‘Labour Together broke the law’

Think tank that propelled Starmer to power hired private investigators to shut down scrutiny of its undeclared funding - I speak to one of its targets, journalist Paul Holden

Why would a political operation on the cusp of power spend a small fortune investigating journalists? This is the question I’ve asked myself ever since I first learned that Labour Together had hired a PR firm to identify the sources of journalists writing critical stories about its finances.

When Labour Together hired APCO Worldwide in November 2023, it was ascendant. Their man, Keir Starmer, was a shoe-in for prime minister. The think tank’s architect, Morgan McSweeney, was Starmer’s all-powerful right-hand man.

So why risk all this by doing something so beyond the pale - so anti-democratic, frankly - as to put private investigators onto journalists?

The answer, I think, is because these journalists were onto a crucial part of the Labour Together story - one that had gone almost unnoticed but was absolutely central to its mission and its success: hundreds of thousands of pounds in undeclared political donations.

But let’s step forward to today for a moment. This morning our story is all over the news bulletins and newspaper home pages.

Having declined to take my calls, cabinet office minister Josh Simons, who ran Labour Together in November 2023 and commissioned APCO, has come out and said that the PR firm was “asked to look into a suspected hack, which had nothing to do with UK journalists at Sunday Times, Guardian or any other brilliant UK newspaper.”

Indeed, as we reported on Thursday, the briefings produced by APCO for Labour Together are peppered with references to “illegally-gathered material” - from a Russian or Chinese hack of the Electoral Commission - that is one of “two potential sources” for the unwelcome stories.

I have seen documents that show how this narrative - of a hack - was fed to other journalists in the British media. Labour Together told journalists it had reported its concerns about a hack to the National Cyber Security Centre.

But there was no evidence of a hack. APCO’s briefings are filled with hearsay and conjecture about ‘Russian links’, but actual evidence of anything? Nope.

What there was, instead, was evidence - and plenty of it - that Labour Together, on McSweeney’s watch, had systematically failed to declare £730,000 in political donations from a handful of wealthy donors. The Electoral Commission fined Labour Together £14,250 in 2021 for breaking electoral law.

But there was more to this story. This is what the journalists that Labour Together were so worried about were digging into.

Labour Together presented McSweeney’s failure to declare all these donations as an “admin error”. Friends of the Corkman explained that record-keeping was not his strong suit.

This might all be accurate. But what is certainly true is that this undeclared funding was critical to Starmer’s rise. It paid for polls and clandestine campaigning that paved the way for Starmer to become Labour leader - and then prime minister.

Publicly, Labour Together was presented as a grassroots movement - a broad-based initiative to unite a fractured Labour party. Privately, McSweeney was building a highly organised political operation in the shadows.

Had the funding been declared, the press, the public and - crucially - Labour party members would have seen that Labour Together’s kumbaya vibe was all an act. It was being bankrolled by the kind of big money that had fled under Corbyn - businessman Trevor Chinn, hedge funder Martin Taylor and others - who wanted to take the party back.

This is what the journalists that Labour Together targeted were investigating. This is why Labour Together was so concerned that it paid a controversial PR firm £30,000 to intervene.

The fantastical story about a foreign hack was very effective. Other media outlets spiked further reporting on Labour Together’s finances at a crucial moment leading up to the general election.

There is still so much we don’t know about this story. One question I keep asking is: who paid for APCO’s work? Was it a specific donor? Political campaigns don’t normally have that kind of money lying around to splash out on private investigators.

Was Labour Together’s board aware that Simons had commissioned APCO?

Labour MP and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell has written to Labour’s general secretary calling for a full investigation into Labour Together targeting journalists. Hollie Ridley’s response - that there is “no contractual or governance relationship between Labour Together and the Party” - would be hilarious if the issue wasn’t so serious.

As long as Starmer is in power, and McSweeney is by his side, Labour and Labour Together are umbilically linked. But the relationship is even deeper than that.

Labour Together was one of Labour’s biggest funders in the 2024 general election. Senior figures in Starmer’s cabinet are Labour Together acolytes: home secretary Shabana Mahmood; justice secretary David Lammy; housing secretary Steve Reed; culture secretary Lisa Nandy.

Given all this power, all this influence, surely we should know exactly how and why Labour Together paid private investigators to target journalists.

This is why I invited Paul Holden onto Democracy for Sale today. Holden is a South African-born journalist and author of The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy. He’s also a victim of Labour Together’s targeting operation.

Holden’s name appears dozens of times in APCO’s briefings. The supposition that his work was based on a Russian hack is presented multiple times, and always without evidence. For Holden, there is a dark comedy in it all. “I’ve actually been sued by a Russian oligarch,” the veteran anti-corruption journalist tells me on our call.

I think this discussion is really important, and goes to the heart of the Labour Together story. The illegal donations - the dark money that brought Starmer, and McSweeney, to power - matter.

As Holden told me, “I’ve seen in South Africa what happens when you have people in power who break the law. It’s very problematic.”

Holden wants the Electoral Commission to publish in full its investigation into Labour Together and its funding - something it has resisted so far.

“The Electoral Commission is still failing the public by refusing to release any details of the investigation it undertook into Labour Together, despite serious concerns that Labour Together was not candid with the Commission,” he told me.

“The Electoral Commission simply must release its investigation report and supporting materials so the public can find out the full story of the money that made our Prime Minister can be revealed.”

Something is really wrong when a political operation is targeting journalists. For all of us, we need the full story about what Labour Together did - and how it spent possibly the most significant tranche of dark money in British political history.