"We were being sabotaged and set up left, right and centre by McNicol's team, and we didn't even know. It's so important that the truth comes out," one party source told Sky News.
Stench of cover-upThe question now for Labour's new leader, Keir Starmer, is what is he going to do with these revelations? Will he use them to clean out Labour's stables, or quietly sweep the ordure under the carpet?
The signs so far are not encouraging.
The intention of current party managers was to bury the revelations until someone foiled them by leaking the report. Predictably, most of the media have so far shown very little interest in giving these explosive findings anything more than the most perfunctory coverage.
Unconvincingly, Starmer has claimed he knew nothing about the report until the leak, and that he now intends to conduct an "urgent independent investigation" into the findings of the earlier inquiry.
Such an investigation, he says, will re-examine "the contents and wider culture and practices referred to in the report". That implies that Starmer refuses to accept the report's findings. A reasonable concern is that he will seek to whitewash them with a second investigation.
He has also promised to investigate "the circumstances in which the report was put into the public domain". That sounds ominously like an attempt to hound those who have tried to bring to light the party's betrayal of its previous leader.
The stench of cover-up is already in the air.
Fear of reviving smearsMore likely, Starmer is desperate to put the antisemitism episode behind him and the party. Recent history is his warning.
Just as Williamson found himself reviled as an antisemite for questioning whether Labour actually had an antisemitism problem, Starmer knows that any effort by the party to defend Corbyn's record will simply revive the campaign of smears. And this time, he will be the target.
Starmer has hurriedly sought to placate Israel lobbyists within and without his own party, distancing himself as much as possible from Corbyn. That has included declaring himself a staunch Zionist and promising a purge of antisemites under the IHRA rules that include harsh critics of Israel.
Starmer has also made himself and his party hostage to the conservative Board of Deputies and Labour's Israel partisans by signing up to their 10 pledges, a document that effectively takes meaningful criticism of Israel off the table.
There is very little reason to believe that Labour's new leadership is ready to confront the antisemitism smears that did so much to damage the party under Corbyn and will continue harming it for the foreseeable future.
The biggest casualties will be truth and transparency. Labour needs to come clean and admit that its most senior officials defrauded hundreds of thousands of party members, and millions more supporters, who voted for a fairer, kinder Britain.
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