydon mayoralty, and having the largest group of councillors, maybe a few carrots have been dangled, with the promise of cabinet posts or other jobs after May 7, which the Greens won’t be able to provide, to focus the attention of any councillors having a crisis of conscience.”
What is the connection between Steve Reed and No10 staffing?
Oscar Harman, a elderly counsel( SPAD) nearly linked to Croydon MP Steve Reed, was recently transferred from his part at the Ministry of Housing to No. 10 Downing Street to serve as temporary journal director for Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Harman chairs the Streatham and Croydon North Constituency Labour Party and worked under Reed during his Lambeth Council leadership; their participated history includes once difficulties like dispatch surveillance on councillors, with Reed also tied to No. 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, whom he guided beforehand in his career.
This secondment places Reed abettors directly in Starmer’s operation amid political pressures like falling pates, extending Reed’s network from his current Housing Secretary part( after Environment Secretary) into core Downing Street functions despite no formal press position in No. 10.
