178: PAUL FOOT 2026: HARD LABOUR

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1:14Khadija Sharife:My name is Peter Gagin and I am the editor of Democracy for Sale. And what is the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot Awards? I'm at the Paul Futter Awards for a story that I did with my colleague Khadija Sharif, which was all about how Labour Together, the campaign group slash think tank behind Keir Starmer, had hired a PR firm called APCO to investigate a bunch of journalists who had been reporting on their undeclared political funding, undeclared funding that was used to power Keir Starmer's rise to power.

1:44Peter Geoghegan:Okay, so quite a significant one. Can you tell us a bit more about Labour Together, just for anyone who hasn't been keeping on top of Stamorite think tanks recently?

1:54Khadija Sharife:if you've not heard of Labour Together they've actually since the story went out they've changed their name I think this story actually possibly contributed to the change of the name they're now called as of last week Think Labour but basically Labour Together was the kind of think tank campaign group call it what you want that was set up by various people after Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015 it was set up by various people and various wings of Labour Party as the name suggests as a kind of cross-party organisation, broadly opposed to Corbyn, looking to see where else Labour should go.

2:26Khadija Sharife:Over time though, a very familiar name to many people became very involved, Morgan MacSweeney. Morgan MacSweeney took over as the head of Labour Together, he then became Keir Starmer's chief of staff. But throughout the period and up until the 2024 general election, which Labour obviously won, Labour Together was a very important organisation. It's important for a bunch of reasons one was it was quietly uh wasn't that public about it was really doing a lot of polling and camp focus group for care starmer so it's kind of pushing starmer's campaign but also taking in lots and lots of money it took in millions and millions of pounds of donations it used that money to do things like run polling and focus groups but also gave out money to politicians who would be politicians the labor people to people that were aligned with starmer and the kind of labor together project so it was a very kind of significant important organization especially kind of in the makeup of the government that we have now.

3:19Peter Geoghegan:Yes I mean as you said in the story the various MPs they backed include about half a dozen who reached senior cabinet positions. Rachel Reeves, David Lammy, Shibana Mahmood, Darren Jones. Lots of people had received Labour Together money. Obviously that will be regulated I'm sure. Can you tell us a bit more about who's in charge of the regulation, who's supposed to be doing it?

3:40Khadija Sharife:The crux of this story really was when Labour Together was kind of becoming this big powerful political machine. Like really, for a good few years at the start of Labour Together, it had been a kind of slightly kumbaya cross-Labour thing where they'd hold, you know, they'd write the odd report and they'd hold the odd meeting. Under Morgan MacSweeney, it changed. They got an office just south of the river in London, had a little pirate flag in the office, kind of sense of, you know, we're buccaneering out in the high seas. And at that stage, money started coming in. Money often from big former Labour donors who'd stopped giving money to part under Jeremy Corbyn.

4:13Khadija Sharife:So all the big money that used to go into Labour really started to flow away from a journey Jeremy Corbyn and it started going to Labour Together so people like Martin Taylor the hedge fund manager Trevor Chin the businessman other people like that started funding Labour Together and one of the things that happened was under Max Sweeney's watch was they didn't declare this money to the Electoral Commission for a very very very long time so the Electoral Commission found that Labour Together had breached electoral rules more than 20 times by failing to declare this money and fast forward to 2023 by which stage morgan mcsweeney is now chief of staff takir starmer he's a really important character he's one like he's really in the driving seat of british politics and labour together has now been run by a guy called josh simons and at that point a story appears in the sunday times in november 2023 and the story is all about this undeclared funding it's about this money that hadn't been declared which at this stage the electoral commission had fined labour together for but no one had really looked at it that much and i was looking at how this money was spent and how this money was spent to help Keir Starmer's campaign into the Labour leadership.

5:16Khadija Sharife:And that was a crucial point for the start of my story.

5:19Peter Geoghegan:Okay. We should say some of money undeclared in donations was about£730 ,000. Yeah. What happens next after that story is run?

5:32Khadija Sharife:So after this story appears in the Sunday Times about this£730 ,000 of undeclared funding, Labour Together under Josh Simons decide to do decide to do something that I think you know you and I would this is what you do if a negative press story came out they hired a lobbying firm a PR firm a company called Abco Worldwide I struggle to say exactly what they are because they sit in that kind of grey box of you know consultancy, advisory intelligence etc but a big big well known company they hired Abco Worldwide and they hired Abco Worldwide to investigate the sources of this story particularly a journalist called Paul Holden who was an important source of the Sunday Times story but also Gabriel Poggeron and Harry York at the Sunday Times, Henry Dyer who by that stage had gone to the Guardian but had also written about Labour Together as well and so Abco Worldwide were given a brief to go and investigate where did these sources had come from but also to put out information into the media to try and change the narrative around this.

6:30Peter Geoghegan:That's a very polite way of saying it to change the narrative yes it is a very polite way of saying it can we say to

6:37Khadija Sharife:discredit the story and the journalists i think you can actually i should be a little bit less yeah they paid um abco worldwide to yeah to discredit these journalists to discredit their work where they come from and that was how they were trying to stop this story dead i think we

6:52Peter Geoghegan:should also just pause and reflect for a moment on how extremely unusual this is this is really not common even if a negative story is printed about you to effectively commission uh a firm to

7:04Khadija Sharife:to discredit the story is rare i've never seen a story this before so but when i was when i was coming up to publication of this story and this as a journalist what you often do is i ring people in worlds to make the sense check you know to censor am i right about this i spoke to senior political reporters like i have never heard of this report i also spoke to a very good contact in the public affairs world, which is the same world as APCO. And they were shocked. They were like, APCO did this? Wow. And my favourite one was, I actually spoke to John Crudus, who set up Labour Together. And he said, Peter, this is dark shit.

7:36Khadija Sharife:Can you tell us what methods APCO were using to discredit the story? Well, so it was very interesting. What APCO did was they put together, there was a brief which we were able to obtain that APCO put together for Labour Together. So they paid just over£30 ,000 to do this work. and they did things like what we call OZINT, human intelligence. So effectively, which means going and talking to people, talking to sources, putting together a kind of a report, a brief, kind of online sleuthing, looking for information online and just effectively trying to find any intelligence they could from anyone.

8:09Khadija Sharife:So talking cerepliciously to people who might know some of the people involved. The briefs themselves, the material that APCO put together, I have to say, it's quite shocking actually. what they said in their material is really like this full of aspersions it suggests that the stories these negative stories are the product of a russian hack of the electoral commission which there's no evidence and when i was breaking this story i asked both abco and labor together you know if you thought you were hacked why did you hire a pr firm they didn't do any investigation into cyber security it was all about like understanding where this material had come from and trying to smoke out the sources which is as a journalist is incredibly dangerous if You're trying to find out where the sources of someone's story is.

8:51Khadija Sharife:And it was done by a guy called Tom Harper, who used to work for the Sunday Times. So Tom Harper was at Sunday Times, and he headed up APCO Worldwide's Europe division. He's now left APCO. And Tom was the person in charge of putting together these briefs. And in the briefs, they talk about the persons of significant interest, who are these journalists. They suggest where these stories might have come from. They cast aspersions about the religious and political identity of the journalists involved. It's quite murky stuff. And this was fed, the idea was to feed this into the media ecosystem to discredit the work.

9:25Khadija Sharife:And it's quite striking that what could and should have been a huge story, this is a story of undeclared funding that powers the next prime minister, it really did disappear. It didn't go very far. So it worked? I think it did work. I think by the time the story recurred again was when Paul Holden brought out his book in 2025, the story came. But by that stage, we'd had an election. josh simons was an mp then became a junior minister cabinet office morgan maxweeney was kirstarmer's right-hand man in downing street yeah so to all intents and purposes if the idea was to stop this negative story from having a political impact it did at the time i'd argue that our story maybe changed that yes what happened after your story yeah a lot um i'll try not to get too uh too into the weeds of this so we published our story in early February and it's fair to say that uh Democracy for Sales a new organization when a couple years old we've had some big stories people you know we had three million reads last year which I'm very proud of but this story really did kind of break our small servers you know it really was it went gangbusters um and we published if people remember there was uh it was the moment where Keir Starmer and Morgan MacSweeney were under huge pressure on Peter Mandelson so we published a story and we kind of revealed that Apco had been hired we're able to name the company name the amount of money like put together put information from the reports into public domain and really

10:47Peter Geoghegan:kind of put a lot of information out there and we should say that josh simons who took over running labor together from morgan mcsweeney had since then become a labor mp yes josh simons now a

10:57Khadija Sharife:labor mp so the story goes out within three days actually it was you know it it was really interesting to see how quickly the story starts to travel because it was really clear morgan mcsweeney had actually resigned a couple of days after the initial story and the wake of peter mandelson josh simons also came out fighting saying this was all untrue we were hacked and we did an investigation into it nothing to see here very quickly that started to unravel and it was very interesting to kind of watch that process in real time because the government really didn't want to deal with this story abco is part of a thing that are called the prca and which is a kind of trade body for the pr industry so they announced that they're going to do an investigation into abco three months later that investigation still hasn't reported but anyway so they said were going to do this when the story broke there was pressure on labour on on the government to do something and actually liz kendall said oh no the regulator for the pr industry is already looking at this the pr industry has no regulations part of the problem all of this sort of work exists off the books is not published anywhere the information about that is happening is seen nowhere quickly as pressures did start to mount we kept on publishing more and more stories around it and other media really picked up on the story too you know we were able to reveal more about josh simon's involvement we were able to reveal more about the fact that APCO Worldwide at the time when our senior people was also an advisor to Labour Together so there was a lot of connections there and we were able to put a lot more on that in the public domain Laurie Magnus who advises on ministerial ethics did an investigation in which he did talk about how Simon's become a distraction and so the pressure did start to mount Simon's eventually resigned from his post in the Cabinet Office just a couple of hours after the first bombs dropped on Tehran, if people remember that from Donald Trump.

12:42Khadija Sharife:So some might suggest I might have been a good time to bury bad news. Josh Simons was forced to resign on the back of this story. Since then, we've actually published more stories about it as well. Tom Harper's at the Leave APCO. There's, I think, rightly a sense in which the story asks big questions, not just about who knew what were in the Labour Party, who knew what were in Labour together at the time, but also how do these companies operate. As you say, we only find out about these things when it comes into the public domain. This has only come into the public domain through a lot of journalism.

13:11Khadija Sharife:It took months to do this story, to tell this story. What else has happened that we just don't want anything about?

13:16Peter Geoghegan:And we should add one final coda, which is that Josh Simons has, of course, just resigned his seat to allow Andy Burnham to stand in a by-election. So it's possible you've started something that I don't think you're going to be able to control, Peter. Are you really running things?

13:34Khadija Sharife:look just on the down low Andy don't tell anybody at the Paul Foot Awards about this but actually

13:40Peter Geoghegan:I'll say no more. Thank you very much Peter. Thank you very much. So that's it for today's shortlist eat. We'll be back with another one tomorrow. We'll see you then. Andy and Anna here from your new favourite podcast No Such Thing As A Fish. Yes we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating amazing weird mad add facts into your ears on a weekly basis. You got any good facts, Andy? Yes, how about this one? Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious, wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels, warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs.

14:26Peter Geoghegan:So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are no such thing as a fish.