A thinktank previously run by a Labour minister and the prime minister’s chief of staff is alleged to have paid a PR firm to investigate journalists who were looking into its funding.
Labour Together, once run by Morgan McSweeney and then by Josh Simons, now a Cabinet Office minister, hired APCO Worldwide to investigate journalists from the Guardian, the Sunday Times and other outlets and to identify their sources, according to claims in the Substack publication Democracy for Sale.
McSweeney left Labour Together in 2020 when he joined Keir Starmer’s team. He remained close to the thinktank, which was a key ally of Starmer as he led Labour to election victory in 2024. Simons was director of Labour Together when APCO was reportedly hired.
Sources close to McSweeney said he had not taken the decision to hire APCO and it was a matter for Labour Together. The Guardian has approached Simons, Labour Together, the Labour party and APCO for comment. Democracy for Sale reported that Simons, McSweeney, Labour Together, the Labour party and APCO all declined to comment on the record.
The allegations come as McSweeney faces severe pressure over his role in Downing Street in the aftermath of new disclosures about Peter Mandelson in the Epstein files. Downing Street has rejected calls for his removal, but Labour backbenchers say his role in Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador makes his position as the prime minister’s most senior aide untenable.
On Thursday night, the Labour MP Kim Johnson said of the allegations that they suggested “McSweeney’s operation is rotten to the core”, adding: “If this is their idea of leadership, No 10 needs gutting from top to bottom.”
Democracy for Sale reports that APCO was hired in 2023, when Simons ran Labour Together, after the Sunday Times had published an investigation into the organisation that alleged McSweeney had failed to declare more than £700,000 in donations to the thinktank between 2017 and 2020. The money is said to have paid for polling and campaigning that supported Starmer’s rise to the Labour leadership.
Labour Together was fined £14,250 in September 2021 over late reporting of £740,000 of donations after the organisation reported itself to the Electoral Commission for failures to declare the money in 2020.
Democracy for Sale says it has seen internal reports prepared by APCO Worldwide for Labour Together that name the Sunday Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, as well as the Guardian’s Henry Dyer, Declassified’s John McEvoy and journalists from other outlets as “significant persons of interest” and discuss potential “leverage” over other reporters. Dyer broke the story of the Electoral Commission’s investigation into Labour Together in 2021.
Democracy for Sale alleges that the thinktank paid the PR firm at least £30,000 to identify the source of stories about its funding.
The briefings supplied to Labour Together by APCO suggest that one possible source of the Sunday Times story was a Russian or Chinese hack of the Electoral Commission, Democracy for Sale reports.
One of the documents reportedly says: “After a review of publicly available information, there appears to be two potential sources for the information about Labour Together’s funding that appeared in the Times article: a leak from someone within the Electoral Commission or Labour Together to the author; or illegally gathered information collected from the 2023 hack of the Electoral Commission that has been passed on to the author.”
Another report by APCO for Labour Together and seen by the publications is reportedly titled: “Executive summary: investigation into Shadow World Investigations,” which is a a London-based investigative outlet run by the South African journalists Paul Holden and Andrew Feinstein.
The memo reportedly attempts to discredit Holden, who collaborated on the Sunday Times story about Labour Together’s finances.
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