SKY NEWS is investigating money that flows around MPs in donations, second jobs and funding for all-party parliamentary groups. It’s good to see journalists “follow the money” around politics — which is something we are supposed to do, but often don’t.

Sky’s investigation highlighted and raised questions about one of the biggest blocks of donations. A company called MPM Connect is the third-biggest donor to MPs since the last election, giving £340,000 to three Labour right figures — Wes Streeting, Dan Jarvis and Yvette Cooper. The donations help run these “moderate” MPs’ offices — the cash promotes their political careers, not their luxury.

Sky is right to raise these questions — but it only really “followed the money” part of the way. While MPM Connect’s role is shadowy, it is possible to pin them down a bit more.

The Labour right’s sugar daddy is Peter Hearn, and MPM Connect is his investment vehicle, especially for his shares in recruitment firm Odgers Berndtson, a major public-sector contractor. Through it, Hearn and Cooper et al are linked to a network of Tory politicians and public-sector outsourcing.

Sky said MPM Connect was a company that “has no staff or website and is registered at an office where the secretary says she has never heard of them,” adding, “The company’s accounts do not disclose where it receives its funding, what it does or why it donates so heavily.”

The Guardian, Mail and other papers followed suit, emphasising the mystery around Labour’s donor. Sky does have an important point — MPs are allowed to take cash from a company that is, to the regular voter, obscure and mysterious. But journalists should be able to dig a bit deeper.

Indeed Morning Star readers are already ahead of Sky journalists because I covered MPM Connect’s donations to Cooper last October.

Hearn has been donating very specifically to the Labour right and occasionally to the Tories for years. Hearn funded Cooper’s 2015 leadership bid. But as I exposed back in 2015, Hearn had previously given £10k to the Tories in the 2010 election.

Hearn also funded Dan Jarvis in a doomed attempt to unseat Jeremy Corbyn as party leader. Now the Labour right is back in charge, Hearn is funding its frontbenchers, Cooper and Streeting.

Hearn’s money says he likes the Labour right a lot, the Tories a little, but has no time even for Labour’s “soft left.”

Hearn made his money in what is known as “executive search” — where businesses, and more worryingly, public-sector bodies, hire consultants to help them appoint their top staff.

Instead of just putting an ad in the papers, executive search consultants go out and find those they think to be suitable staff. In my experience, they often have a sort of “stable” of chums and hangers-on that they put forward for jobs.

MPM Connect is Hearn’s vehicle for holding shares in recruitment companies. In particular, MPM Connect owns between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of executive search firm Odgers Berndtson. Odgers Berndtson is owned by a parent company, OPD Group, and MPM Connect owns up to half of the shares of OPD Group.

Hearn founded Odgers Berndtson and serves on the board. Through his companies, MPM Connect and a second company called MPM Connect 2, he owns and controls many of the firm’s shares.

MPM Connect, which donated the money to Streeting, Cooper et al, has around £11 million in assets. Given it is quite a big company, I think most of these assets will be Odgers Berndtson shares, although the company has bought and sold shares in other recruitment firms.

Hearn’s Odgers Berndtson is a very Tory-friendly firm too. It gets a lot of government business as well as working for City companies, so being Tory-friendly probably helps them do business.

Hearn sits on the Odgers Berndtson board alongside former Tory health secretary Virginia Bottomley, who chairs its “board practice” — meaning recruitment to top boards. Fellow board member and overall chairman Richard Boggis-Rolfe has given the Tories around £200k over the years.

As an example of how the firm works, it helped foist Tory hanger-on Dido Harding on the NHS. Harding says she got her first big public-sector job, as the chair of NHS improvement because “I met the team at the headhunters Odgers Berndtson, and it is they who first suggested that I consider applying.”

This in turn led Harding to become the head of NHS Test and Trace, a politically friendly appointment which led, in my mind, to a crony who wasn’t up to the job getting this key role.

In my view, Hearn’s big enthusiasm for promoting the Labour right and occasional pro-Tory gesture flows naturally from his interests.

He has a lot of wealth — like the £11m of assets he owns through MPM Connect. So it seems very likely he doesn’t like the idea of “wealth taxes” or other tax increases on the rich and their firms. The Labour right will stop the Labour left from doing any of that.

He likes outsourcing because his firm relies on government outsourcing — and the Labour right will not limit outsourcing. He is very comfortable with top Tories like Bottomley because that is part of his business — as is the Labour right.

It seems natural that Hearn would be comfortable with their politics and antagonistic to even the soft left of Labour. What is less natural is that Labour, as a party of reform, a party that hopes or claims to represent working people, a party that should be about redistributing wealth, not defending it, allows men like Hearn to use their money to shape its politics.