Political fallout and resignation of Josh Simons

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I'm at the Paw Footer Awards for a story that I did with my colleague uh Khadija Sharif, uh, which was all about how Labour Together, the campaign group slash think tank behind Clear 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 Kir Starmer's rise to power. Okay. So quite a quite a significant one. Um can you tell us a a bit more about Labour Together, just for anyone who hasn't been keeping on top of Starmarite think tanks recently. If you've not heard of Labour Together, they've actually since uh 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 uh think tank campaign group, call it what you want, that was set up by various people after Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour Leadership in twenty fifteen. It was set up by various people in and various wings of Labour Party, as the name suggests, is always a kind of cross party organization, broadly opposed to Corbyn, looking to see where else Labour should go. Over time though a very familiar name to many people uh became very involved, Morgan Max Sweeney. Morgan Max Sweeney took over as the head of Labor Together, he and became uh Kir Starmer's chief of staff. But throughout the period and up until the twenty twenty four general election, which Labour obviously won, Labour Together was a very important organization. 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 Kirst Armer, 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 uh polling and focus groups, but also gave out money to politicians, the would be politicians, the Labor people, to people that were aligned with Starmer and the kind of Labour 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. Yes. I mean As you said in the story, the various uh MPs they backed include about half a dozen who reached senior cabinet positions. Rachel Reeves, David Lamy, 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? 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 there had been a kind of slightly come by a cross party cross labour thing where they'd polled you know, they'd write the odd report and they'd hold the odd meeting. Under Morgan Max Sweeney it changed. Uh they got a n big uh they got an office in uh just south of the river in London, had a little pirate flag in the office, kinda sense of, you know, we're buccaneering out in the high seas. Uh and at that stage money started coming in. Money often from big former labour donors who'd stopped giving money. all the big money that used to go into labor really started to flow away from a journey Jeremy Corbyn. And it started going to Labor Together. So people like Martin Taylor, the hedge fund manager, Trevor Chin, the businessman, other people like that started funding Labor Together. And one of the things that happened was under uh Max Sweeney's watch was they didn't declare this money to the electoral For a very, very, very long time. So the Electoral Commission found that Labour Together had breached electoral rules more than twenty times by failing to declare this money. And fast forward to twenty twenty three, by which stage Morgan McSweene is now chief of staff to Keir Starmer. He's a really important character. one like he's really in the driving seat of of British politics. And Labor Together has now been run by a guy called Josh Simons. And at that point a story appears in the Sunday Times in November twenty twenty three. 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 find 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 Kirst Armer's uh campaign into the Labour leadership. And that was a crucial point for the start of my story. Okay. Um we should say the sum of money undeclared in donations was about seven hundred and thirty thousand pounds. Yeah. What happens next after that story is run? So after this story appears in the Sunday Times about this seven hundred thirty thousand pounds of undeclared funding, Labour Together under Josh Simons decide to do decided 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 a lobbying firm, a PO firm, a company called Apco Worldwide. I struggle to say exactly what they are because they sit in that kind of grey box of, you know, consultancy advisory, in intelligence, etc. But a big, big, well known uh company, they hired Apco Worldwide and they hired Apco Worldwide to investigate the sources of this story. Particularly a journalist called Paul Holden, who is an important source for the Sunday Times story, but also Gabriel Palgron and Harry York at the uh 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 have come from, but also to put out information into the media to try and change the narrative around this. 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 discredit the story and the journalist? I think you can actually. I should I should be a bit less. Yeah. They paid um Apca Worldwide to yeah to discredit these journalists, to discredit their work, where it come from, and that was how they were trying to stop this story dead. I think we 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 to discredit the story. It's it's rare. I've never seen a st 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 a sense check. You know, am I right about Spoke to senior political reporters like I have never heard of this before. I also spoke to a very good contact in the public affairs world, which is the same word as APCO. And they were shocked. They were like APC did this? Wow. And my favourite one was actually spoken to John Crutus, who set up Labour Together. And he said, Uh Peter, this is dark shit. Can you tell us what methods Apco you were using to discredit the story? Well so it was very interesting. So what Apco did was they they put together there's a brief which we were able to obtain that Apco put together for Labor Together. So they paid just over thirty thousand pounds to to do this work. And they did things like what we call Ozent, human intelligence. So effectively, which means going and talking to people, talking to sources, putting together um a kind of a a report, a brief, kind of online sleuth thing, looking for information online. And just effectively trying to find any intelligence they could from anyone. So talking surreptitiously to people who might know some of the people involved. The briefs themselves, the p the material that Apka put together, I have to say, is it's 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, for which there's no evidence. Uh when I was breaking the story I asked both Abco and and Labour together, you know If you thought you were hacked, why did you hire a PR firm? They didn't do any investigation into cybersecurity. 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 like find out where the sources of someone's story is. Yeah. Um and it was done by a guy called Tom Harper, who's uh who used to work for the Sunday Times. Uh so Tom Harper was a Sunday Times and he w 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 sini significant interest who are these journalists. They suggest where these stories might have come from. They cast dispersions 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 in into the uh media ecosystem to discredit the work. And it's quite striking that What sh 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 twenty twenty five, the story came But by that stage, you know, we'd had an election. Josh Simons was an MP then became a junior minister in a cabinet office. Morgan Max Sweeney was Kirst Armer's right hand man in Downing Street. 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, uh a lot. Um I won't I'll try not to get too uh too into the weeds of it. So we published our story in early February, and it's fair to say that uh Democracy for Sales, a new organization, only a couple of 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. It really was. It went gangbusters. Um and we published, if people remember there was uh it was the moment where Kirst Darmer and Morgan Max Sweeney are under huge pressure on Peter Mandelson. So we published a story and we kind of revealed that Abco had been hired, we were able to name the company, name the amount of money, like put it together put information from the reports into public domain. And and we should say that Josh Simons, who who took over running Labour together from Morgan McSweeney, had since then become a Labour MP. Yes, Josh Simon's now a Labour MP. So the story goes out We didn't Three days actually was you know, it it was really interesting to see how quickly the story started to travel because it was really clear Morgan Max Sweeney had actually resigned a couple of days after the initial story and in the wake of Peter Mandelson. Josh Simons also came out fighting saying this is 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.