Before Labour Together tried to smear Sunday Times journalists, it was a vital source for them
The real problem is that the Starmtroopers turned their dirty tricks on Murdoch's men.
Previously: Wes Streeting’s Mariah Carey method
“It’s late afternoon on 2 April 2019 and Jeremy Corbyn is about to come face to face with the conspiracy that will one day destroy him.” That’s the first sentence of the first chapter of Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire. The conspiracy in question is Labour Together, the campaign group which, under Morgan McSweeney’s leadership, played a central role in making Keir Starmer the leader of the Labour Party and ultimately Prime Minister.
This weekend — after reporting from The National in September 2025 and Democracy for Sale over the past two weeks — The Sunday Times splashed on the story that Labour Together had paid £30,000 to ‘public affairs’ firm, APCO Worldwide, to investigate journalists from The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Declassified, and other outlets as well as Paul Holden, the author of The Fraud, a book about Labour Together and the Starmer campaign. The aim of the APCO report produced by a former Sunday Times journalist, Tom Harper, was to undermine reporting on Labour Together’s use of undeclared funding to bankroll Starmer’s leadership campaign.
Harper wrote that he had examined the “sourcing, funding and origins of the Sunday Times story” using a mix of documents and “discreet human source inquiries”. He’s said to have made baseless claims that the emails underpinning the story were the result of a suspected Kremlin hack of the Electoral Commission and implied that the journalists were being manipulated by “the Russian state, or proxies of the Russian state”. The report also included 10 pages of fabricated allegations about Pogrund, focusing on his Jewish background and upbringing as well as his personal and professional relationships.
Josh Simons, who was running Labour Together when the report was commissioned and disseminated its findings across Westminster, is now a minister in the Cabinet Office. Keir Starmer, who claims he knew nothing about the smear campaign, has now instructed the… Cabinet Office to investigate the issue. When Simons passed the APCO report onto the National Cyber Security Centre (a department of GCHQ), he removed the personal information related to Pogrund. But those smears were still shared with other members of the political class.
The way the APCO/Labour Together story is being reported by The Times and Sunday Times is instructive. The targeting of other journalists — particularly those on the left — is minimised, and there’s an exaggerated sense of shock that McSweeney and company would engage in such dirty tricks. In its leader column yesterday, The Sunday Times raged, “…there should be a healthy tension between the press and governing classes.” But for many years, there was something more like a cosiness between the Times titles and Labour Together. Before Pogrund was a victim of Labour Together’s tactics, he was a beneficiary of them.
In Get In, Pogrund and Maguire write about efforts by McSweeney and Imran Ahmed — a former staffer for Corbyn leadership challenger, Angela Eagle — to get negative stories about Jeremy Corbyn into the British press. This involved the creation of the Center for Countering Online Hate and Stop Funding Fake News as astroturfing outfits for Labour Together. McSweeney and Ahmed trawled Corbyn-supporting Facebook groups, with tens of thousands of members between them, for months to create a collection of every post that they thought could be considered hateful, with a particular focus on identifying antisemitic comments.
Pogrund and Maguire write in Get In:
McSweeney ensured the most disturbing examples found their way to the Sunday Times.
What was missing from this recounting of history was that Pogrund was one of the four journalists bylined on the stories promoted by the Labour Together ‘dossier’. On April 1 2018, the Sunday Times front-page splash was headlined Exposed: Jeremy Corbyn’s Hate Factory. Inside the paper, a further report (Vitriol and Threats of Violence: The Ugly Face of Jeremy Corbyn’s Cabal) expanded on the story. A tiny proportion of comments from groups with more than 400,000 members were presented as their dominant theme.
In The Fraud, Paul Holden writes:
While McSweeney and Ahmed were secretly feeding alarmist stories to journalists to build the narrative that Corbyn’s Labour was awash with antisemitism, they were simultaneously establishing what I believe to be the Labour Together project’s most problematic known initiative: the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its sister campaign Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN).
Holden explains how SFFN presented itself as a group of anonymous ‘activists’ who had to remain secretive for fear of putting themselves at risk. In reality, SFFN was funded by the same multi-millionaire donors that supported Labour Together and controlled by McSweeney and Ahmed. By 2024, when Anushka Asthana published Taken as Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party, veterans of Labour Together’s dirty tricks campaigns were happy to boast about what they did:
One of McSweeney’s obsessions was the Canary, an alt-left website that had seemed to appear from nowhere and grown to a peak of 8.5m hits a month. Moreover, Corbyn supporters trusted the site equally to the Guardian, their other favourite source of information. And so McSweeney had an aim – to schmooze the Guardian and kill the Canary. “Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us,” he told the Labour Together MPs…
… they took aim at news websites they considered to be either alt-left or alt-right, including, perhaps not surprisingly, the Canary. As part of a “Stop funding fake news” campaign, they took screenshots of articles they felt had either racist or fake content, then posted messages on Twitter aimed at brands that were advertising on the websites’ pages. Unquestionably, the readership of the Canary took a hit. In an editorial, the website noted that “people who don’t like our politics have encouraged our advertisers to blacklist us. That’s come at a cost”. Its contributors’ coverage, it argued, had been targeted at Israel and not Jewish people and it said it had been “smeared with accusations of antisemitism”. However, the result would be a “much leaner” Canary newsroom with a dedicated team of seven staff members, rather than a network of freelance writers.
When John McEvoy, then of The Canary, now at Declassified, revealed McSweeney’s role in creating SFFN, it led to his inclusion in the group of journalists targeted by APCO’s corporate espionage efforts.
Later in Get In, Pogrund and Maguire write about an antisemitism case against a Labour councillor called Pam Bromley, who had used Facebook to “rail against the Rothschilds and dismiss allegations of antisemitism as the work of a ‘fifth column’ inside the Labour Party”, which they say “[took] nearly a year” to be addressed. In an aside, they note that the disciplinary procedures were hastened by “reporting in the Sunday Times that McSweeney had helped orchestrate”. As Holden points out in The Fraud, The Sunday Times wrote two articles on Bromley’s case, the second of which was co-bylined to Pogrund.
None of this is to argue that Pogrund (or any of the other journalists targeted) deserved to be attacked by Labour Together. The point is that when the campaign group was turning these tactics against left-wing outlets and their reporters, they were to be ignored or even applauded as smart political thinking. We are only now getting speeches about the importance of a free press because Labour Together turned its dirty tricks on the newspapers that believe they deserve respect.
Labour Together and Keir Starmer’s political operation are only in trouble today because Simons set APCO on reporters who are deemed worthy of establishment protection. These methods shouldn’t ever be acceptable, but the truth is that they’re seen as entirely justifiable when it comes to hunting the Left. We’ll also see now that Labour Together, an outfit that is unquestionably a creature of the Labour Right, will now be framed as a left-wing think-tank gone rogue. After years of getting away with (and in fact being lauded for) smears and sneers against members of their own party, Labour Together didn’t know when to stop.
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