Why did Labour Together orchestrate a smear campaign against journalists?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, how Keir Starmer's favourite think tank smeared journalists just doing their job.

0:22Back in February 2021, I was a 23-year-old freelance journalist. I'd left university, hadn't got a job and had just started writing. And I had done a lot of stories going through records, had nothing else better to do. This is Henry Dyer, one of The Guardian's investigations correspondents. If you're a regular listener, then you will recognise his voice from episodes we've made about corruption in the House of Lords and Boris Johnson's secret files. He's like one of those journalists you see in films, always surrounded by papers, taking whispered phone calls and spending hours and hours wading through spreadsheets and databases.

0:57He's always been like that, even as a callow youth trying to get his big break in the media. In early 2021, I was going through more Electoral Commission records, and I spotted that this group, Labour Together, had declared hundreds of thousands of pounds of donations. More than£700 ,000, in fact, mostly donated by two very rich men, all declared years after they'd actually been donated, a clear breach of Electoral Commission rules. Now, the rules say you've got to declare your donations within 30 days, so it was clear that these were well overdue. I emailed the Electoral Commission to ask them why this has all come out now, and they said it's a part of an ongoing investigation.

1:40Henry wrote up a story for a news website called Business Insider, and then he largely forgot about it. Five years went by. Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, and Henry got his job with us at The Guardian. Then one rainy Thursday earlier this month, Henry got a text. I was at a comedy gig on a rainy night in South London, and I get this text from a reporter called Peter Gagan. He runs an investigative news site called Democracy for Sale with this story. I step out and I read it. And my first reactions were that I was really surprised and expected it to be a story about me in this way, and shocked because this is something that was kind of five years ago in terms of my involvement of it.

2:27Henry learned that back in 2023, Labour Together, a think tank, had commissioned a corporate intelligence firm to carry out a secret investigation into journalists and researchers who'd been digging into its funding. On top of the list, Henry Dyer. This weekend, it emerged that not only were reporters being investigated, but they were also accused with no evidence of being part of a Russian conspiracy against the British state.

2:59And who commissioned the investigation? Josh Simons, then Director of Labour Together, and now a Cabinet Minister at the heart of Keir Starmer's Downing Street. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, Labour Together and the Dodgy Dossier.

3:19Henry, let's start at the beginning. What is Labour Together? Who is involved? And what were they actually set up to do? So I only first heard of this organisation after the 2019 general election. They did a post-mortem of what had gone wrong. But they'd been founded four years before then, in 2015, with very little fanfare, no website, no sort of big publicisation of what they were up to more of an internal group and it was set up by someone who's now a former Labour MP, John Crullus, as well as two MPs who have now gone on to be members of the cabinet, Lisa Nandy and Steve Reid. It was meant to be a sort of broad church for the Labour Party.

3:55You know, finally, right, there's a lot of factionism within the Labour Party. Let's have one place, as the name suggests, where we can all work out what's best for the party and have different wings of the party involved in that. But in 2017, Morgan McSweeney comes in to lead the group. And it's at this point that we can see that very large donations start coming into the group that nobody finds out about for several years. And we know that at this point McSweeney starts to use the group to pursue research into how Labour can win the next election and what it's going to do after Corbyn. This is a strategy he's obsessed, you know, with getting all the data, with finding the hero voters, and with identifying a strategy to first win over the Labour Party membership to elect the right leader, and then to win over the country to elect Prime Minister.

4:49So they're preparing for a post-Corbyn future while Corbyn is still very much leading the Labour Party. That's right. And then after the 2019 general election...

5:04Corbyn standing down.

5:10And there's this Labour leadership campaign.

5:18And Starmer's running. And Starmer is Mick Sweeney's man. He's been identified as such for years as our candidate who's going to allow us to change the party. I think, given where we've got to, I think the last thing our members, our movement and our country wants is us all trying to take lumps out of each other. OK, and then Starmer ultimately does win the leadership of the Labour Party in April 2020. That unifying spirit. I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who led our party through some real... The year after that, you publish your first article looking into Labour Together's finances. And at that point in time, what was Labour Together up to?

6:03So it was continuing to do research. But one of the key things it was doing by this point is it's starting to pay for staff. It has a member of staff it's paying for in Rachel Reeves' office doing policy and administration work. And this is something that continues from that period. But I wrote about it at the time as a think tank, you know, kind of with influential links to the people closest to Starmer, McSweeney in particular. Right. And did anything happen as a result of your article back in February 2021? Nothing directly happened. But what then happened about seven months later is the Electoral Commission released an update on the investigation that they'd been carrying out.

6:48and they decide to fine Labour Together for more than£14 ,000 because they say you have done repeated breaches of electoral law in terms of the failure to declare those donations on time. So you knew that they had received hundreds of thousands of pounds which they had very, very, very belatedly declared. Did the spreadsheet or the database that you were looking at, what did it tell you about where these donations had come from? Two predominant figures as well as a host of others but two people really jumped out. Now the first is a guy called Martin Taylor. He was a Mayfair hedge fund guy. Not the sort of person who would have given a lot of money to the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

7:31And the other guy who was giving a lot of money to Labour Together that hadn't been declared for a substantial amount of time was called Sir Trevor Chin. Again not someone who had donated considerably to the Labour Party itself or to many Labour politicians under Corbyn's leadership. So it had appeared, was giving a lot of money that hadn't previously been declared to Labour Together. But did you know what that money had actually been used for at that point? No, we didn't. So November 2023, and the Sunday Times, two journalists there, Gabriel Pogand and Harry York, do this front page story. Brilliant story.

8:08And it's going into a lot of detail about Morgan McSweeney and about the work that McSweeney did at Labour Together. One of the main allegations it made is McSweeney had made the deliberate decision to keep the identity of these donors secret so that Labour Together could continue to be seen as this kind of broad church just interested in finding the best way forward for the party as a whole. as opposed to the when Corbyn's gone, how do we change the party fundamentally from the way he's led it? Because the identity of those donors, of Trevor Chin and Martin Taylor in particular, would have been really significant to Labour Party members in early 2020 when they were looking at the leadership campaign.

8:49Labour Together had said they weren't going to back any candidates in particular. They were just kind of looking at what's best for the party. But then after Starmer wins, they go back and they say, we've helped him from the very start. And something else happened during the leadership campaign, actually, which is Starmer delayed the reporting of the donations that he received towards his leadership campaign until after he'd won.

9:16Okay, so Morgan McSweeney and Labour together have basically got their man into Downing Street. And And thanks in no small part, you may think, due to these whacking great donations. And did Morgan McSweeney or Keir Starmer ever explain why there was such a long delay in registering those donations? No, so neither of those two men have ever addressed the delay in declaring those donations. But we know that the reason the group gave at the time when I first reported the story was an admin error. Now, what later came out were leaked emails released last year. these date back to February 2021, just before I'm doing my story.

9:53And it's correspondence from a lawyer that works with the Labour Party to Morgan McSweeney. And the lawyer is essentially advising, there's no easy way to explain the failure to disclose, and you should call it an admin error. And right, so that Sunday Times article comes out and basically demolishes any claim that Labour Together might have had, that it was this big tent organisation supporting the broad Labour cause. And it revealed that it was in fact working to make Keir Starmer the leader of the Labour Party. And by this point, so November 2023, who has taken over at Labour Together? So by this point, it's being run by this guy, Josh Simons.

10:30This is the kind of stuff you do all the time. Are you finding the same things that we saw in the programme? Yeah, we are. And actually, we're doing a big project at the moment looking into the Conservative 2019 Voter Coalition. Josh Simons has got a background. He studied at Cambridge. He did very well. He went off to Harvard. He did a doctorate there. He's sort of seen as one of those up-and-coming figures. And Simons reads this story that the Sunday Times has got. And it looks like he notes a section at the very, very end of the Sunday Times' story, which talks about documents having been provided to the Sunday Times for that story, by an investigative journalist called Paul Holden.

11:16And so he goes to a firm, APCO Worldwide, and he asks them to look into the sourcing of the Sunday Times story, to look into Paul Holden by name, and also to an American journalist called Matt Tybee. And what kind of firm is APCO? That's a really great question. It's not entirely clear. Public relations, maybe, or some sort of communications consultancy. I saw it as a global public affairs firm. For anyone else, it would seem like fantasy land. But the work that they end up doing isn't about public relations, and it's not a way of kind of communicating. So APCO is based in Washington, D.C., in the U.S.

11:52It was founded in 1984, and it describes itself as a global advisory and advocacy firm helping clients navigate a complex world and create lasting impact. So what that really means, it seems, is that they do a lot of research back in the day. They started off doing research for Philip Morris, the huge tobacco company. And what's interesting about APCO at the time that their commissions do the research is one of its directors is a woman called Kate Forrester, a former journalist. And she was also at the same time on the advisory board of Labour Together. What exactly had Labour Together asked APCO to do?

12:25So Labour Together paid APCO more than£30 ,000 for the research. And we have a copy of the contract that Josh Simons agreed with APCO. And APCO agreed to devise a strategy to aid Labour Together and that they would investigate the sourcing, funding and origins of a Sunday Times article about Labour Together, as well as upcoming works by authors Paul Holden and Mark Tybee to establish who and what are behind the coordinated attacks on Labour Together. The approach should provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up for use in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together.

12:58Wow, it's that explicit. could inform any future legal strategy that Labour Together could wish to pursue against any of these parties. And then APCO in this contract even spell out the work that they would use. They would do open source investigation. They do human intelligence investigation. They do financial investigation, digital forensic investigation, stakeholder outreach, as well as media packaging and dissemination. So this is a contract to do a sort of cohesive strategy. Let's find out the material. let's work out kind of the best spin we can put on it and then who can we go off and give this to in order to defend ourselves from any further criticism and scrutiny of our group and i've seen this described as sort of spying operation do you think that's a fair characterization human intelligence isn't that spying you know it's not necessarily spying but it is and it is investigating i mean to some extent you know journalists to a great extent use that we use open source intelligence we use human intelligence investigations but we're doing that for stories that we believe are in the public interest, not in order to devise a media strategy to defend ourselves from future attacks, especially of something that we know that we have done.

14:07And who actually goes off and does this research and writes the report? So the research is done by a guy called Tom Harper at APCO. And Tom Harper, he is a former Sunday Times journalist who is working on a contract to investigate the work of current Sunday Times journalists. people he may have worked with in the past. That seems decidedly unusual. Yeah and in the course of the work that Tom Harper and other people at APCO do they draw up several kind of interim internal research reports and I've seen one of those which is a sort of broad timeline of the stories that had been written about Labour together and then towards the bottom of it is this list of significant persons of interest.

14:55Now, I don't draw any conclusions from the order of that beyond it being kind of mostly chronological. I'm there at the top as someone who had done the original story about the undeclared donations. Gabriel Pogrand was in it, Whitehall editor at the Sunday Times. Harry York, who at that time was the deputy political editor. There's the guy, Paul Holden, who had provided some of the information to the Sunday Times and other people who had written really in any critical way about Labour Together. And all of us listed as significant persons of interest in this bit of internal interim research that APCO had done following the commission from Josh Simons.

15:32And what exactly were they looking into? What we've just found out in the Sunday Times over the weekend is exactly what they went off to do about Gabriel Pogrand in particular. This seems to have been in far greater detail than the research they did about myself, about Harry York or other British journalists working at British newspapers. But on Pogrens, they came up with baseless allegations about the quality of his work, about what he was seeking to do by the stories that he had reported for the Sunday Times, including really excellent reporting about the royal family, among other things. It sort of suggested this was trying to discredit and break down the British establishments and that he had been duped in some way.

16:16And the newspaper had been duped by sort of shadowy Kremlin-linked associates. It's conspiracy theory stuff, but also highly personal stuff about Gabriel looking at the fact that he's Jewish and speculating wildly and inaccurately about his status as someone who's Jewish and, you know, the political beliefs he may or may not hold.

16:51So it's just so outrageous, this idea that Gabriel Pogrens and Harry York were kind of, I don't know, some kind of Russian stooges, rather than excellent journalists who were just working their sources and doing their job. Where do you think this idea that they were working for the Russians might have come from? It's come from nowhere. It was something that Labour Together were advised that they could use and decided to go along with. And it was something that they could take to other papers, to the cabinet, to use in Westminster. It's been kind of described as a whispering campaign with the objective of discrediting the work of some of the best journalists in Fleet Street.

17:29But any suggestion that Gabriel is working at the bidding of Russian proxies is completely ridiculous. He was himself sanctioned by Russia. He's on a no travel list. This is not someone who is an ally of the Kremlin. And their theory, of which they presented no evidence, is that there was some use by some journalists of material that had been hacked. They initially suggested into themselves and then started thinking, well, maybe it was linked to this publicized act of the Electoral Commission, which is completely untrue. So Josh Simons has this chunky report containing all of these baseless allegations.

18:11And it appears it was then hawked around various senior Labour politicians at the time, including people who are now in the cabinet. What has Josh Simons had to say about it all? He's claimed that he was astonished to find all of this research it had done into Gabriel Pogrand. Right. This report that he commissioned. But he doesn't seem to have stopped his relationship with the company at that point. Simons insists he took out the offending bits about the Sunday Times journalists. I think in particular, Gabriel, given the really shocking personal details that APCO had dug up about him. And not just details, but also more baseless allegations.

18:53Not just dug up, but invented. Invented. And then he says that he handed the dossier stripped of this material to GCHQ. and they took this and were looking into it, so Simon has claimed. And it seems the objective of that is that this is part of that strategy to be able to respond, where if someone were to say, okay, I've found out something else about Labour Together, I think there's some more questions to be asked about your donations, you could say, well, some of the reporting that's already been done about this is now being looked into by GCHQ. and there are questions over the provenance of that data.

19:33And that's a way you might encourage someone not to do that. Yes, definitely. Now, it's also important to add, Simons' position on this in the past few weeks has been very strongly caveated in saying that he never ordered the investigation of any UK journalists working at any UK newspapers. Now, we can leave to one side the fact that if you're investigating the work of the Sunday Times and it's the sourcing of a story in the Sunday Times, you're going to, as it turns out, investigate the journalists who wrote it. Has his position changed at all as the story has moved on? Yeah, so last week I spent Tuesday in a series of increasingly unproductive phone calls with Josh Simons as his special advisors, who were offering slightly changing positions about how he felt about all of this.

20:24Simons and his team say that he's just wanted to be open about this from the very start. But if that's the case, when Peter Gagan's story gets published on that rainy Thursday, and then Josh Simons that weekend is tweeting, you know, I always stand up with journalists. I would not want to see anything like this happen to British journalists at British newspapers, which is a notable caveat. Why did he not then say, I saw reports that had horrible material about Gabriel Programme? Why did it take him a week to admit that this had happened? Initially, his team offered, and then he had put on the record, that he, under Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party, had campaigned very strongly against anti-Semitism in the party.

21:11I'm Jewish. I saw what anti-Semitism, racism on the left of British politics looks like. And it was pretty horrible, pretty unpleasant. And, you know, frankly... And said that he would always stand up against it, but did not take the opportunity to be open and forthright about the work that APCO had done that mentioned Gabriel Pogrand and spoke about his status as someone who is Jewish and raised questions about his political beliefs and whether there were any contradictions.

21:49Coming up, how damaging is all of this for Keir Starmer?

22:08So you've told us what Josh Simons has had to say and how his position has shifted over the past 10 days or so. What about Keir Starmer himself? I mean, as you've said, Labour Together was essentially providing a blueprint for Starmerism. So he's connected with Labour Together, whether he likes it or not. Yes. So earlier this week, the government announced that the Cabinet Office, which Josh Simons is a minister within this department, would be carrying out a kind of fact-finding exercise at this stage into the kind of whole saga, it seems. So they're marking their own homework? The Cabinet Office will be establishing the facts around it.

22:43Is that the same as launching an investigation, which is what John McDonnell says he's been rebuffed on four times? Well, establishing the facts is the first thing that you've got to do on anything. The details of this are all very, very vague. And they're not the only people investigating this, I should say. APCO, the PR consultancy, is being investigated by the PRCA, which is a sort of lobbyist's consultancy. they're one of the umbrella bodies into the work that they did for Labour Together. But it's not clear what rules there are that could have been broken. It's, I think, more about the question of, do we think it's an appropriate way for people in public life to respond when there are legitimate stories written about them to spend tens of thousands of pounds on getting a private investigation into the journalists who have written those stories?

23:29Yeah, and has Starmer himself said anything about it so far? Yes, he said on Monday morning that he thought it was an important thing for these claims to be looked into. I didn't know anything about this investigation and it absolutely needs to be looked into. So the Cabinet Office will be establishing the facts. And APCO themselves, have they put out a statement at all? Yes, so APCO have said that they are deeply committed to upholding their values and standards as an organisation and treat any suggestion they've failed to do so very seriously. And some people listening to this might sort of shrug their shoulders at all of this.