Laura Kyrke-Smith: Who are the donors backing the MP for Aylesbury?

Laura Kyrke-Smith made history in July as she became the town’s first ever Labour MP and first ever female MP, ousting the Conservative incumbent Rob Butler in the general election.

In April of this year, she accepted a donation of £10,000 and another of £5,000 in May, according to her filings.

Both payments for her campaign were registered in July and were jointly made by Cressida Pollock and Danny Luhde-Thompson.

The MP was asked to provide more detail on the payments, including about her relationship with the donors.

She told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “These donations were made to support the recent general election campaign and have been properly declared to both the Electoral Commission and on my register of interests in Parliament.”

Kyrke-Smith added: “Cressida and Danny are personal contacts who helped support my campaign.”

Daniel Luhde-Thompson is a strategic advisor at Quadrature Capital, the London-based investment manager for hedge fund, the Quadrature Group, which is based in the Cayman Islands.

He is a donor to Labour under Keir Starmer’s leadership, while Quadrature itself donated £4 million to the party in May.

News outlet Open Democracy reported this week that Quadrature Capital held millions of pounds worth of shares in companies providing arms to Israel to support its ongoing military campaign in Gaza.

They are said to include companies that help make the F-35 fighter jets used to bombard the Palestinian enclave with air strikes.

The LDRS has approached Kyrke-Smith’s office for comment about Quadrature’s links to Israel’s military activities.

Luhde-Thompson and Cressida Pollock are listed as trustees of the sustainable development charity LTPP.

Pollock is a former McKinsey management consultant and former head of the English National Opera.

She is also on the board of trustees of the International Rescue Committee, the humanitarian charity where Kyrke-Smith used to be executive director.

The MP declared a final payment of £2,221.60 from the organisation on her financial register of interests.

Kyrke-Smith said she received the money in July this year and declared that she had not worked any hours in the role since her election.

The MP went to work for the charity, which helps people caught up in conflict and disaster, back in 2016.

Earlier in her career, she was also a policy analyst and speechwriter in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office during the last Labour government and was later a partner at Portland Communications.

A spokesperson for Quadrature said the company did not hold shares for ‘significant periods’ and that the filings cited by Open Democracy only provided a ‘snapshot’ of its activities, meaning that the image portrayed of its investment was ‘inaccurate’.

The company claimed it was a ‘fully automated systematic trading firm’, meaning that it did not make ‘any proactive or discretionary decisions’ on the nature of stocks.

The spokesperson said: “The idea that Quadrature’s trading is ‘linked to Israel’s war in Gaza’ is nonsensical. Most pension holders in the UK and most index tracker funds also own these stocks.”

They added that the company made a ‘values-based donation’ of £4m to the Labour Party, ‘in support of policies that will deliver climate action while also promoting social equity and economic resilience’.

A spokesperson for Quadrature said the company did not hold shares for ‘significant periods’ and that the filings cited by Open Democracy only provided a ‘snapshot’ of its activities, meaning that the image portrayed of its investment was ‘inaccurate’.

The company claimed it was a ‘fully automated systematic trading firm’, meaning that it did not make ‘any proactive or discretionary decisions’ on the nature of stocks.

The spokesperson said: “The idea that Quadrature’s trading is ‘linked to Israel’s war in Gaza’ is non-sensical. Most pension holders in the UK and most index tracker funds also own these stocks.”

They added that the company made a ‘values-based donation’ of £4m to the Labour Party, ‘in support of policies that will deliver climate action while also promoting social equity and economic resilience’.