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'Making Friends with MAGA'

Lord Maurice Glasman likes to visit what he calls a 'bike shed' round the back of the upper chamber where he sits smoking roll-ups and shooting the political breeze.

With his East End accent and affable manner, he is happy to engage. Ordering burgers and chips in the House of Lords canteen, he seems to know all the staff by name, whom he treats like peers rather than peers of the realm.

And so Lord Glasman may - or may not - appear to be an unusual candidate to enter the eye of the storm since Donald Trump's re-election in the United States.

Recently referred to as Number 10's "MAGA whisperer" by The Times, he was the only British lawmaker invited to Trump's second presidential inauguration, on a freezing January day in Washington, DC, earlier this year.

Glasman was invited there by a long-term contact - now the US Vice President - JD Vance, who admired his writing about class and had first approached him some years earlier, exploring whether the US Democrats could provide a new deal for workers. In DC, Glasman was overawed by the scale of the celebrations and the energy around Trump's 'Make America Great Again' movement.

He sought out, and was sought after, by some of the most important Trumpworld movers and shakers: Steve Bannon, former Trump campaign manager and co-founder of Cambridge Analytica; the influential 'Dark Enlightenment' thinker Curtis Yarvin, and - as Byline Times can reveal - the tech baron and Palantir data firm founder, Peter Thiel.

This would be an impressive list of American contacts to make in less than a year, but more unusual still - given Trump's well-known connections with Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage (who Glasman regularly debates on GB News) or the long-established links between the US Republican Party and the British Conservatives - is that Lord Glasman has been a left-wing Labour peer for 14 years.

As a founder of the 'Blue Labour' strategy - which promotes the blue-collar union origins of the Labour movement - Glasman has often swum against the New Labour mainstream.

An early critic of globalisation, he dislikes the term 'diversity' and rails against the way what he calls 'progressivism' has replaced working-class 'solidarity' with rules and regulations.

Glasman voted and campaigned to leave the EU in 2016, and decries the 'lanyard class' of politicos and wonks. Though he believes in the rule of law, he condemns 'the rule of lawyers'.

He worked with Keir Starmer's Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, to see off the threat of the far-right BNP in east London in the Noughties - but does not appear concerned that a new far-right, centred around revived race science and Big Tech, could be using him to add an air of respectability around their access to the governing Labour Party.

Previous reports have detailed Glasman's appearance at Trump's second inauguration, having his portrait painted alongside Curtis Yarvin, and his appearances on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast. But, for the first time, Byline Times can reveal that he was tasked by Morgan McSweeney to make contacts and connections in the Trump administration. And, at first, he reported back almost daily to Number 10.

This newspaper can also reveal that, at the inauguration, Glasman met Peter Thiel - whose company, Palantir, was recently awarded a £1.5 billion contract with the Ministry of Defence as part of the US-UK 'Tech Prosperity Deal' announced by Donald Trump and Prime Minister at the recent state visit.

Glasman shared a cup of tea with Thiel while talking about AI, an area he has an avid interest in.

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