Evan Moorhead’s Anacta makes a splash at UK Labour conference

From The Australian, written by Nick Evans

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wasn’t the only Aussie playing a starring role at the UK Labour conference in Liverpool this week, as Evan Moorhead’s Anacta lobbying outfit spent big to rival Albo’s own profile among the British comrades.

Albo’s election magician Paul Erickson was also in Liverpool, we’re told, extending his own victory lap beyond Australian shores. As was the ever-present Wayne Swan, though nobody knows why. Even Julia Gillard popped in, we hear.

But the standout was Anacta, which opened a UK office a year ago. Not since Lynton Crosby was dubbed the Wizard of Oz for his services to Conservative election victories has an Australian lobbying – sorry, strategic advisory – firm made this big of a splash in the motherland.

Of course, even though Anacta’s Australian co-founder David Nelson helped out a bit on British Prime Minister Keith Starmer’s election campaign – and Moorhead and his colleagues have copped plenty of criticism for doing the same for Albo – Anacta is yet to coin an election strategy quite as catchy as Crosby’s famed “dead cat on the table” approach to media management.

But there’s plenty of time, and certainly there’s a will, if the effort to woo UK Labour at the massive “Anacta Hub” at the Labour national conference was anything to go by.

Moorhead himself was there, of course, watching his UK colleagues put on an onstage show packed with lesser ministers – Local Government Minister Alison McGovern, Secretary of State for Business and Trade Peter Kyle, Economic Secretary Lucy Rigby, Arts Minister Ian Murray, that sort of thing.

To be fair, Margin Call’s spies at the conference tell us Anacta’s hub was heaving with backbenchers as well. Mind you, Labour has 400-odd MPs in the UK, so anywhere with a decent coffee machine and the prospect of a free drink in the arvo was probably a bit of a magnet for the masses.