Gabriel Pogrund speaks out on Labour Together scandal

0:00Labour activists paid for smear campaign against journalists. The whole of the Labour governance is an absolute cesspit. It's the kind of thing you would expect in Putin's Kremlin. And I think we need to know the guilty men. And if they're in government, they should be fired. The journalists in question here, I think, are second to none in the investigative work they do, but causes problems for us, but that is their job. We were all lumped together as essentially useful idiots for Russia in this report. You know what it's like as a journalist if someone damages your reputation, it could be career ending, couldn't it?

0:42I didn't know anything about this investigation and it absolutely needs to be looked into so the Cabinet Office will be establishing the facts. Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times that takes you inside the rooms where it happens in Westminster every single week. I'm Patrick Maguire, Chief Political Commentator for The Times. And I'm Gabriel Pogrand, Whitehall Editor at The Sunday Times. Now, it's just me and Gabriel this week, so we are going to talk about the only story we can talk about, which is, of course, the launch of Rupert Lowe's new political party, Restore Britain.

1:20No. In all seriousness, it's sort of quite surreal to be sitting with you here today, Gabriel, because the biggest political story of the week so far, and certainly over the weekend, is about Gabriel Pogren of the Sunday Times. And as we heard in the intro there, the fact that Labour Together, the think tank campaign group set up by Morgan McSweeney, who was Keir Starmer's chief of staff, his most important aide in opposition and in government since resigned over the Peter Mandelson affair. That organisation, Labour Together, after you and Harry York, Deputy Political Editor of the Sunday Times, did a story on the funding of Labour Together a few years ago in the Sunday Times.

2:06They commissioned a report into that report and it's turned up some pretty out there stuff about you specifically and about other journalists. So let's just kick off. Why don't we go back to the aftermath of your reporting on the undeclared donations that took Keir Starmer to power,£700 ,000 Labour Together received from donors were reprimanded by the Electoral Commission for not declaring properly. Let's go back to 2023, 2024 and your experience of reporting that and the sort of stuff we were both hearing about you. Yeah, so I suppose the story begins in November 2023, when the editor of the Sunday Times, Ben Taylor, had the foresight to put a pretty disobliging story about Labour together on the front page of the newspaper.

3:04But this was, lest we forget, a period in which nobody wanted unsparing scrutiny of Keir Starmore, or at least the general story, as such as it was, was Tories, Sleaze, Rishi Sunak on his last legs. And then we felt that the evidence we had unearthed was nevertheless urgent and important enough to give it some serious wattage. And we reported that this entity, think tank pressure group that had helped deliver Starmer the Keys to the Labour leadership, run by his now erstwhile chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, we revealed they had failed to declare the best part of three quarters of a million pounds, which is a lot by the standards of British politics.

3:47but moreover we have been endowed with some evidence some emails from a south african investigative journalist by the name of paul holden which posed questions as to whether the non-declaration of the money in question by morgan mcsweeney wasn't as he later characterized it an administrative error words by the way which his very own lawyer advised he ought to use in the event he didn't have a better excuse but rather whether it was if not a conspiracy then an intentional effort to conceal the work that Labour together were doing now Patrick you and I hadn't put pen to paper on our book but we did remark upon the non-declarations in get in but also we reported on the extent to which McSweeney was absolutely operating covertly you know the I think we reported on a PowerPoint presentation he showed donors in which he said Labour Together's role was akin to a phalanx of Roman soldiers with their shields.

4:56It was concealing something going on within. He called his plan to transform the Labour Party Operation Red Shield and explicitly told fundraisers that the branding and vibes of Labour Together would be modelled on Greenpeace. That is to say, as innocuous. As a cuddly NGO that nobody in the Labour, the name, right? And in our book, Get In, which tells a lot of this story, it is, I think someone involved told us it was one of the greatest deceptions in the history of British politics. Deliberately so. Some would say that was a political necessity, that the moral imperative, as people involved would have seen it, of taking the Labour Party back from Jeremy Corbyn and rehabilitating the Labour Party and getting, as they would see, anti-Semites out of the Labour Party necessitated a degree of political school degree.

5:43That's right, Patrick. Probably, by the way, the reason we were compelled by McSweeney as a character was the... Audacity. Audacity of the project. As you say, it purported to be about togetherness. The objective was division and the outcome was division. The Corbynites were peeled away from the mushy middle of the Labour Party. Starmer was the personification of this sort of superficially unifying politics. Obviously, the long term goal was very different. But all of this is to say that we weren't making value judgments on whether McSweeney was right to have this hostility towards the far left.

6:24We just wanted to write what had happened, which we did. We wanted to pose some tough questions, which we also did, not least because at the time there are a lot of people in Labour land telling us that McSweeney's failure to report these funds was not only conspicuous given the avowed objective of the group but also something he'd done not withstanding people who are now in the cabinet warning him he needed to. Shabana Mahmood was one of those who used a parliamentary gathering of Labour together to make sure that the then little known McSweeney was dotting his I's crossing his T's. So we put this story in the public domain.

6:58and we should say there are a range of explanations offered after the fact one was morgan mc sweeney's extremely disorganized which lots of people who've worked with him would attest to the other was they were trying to hide what they were doing and then another sort of variation on that was trevor chin one of labor together's main donors was jewish they wanted to protect him from unspecified attacks by political opponents none of none of those explanations changed the central fact that you reported which is the donations were not declared in the proper way indeed Labour Together was subsequently fined by the electoral commission for for that breach.

7:32It's one of those stories where you think well this ought to have some implications because it is in terms saying the group which has handed the next prime minister the keys to the leadership did so based on unlawful activity but the response was practically nothing at least in public terms very few publications followed the story up very few people raised it in parliament contacted us asking for more information it was one of those instances where the response was the square root of nil and I think that I at the time presumed that was because of the public mood but it turned out I was wrong and I've only learned this week that I was wrong I was wrong in that only now do we know the reason why very few people followed up the story and very few people decided it mattered was because there was a elaborate and paid campaign to forestall further scrutiny of the subject matter.

8:38I think Patrick it's worth bringing in the at this point the fact that in the weeks after that story was published you remember this my partner remembers this there was a sudden uptick in the number of people getting in touch asking me about my views my friendships my purported friendships my sources there was this this very sudden very random series of questions which I was confronted with by among others people at the summit of the Labour Party. We now know that that is because, hot on the heels of this publication in the Sunday Times, Labour Together retained the services of a US lobbying company called APCO.

9:29And APCO were entrusted by Labour Together with getting to the bottom of how it was that the Sunday Times, via Paul Holden, whose role in the story we explicitly mentioned, had come into possession of these emails, which were very damaging indeed for McSweeney. And these were internal Labour Party, Labour Together emails? Yeah, party correspondence pertaining to the Electoral Commission inquiries into Labour Together and the question of why funds had not been declared. Now, it's hard to talk about the past without momentarily flicking to the present. Let's just say that Labour Together's position today is that it conducted this inquiry or it asked APCO to do so for the sum of£36 ,000 because it feared there had been some kind of hack of their systems, possibly even a hack of the Electoral Commission affecting them, and that they wanted to get down to the bottom of the matter.

10:29I suppose what strains credulity about that position, and what will no doubt be the subject of much ongoing scrutiny is the fact that APCO isn't a cybersecurity firm. It doesn't have expertise in the field of cybersecurity breaches. What it does do, though, is it specializes in public relations and campaigns. And I know now that part of what APCO were asked to do was to examine the backgrounds and motivations of the Sunday Times reporters behind this story as well as Paul Holden in order to stop whatever was taking place that had led this information into our possession but also to discredit any further attacks on Labour Together.

11:16By the way I just want to talk about that word attacks that is how it was being perceived. We're out here doing our public interest reporting role but the way it was perceived was there is an attack on us and we need to punch back hard and we need to do that by gathering intelligence on Gabriel as well as Paul and my colleague Harry York and various others and what's funny and possibly somewhat disturbing is that having now read the final report submitted to Labour Together and the 10 pages dedicated to me many of the questions I was being confronted with at that time were carbon copies of the allegations that then appeared in the report itself.

12:01And in one instance, it is actually so conspicuous, I have to talk about it. One of the most senior figures in the Labour Party messaged us 24 hours after APCO had submitted its report onto Labour Together's desks asking, Gabriel, there's a rumour that X, Y, Z, is this true? And we've looked at my reply. I said, no, but also what? Where's this from? To which the response came rumours. Well, they weren't rumours, actually. It was, as we now know, the contents of this investigation which I should say as well I'm trying not to dignify the contents too much but it was you know in the text and what it said an attempt to not just portray my career as a sham and the result of disingenuousness dishonesty and a hidden agenda on my part but it actively portrayed me as somebody with deep roots in a particular political tradition with which I have no actual heritage or connection but also that I might have willingly or otherwise been part of Russian attempts to destabilize British politics.

13:29It would be sinister if it wasn't so funny but then also it would be funny if it wasn't so sinister. I mean it looks at every one of my life's achievements every thing i've written for this paper and in cases where it was a result of no end of pain fact-checking diligent research says no no this was probably part of a russian influence i mean it also portrays me as being the beneficiary in sourcing terms of person characterised as a suspected Russian asset when the editors of the paper, who've also examined the contents of this investigation, themselves met a couple of sources of mine as part of some very sensitive investigations, and themselves know that the allegation at the heart of this report, or at least one of them, is not true.

14:24And I think the detail which has probably ended up causing a lot of heat and a fair amount of revulsion too is the fact that the report used my Jewishness which is a source of great pride for me but quite grotesquely subverted that and said that I must have an odd relationship with my ethno-religious background because of the views that it falsely purported that I hold. Now, I feel like the beauty of being a journalist, the beauty of not being a politician is I don't really know that I have politics. I think we both feel in the course of what we do that we try to travel reasonably lightly. We've been very close friends for a very long time and neither of us have ever really aligned with a particular colleague or organization patrick you're obviously the preeminent chronicler of this administration but i mean if kirsten was to be told that you were an outrider for him i'm sure he would uh he'd say get me a better outrider get me a better outrider he did describe the central thesis of our book as bollocks so um you know he's not a friend of ours and we're not a friend of his and that's the way it ought to be but for my own part i try to put factual information into the newspaper every week and i try to ensure that nothing i write is contaminated by my prejudices or personal views to the extent that i have any finalized politics whatsoever and this totally um you know contrary to that portrayed me as being an agitator for a particular political tradition and also one with friendships with people who i and you know have not spent a single social second with in my life now I don't want to witter on too much but I will just say one thing which is on the topic of my Jewishness there was a little piece of Jewish folklore that came to mind actually about the nature of gossip there is one story where a rabbi characterizes gossip as being akin to taking a knife and ripping it through pillows stuffed with goose feathers and then asking somebody after you've shaken the pillow about to collect every feather and in this instance I suppose what was sad about what happened was that there were some people who had the loyalty to me or at least the integrity to double check what they'd been told about me and to ask if it was true and to give me the opportunity to rebut the allegations which were circulating about me uh you know there are goose feathers which you know whose whereabouts no doubt cannot be traced now there will have been people who believed what was being said about me and who believed in turn that there had to be something wrong, sinister, conspiratorial about the provenance and the execution of our Labour Together piece.

17:41I have the incredible privilege of working for a paper where I feel I've got a lot of support and a lot of love from the people here, where thankfully when people want to discredit me, they don't actually take me out. They might just say disobliging things about me. But I suppose is this really as an instance where it just went a bit further than that? And there were tactics which were underhand and secret and which involved money and remuneration. But that's why I think the Sunday Times last weekend decided that it was important to make this point and write an editorial outlining how objectionable and wrong this was.

18:21And I'm very pleased that the remedy we've chosen in this instance has been the disinfectant of sunlight and some more reporting on the matters we were trying to amplify at the time. Well, there are lots more questions that I'd like to ask you about this. And we should, of course, talk about what this all symbolises politically for the Labour Party and for Keir Starmer, which we'll do after we go to a short break. Welcome back to The State of It. Gable, I just wanted to pick up on something you just said about why Labour Together commissioning this investigation feels different. Something I've been sort of wrestling with is I've been reading these stories and you used the word gossip before.

19:05Let's not pretend that as journalists and people who deal with political actors all the time and it's important to remember we cover politics. People often complain, why aren't you covering this policy announcement or that policy announcement or, you know, writing about all the great things the government is doing. It's because we report, I mean, you have a broader beat, but I report, I write my column in the Times, my commentary on politics, what's motivating people, what people want to achieve, what they believe. And it is inevitable in Westminster, which is a village, it is a bubble, that people will read stories and say, where's that come from?

19:43or they will look at the joins in a story or the names in a story or the emphasis of a story and think about the timing of a story and say, aha, Gabriel's obviously got that from that person or Patrick's got that from that person. As Liz Kendall said, the science secretary who was clipped up in our intro to this episode, that's not nice for people in politics. You know, every party has an attack and rebuttal and research unit whose job is to unearth embarrassing things, be that about Tory parliamentary candidates or Labour donors or whoever, and give them to journalists because the material's in the public interest, it's factional, and it will hurt the other party.

20:23And what is the difference, qualitatively, do you think, between a couple of Labour people are in a pub and they're saying, did you see that bollocks Gabriel Pogrom put out about Labour together. I reckon that's come from X because I know he had lunch with him last week. And obviously sourcing is a big taboo in journalism, rightly, because if we were indiscreet about sourcing, we would never be able to do our jobs because there's a necessary degree of protection. But when people say that to you, you know that often they're wrong. What's the difference between that and what's happened here? That's a great question.

21:05Being falsely connected to sources, in some instances you've never met, is par for the course. There's all sorts of factors that end up guiding the response to a story. One, as you say, is political self-interest. Sometimes there's professional jealousy. Sometimes there are people out there who can't quite believe you've got the scoop and just want to assume that you've got it in a way which is the least impressive interpretation of the facts available. I suppose the distinction here is I think twofold. One is this was paid. There were people who received money to produce these distortions and to confect this, from what I've seen, seemingly deliberately defamatory portrayal of not just me, but other people from Harry Ork at the Sunday Times to Paul Holden, anybody that they knew to be connected to the story or who they believed they could tendentiously and disingenuously connect to the story, they did.

22:10And we were all bracketed together and fitted up as people propagating lies and also partaking in these attacks. But the fact it was paid, I think, is a significant distinction from the usual Riemann mill. The other thing I'd say as well is it was actively designed to stop questions being asked. And moreover, it succeeded. So one thing I've not mentioned so far is a version of this report was handed to GCHQ. Now, I've read the report. It does not for one moment consider any hypothesis other than the contention that this emanated from the Russian state. It doesn't say that this was the result of a breach of Labour systems, of Labour Together systems.

23:01It reaches for a concurrent piece of context, which is that there was an actual hack of the Electoral Commission and says because Labour Together had this Electoral Commission matter relating to donations, let's suggest that we may have fallen foul of the Electoral Commission breach too. Now, as I understand it, GCHQ met with this referral, took no action. But the fact of the referral was used to stop further scrutiny and paint the story as being as sinister as it was possible to be and i remember walking around portcullis house and speaking to a now member of the cabinet who i i had had a good professional relationship with i i do have a reasonable professional relationship with now there's no bad blood on my part but this person was seized of the idea that the story had come from russia that was a fact so it's different to gossiping about you know oh I saw Gabriel at the cinnamon club in Westminster having lunch with this person and this story on Sunday you know attacks their least favorite person in the cabinet or something exactly and uh it went further than that and I think that is there and I is the distinction well I think it was Matt Taibbi the journalist who was quote again quoted in the at the top of the show who said the effect was to make a lot of people look like you were all useful idiots for Russia which is a different order of magnitude to saying you know someone gets all their stories from you know CCHQ's attack department or whatever I understand your point there I mean I guess another question I would ask is do you feel it impinge your ability to report freely openly develop relationships with people at the top of the Labour Party in in a professional way I should say my best attempt an accurate answer is I can't know.

25:01So I don't know the effect to which it impeded my reporting because I don't know the stories that people didn't see fit to approach me with based on what they've been told. And I don't know the extent to which people may have withheld information they might otherwise have availed me of on the basis of their belief that I was some sort of adversary representing the Russian state. That being said, I don't feel as though my career was fatally affected by it, but it did at the time require some pretty vigorous diplomacy, it should be said as well. You may remember this, Patrick, but there are a lot of people when we were writing the book that expressed some of the concerns which we've been referring to about my alleged beliefs and relationships and demanded clarification from us and you know I'm very fortunate to have been blessed with you as a great friend and partner in crime I just have to say for whatever it is worth that I don't peddle anybody's thesis or agenda I just try to report the facts.

26:11Report on facts yeah that may incidentally be in a in a book that people disagree with or think is malign or think he's fantastic, but facts are facts in the same way that when we've written books on the Labour Party, people have lifted facts from them and put them in newspapers. That is not an endorsement of the content. You know, I can't speak, by the way, for the damage that it did to Paul. I've not mentioned him so far, but Matt Taibbi as well. Harry Ditto. You know, we can't say definitively what the effect was, but um you know happily for us i felt we were able in the end to make a decent fist of writing the book that we did and i feel like i've ended up you know obviously continuing reporting for the sunday times and um and i didn't feel that was ever in doubt let's talk about the broader politics of this because yes this is a story about private investigators saying spurious things about journalists and being as you say handsomely compensated for that but it's also become a political problem for the government for the government that Labour Together built and let's not lose sight of this you can draw a straight line from those Labour Together donations that you're reporting on to where we are now which is Keir Starmer is the Prime Minister Mormont Sweeney was his Chief of Staff until a couple of weeks ago Josh Simons used to run Labour Together is now a cabinet office minister indeed he was running Labour Together when it commissioned the report and Keir Starmer's government that Labour Together government as was is still in the grip of one of its most profound political crises of its lifetime well the most profound political crisis possibly a terminal political crisis what do you think this story tells us about what Labour under Keir Starmer has become, about Keir Starmer's leadership?

28:16Let's just briefly say there are very possibly some very immediate consequences in political terms in that Josh Simon's Cabinet Office minister is now no doubt going to have to provide an exhaustive account of events as part of this Cabinet Office inquiry. It's yet another kind of unhappy and unfortunately timed inquiry or ethical issue for Sarmer after a fortnight of headlines about Peter Mandelson and Matthew Doyle. And there is a very clear allegation now, which Simon's, I suspect, will continue to rebut. But the claim is that Labour Together knowingly retained the services of a corporate investigations firm to smear journalists.

29:02His position is that he didn't. That firm went rogue. Yes. that's what he said to the sunday times that's what he'd said publicly before that he hadn't you in particular but more broadly on any british journalist he didn't commission any any investigation into british journalists yeah and josh simons said that in a fairly detailed way to the sunday times on the weekend so the investigation is going to get down to the bottom of that and that is one of the first order consequences of this but possibly the more interesting question as you say is what this all says not for the first time patrick i might make use of your intellectual property now and say something we were discussing a few moments ago in the green room which is that starmer's insistence that he knew nothing of this investigation tells its own story about the nature of starmer and starmerism whatever that is because as you say It's true that Labour Together was the incubator of his leadership.

30:04We know that. We've reported that. We know that McSweeney... Well, that's how they brand themselves now. We made Keir Starmer prime minister. Whenever you write about Labour Together, which I have done on several unrelated things recently, mostly sort of slightly out there things they've been doing as they sort of grapple with their post-Morgan, post-opposition identity crisis, which has been happening for some time. They were polling Labour members on who should be the next leader of Labour Party, who could beat Keir Starmer in a leadership election. They put out, by the standards of the Labour Party, a pretty radical bit of economic policy just before Christmas, basically said, gut the workers' rights, build some of its provisions, cut business taxes, build the Oxford-Cambridge art, all of that stuff.

30:42But whenever you write about Labour together, in any context, the next clause, what we call the nut par in journalism, i.e. the par that explains, the paragraph that explains what the hell the thing you just mentioned is, It is the think tank that made Keir Starmer prime minister and used to be run by Morgan McSweeney. That's the significance of this. That's right. And I suppose the significance of Starmer saying he had no idea what was going on is that it is utterly believable. It is utterly believable. We know that the circumstance, you know, I think I've used this binary before that back in 2019 McSweeney had a machine but no candidate.

31:25and Starmer was candidate without a machine. And the waltz between Starmer and McSweeney was exactly that. It was the machine and the candidate coming together as one. But do not for a moment ever overestimate Starmer's intellectual curiosity or the extent to which he has given extensive thought to what it was that Labour Together did or what its politics were all about. Now, we have chronicled actually in Get In that in the very first meeting of his furtive leadership strategy discussions. So Starmer throughout 2019 was secretly meeting at the home of Jenny Chapman, an MP friend of his to discuss the path to the premiership.

32:15At that meeting, he was reluctant to chair the discussion and when asked what he wished to discuss, so they wanted to make sure they were adhering to the parliamentary standards rules and trade union legislation so in this ironically given everything else that happened since the labor together yes quite ironically given that the campaign of which he was the personification or at least the front man um was as you say in very much in breach of his obligations under legislation and and thus underscores the question which mcsweeney's departure posed when he did leave last week which was well what then can starmer be divorced as he is now from not just the man that created him politically but also you know he's shorn now of all of that for better or worse the mythology of labor together the story of reforming the party in order to change the country.

33:16Starman now is in a world where he is a politician without roots, without his own creation story. And he has to create one anew or, as seems likelier, defer to the parliamentary party and the soft left, which is much surer of where it's come from and where it's going. Yeah, it's sort of like he's now having to try to unbake a cake and work out what ratio of the original component parts were crucial in making that cake you know what i mean you can't you can't unbake a cake and take the eggs out and say actually that it was the sugar that made the difference or the cocoa pound that made a difference you know kia starmer is a creation of that period and that organization but it all comes back to is there a benign explanation for that or one that flatters kia starmer and we've heard this hundreds of times in various forms which is kia knows his strengths he knows his weaknesses he's a relaxed leader he feels confident in delegating to people.

34:13There's also a sort of slight, people like to flatter Keir Starmer by distinguishing him from some of his former political operatives, which is he's never been comfortable with that. He took a sort of hands-off view. As long as it produced results, he was fine. You know, he's never really been comfortable with Morgan's hard-edge politics and thinks the Labour Party is strange and organising the Labour Party, he never wanted to do it. So he left it to factional people. But ultimately, you get to the same place, which is Keir Starmer stood in front of a television camera when confronted with a problem saying, I knew nothing or I don't know or I didn't know.

34:44And if you're prepared to believe that, which I think we both are having a good understanding of how his offices have always been set up, his own view on politics and Labour politics and internal machinations within the Labour Party. Okay, then you end up accidentally, if you're Keir Starmer, when you keep saying this, and basically every time there's an internal blow up he doesn't know or nobody told him or it never crossed his desk you end up in the place and several now former aides to Keir Starmer have said this to me over the past six months or so it's often their first reflection on leaving it is I never believed the thesis as put forward by one of Keir Starmer's advisors in our book, which was Keir Starmer is sat at the front of the Docklands Light Railway, pretending to drive it while other people control it.

35:44But more and more, he seems to be acting in a way that almost unconsciously vindicates it. This is one of those stories. I knew nothing about the think tank and the organizational infrastructure that did my leadership campaign, would sustain me in opposition, was constantly written up as the leading Star-Might think tank, the think tank that's closest to Keir Starmer, would put out stuff with the implied imprimatur of Keir Starmer and people close to him, right? So you're saying you knew nothing about that. Okay, fine. Then what? Then what? Then what? And then there's another question, which it makes you think, okay, then what does this mean for the next bit of Labour politics, for the next period of Keir Starmer's premiership, however long that may be.

36:32You know, it could be six minutes, it could be six months, it could be longer. Who knows? But Keir Starmer now, to survive, is on various levels saying to Morgan McSweeney's many critics, to the people who were beaten down and discredited and stripped of their claim to the moral high ground of Labour politics very effectively by not just Labour's together, but the sort of associated ecosystem and people who were, until very recently, closely aligned with or working for Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer is now saying to them, at some level, you guys were right. The way I did politics or the way my people were doing politics was wrong.

37:21You get really no sense that Keir Starmer necessarily understands the implications of what he's doing there, because it's sort of saying we need a counter-revolution. We're sweeping away all of those people. It's fundamentally about power. And we are now in a position where the very people who were crushed under the heel of the Labour Together school of politics, the Morgan McSweeney School of Politics, are now speaking with the moral clarity that was beaten out of them for years before. And that's a hugely significant thing. And this story, the Labour Together APCO story, I think is more grist to that mill.

37:59That's right. I think just the last addendum to that, something I said last week, which I think just assumes a lot of significance now, is the fact that when it came to it, Patrick, I think we've both now heard through sources, Keir Starmer didn't have a view on whether McSweeney should go. he was to the end or that partnership was to the end defined by the diffidence and indecision of the man the public would have as the protagonist while Sweeney the actual agitator and mover within the relationship decided that he had to go now that's all we've got time for and I got to say it was an unusually personal episode and it's not something I hope to repeat but hopefully that was a...

38:47Until the next investigation into your sourcing. Until the next, until the reform retained the services of APCO for another report of mine, unless, of course, it's happened already. But thank you for listening. Thank you to you and Doritney for producing and we'll be with you next week. See you then.