‘Parachute’ Welsh Labour MP challenged over potential conflict of interest

Martin Shipton

Cardiff West MP Alex Barros-Curtis has been challenged over a potential conflict of interest between his former role as executive legal director of the Labour Party and his directorship of a private sector company.

Earlier this week Nation.Cymru reported how Mr Barros-Curtis had been involved as the party’s head of legal in preventing left-wing activists from becoming parliamentary candidates.

Responding to our story, Mish Rahman, a former left-wing member of Labour’s national executive committee posted a message to social media that read :”While Head of Governance and Legal blocking left wing candidates was also running a side hustle called the Good Campaigns Company (see Companies House, only resigned in 2025) which supported candidates who were looking to be selected. Website now deleted.”

We contacted Mr Rahman, who left the Labour Party last year and is now a member of the Green Party. He also chairs the trustees of the anti-racism in sport charity Show Racism the Red Card. We asked him what more he could tell us.

Mr Rahman said: “There is plenty of evidence in Paul Holden’s recently published book The Fraud about Alex Barros-Curtis’s involvement in the purge of Labour’s left wing and the blocking of left-wing candidates from standing. Yet he was at the same time a director of a company that supported people who wanted to be Labour candidates. To me that seems like a conflict of interest that should be looked into.”

Documents filed at Companies House show that Good Campaigns Company Ltd was set up in 2015 with Mr Barros-Curtis as a director. The board included a number of other Labour Party officials, including Azhar Ali, who became a director in 2016 and stayed on the board until 2020. In 2024, having previously been elected as a councillor, he was selected to be Labour’s candidate in a parliamentary by-election in Rochdale. The party withdrew its support from him after he claimed that Israel had permitted Hamas to undertake the October 7 murders in order to gain a pretext for invading Gaza. The election was won by George Galloway of the Workers’ Party.

For a period, Mr Barros-Curtis was described in Companies House documents as a person with significant control of the company, a status that ended in January 2024, a day before he resigned as a director.

Cardiff West

In July 2024 he became the MP for Cardiff West, having been parachuted into the seat by a panel set up by Labour’s NEC after the previous MP, Kevin Brennan, decided to stand down past a deadline that would have allowed local party members to choose his successor as the general election candidate for the seat.

Widely seen as arguably the most left wing Constituency Labour Party in Wales, it is considered inconceivable that Mr Barros-Curtis would have won the nomination if all local party members had been allowed to vote.

His selection was seen by many as a reward for his involvement in getting Keir Starmer elected as party leader and in a parallel campaign involving “stitch-ups” to neutralise and purge the party’s left wing.

After a brief period working as First Minister Eluned Morgan’s chief special adviser, Kevin Brennan was given a seat in the House of Lords where he now sits as Baron Brennan of Canton.

The Good Campaigns Company was dissolved in December 2025.

We wrote to Mr Barros-Curtis stating: “Mish Rahman has posted a message on X about you, referring to your involvement with the Good Campaigns Company.

He writes: “While Head of Governance and Legal blocking left wing candidates was also running a side hustle called the Good Campaigns Company (see Companies House, only resigned in 2025) which supported candidates who were looking to be selected. Website now deleted.” He has published a screenshot.

“On the surface this appears to be a conflict of interest. Could you send us a statement by 5pm today please, explaining how the Good Campaigns Company operated and why in your view there was no conflict of interest.”

We did not receive a response.