A thinktank previously run by a Labour minister and the prime minister’s chief of staff paid a PR firm to investigate journalists who were looking into its funding, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
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, documents suggest.
A memo produced for Labour Together, first reported by the Substack publication Democracy For Sale, lists journalists who are viewed as “significant persons of interest” over articles about undeclared donations during McSweeney’s time at the thinktank. It adds: “It is important to identify the source of the information and to ascertain what additional information could be published.”
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 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.
In response to the allegations, Labour MP John McDonnell called for his party to launch an inquiry into Labour Together and those in the party connected to it.
In a letter to Hollie Ridley, the party’s general secretary, on Friday, McDonnell called the investigation of journalists “truly shocking” and added: “If the reports of [Labour Together’s] activities in surveilling journalists are accurate it is clear that this organisation and its operators and controllers are bringing our party into disrepute.”
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.
Documents seen by the Guardian suggest 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.
Internal reports prepared by APCO Worldwide for Labour Together 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 subjects 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 claim that one possible source of the Sunday Times story was a Russian or Chinese hack of the Electoral Commission.
One of the documents 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 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. Holden collaborated on the Sunday Times story about Labour Together’s finances.
