I made Labour Together angry. Here’s how it feels when a political party targets you

On the evening of Thursday 8 February 2024, the Guardian’s political editor, Pippa Crerar, informed me by email that the paper was 24 hours away from publishing an article that I feared would significantly damage, if not destroy, my professional reputation. She explained:

“We are planning on running a story on the Guardian site tomorrow, and in Saturday’s paper, that the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is investigating whether information obtained from an Electoral Commission hack may have been used to target the Labour party. We understand the NCSC probe centres on a series of private legal emails between the political thinktank Labour Together, which was previously run by Morgan McSweeney, and the Electoral Commission.” 

McSweeney is the former chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer. He resigned in February, carrying the can for the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the US. The NCSC is part of the UK security services, sitting within GCHQ.

I have been investigating McSweeney and the underhand projects he ran for close to four years, examining how he used a seemingly anodyne thinktank called Labour Together to undermine former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and discredit news outlets he felt threatened by.

“The Guardian understands that part of the NCSC’s investigation is whether emails (subsequently leaked to you) came from that cyber hack,” Crerar continued. 

I was given a deadline of less than 14 hours to respond.

My first reaction was confusion. I had literally no idea what Crerar was talking about. I quickly Googled “electoral commission hack” and discovered that the commission had, indeed, been hacked in 2021, probably by a hostile foreign actor such as Russia or China. Crerar confirmed that, yes, this was the hack she was talking about.

My second reaction was dismay. I feared that soon the Guardian’s huge global readership would believe that I was being seriously investigated for receiving documents from an illegal hack, probably by a hostile foreign country, targeting a Labour party just about to sweep to power. 

This would have been devastating for me and my colleagues at Shadow World Investigations (SWI), which I set up with my colleague Andrew Feinstein eight years ago. SWI focuses on exposing grand corruption and militarism. We just about scrape by with philanthropic funding, and our funders rightly expect us to maintain the highest levels of probity and good governance.

Crerar’s article would have evaporated our funding. The small team of young researchers we employed would be out of work, and maybe forever tainted by their association with me. It would have dropped a bomb on my life, my colleagues and my family.

My third reaction was anger. I’d never even heard of this hack, let alone received materials from it. I was painfully aware of how the Guardian’s story would undermine my investigation into McSweeney and the Labour party he in effect controlled. I also knew it would fatally undermine my ongoing work tackling corruption in South Africa, where I was born and lived until my mid-20s. 

Crerar’s email had not come out of the blue.

Two days before she had written to me, the Telegraph had approached Labour Together and its erstwhile director, Josh Simons, for comment. The Telegraph informed Simons that it was due to publish a story based on documents I’d got out of the Electoral Commission through a freedom of information request. That story would report damaging new information about McSweeney, Labour Together, and the large pot of undeclared money McSweeney had used to transform British politics. (I tell that story in more detail below).

“I want to make this very, very clear,” I wrote to Crerar after talking to my lawyer. “If there is any hint in your reporting that I received material from the hack of the Electoral Commission referred to above, whether knowingly or unknowingly, I will immediately be bringing defamation proceedings against you and the Guardian … The allegation that I have received information from a hack of the Electoral Commission is not only false, but I can positively prove it to be false.” 

Crerar acknowledged my response but did not ask me how I could prove it to be false. Instead, she told me, “on background”, that she had confirmed the “nature and scope of the NCSC’s investigation with her own sources”. She told me that a story would be published shortly, although it would state that there was no evidence I’d received any hacked material. But if that was the case, why even publish an article mentioning my name – something I quickly pointed out to her?

 “I’ll let you know what we do,” she responded. She never did. 

Instead, I waited up anxiously overnight, checking the Guardian website to see if anything had appeared. Nothing. I wrote to Crerar the next day asking what was going to happen. She said that she would get back to me in a few days. 

I never heard from her again, and she has not responded to requests for comment for this article.

Crerar had confirmed, in one of her emails to me, that the alleged NCSC investigation into me was prompted because Labour Together had “reported their concerns” to GCHQ. It is only in recent months, following fresh revelations in the Guardian, Sunday Times and the excellent Substack Democracy For Sale, that I’ve learned the full, lunatic story.

In mid-2023, I had approached Gabriel Pogrund of the Sunday Times. Two years previously, I’d lucked into a trove of documents from the Labour party, leaked by party whistleblowers worried about misconduct by senior Labour figures. The cache included damaging documents about McSweeney and Labour Together, who, until that time, hadn’t been scrutinised by journalists. But the documents I found spoke to their outsized and problematic impact on the Labour party and British political life.

In July 2017, McSweeney had left his job in the Local Government Association to join Labour Together. The reason was Labour’s unexpectedly good showing under Jeremy Corbyn during the 2017 general election. McSweeney, according to multiple accounts, despised the socialist, anti-imperialist politics of the so-called “hard left”, and the near-win of 2017 was an emergency.

McSweeney plotted the downfall of Corbyn, incubating numerous dodgy projects to do so – all with a distinct whiff of the Mandelsonian “dark arts”. With Corbyn defeated and undermined, McSweeney and his Labour Together collaborators – most notably the current cabinet minister Steve Reed – would choose a pliant successor who would cleanse the Labour party of its leftwing tendencies. 

The man they eventually alighted on was Sir Keir Starmer. From at least July 2019, Starmer worked closely with McSweeney to plot Starmer’s tilt at the Labour leadership. The campaign that Starmer ran to solicit the votes of a left-leaning Labour party membership was very much a McSweeney and Labour Together product.

McSweeney executed this plan with significant financial backing. Close to £1m was donated to Labour Together under McSweeney’s watch. Most of these donations were made by Martin Taylor and Sir Trevor Chinn. 

Taylor is a multimillionaire hedge fund owner with interests in private healthcare. Chinn is British businessman and a long-time pro-Israel advocate. 

But between February 2018 and April 2020, Labour Together – or more accurately, McSweeney – failed to report £730,000 of these donations to the Electoral Commission as required by law. In September 2021, Labour Together was fined just £14,250 for the offence by the commission. The thinktank said the failure to report donations had been a simple “administrative oversight”.

The documents I took to Pogrund told a different, altogether more concerning, story. 

They confirmed that McSweeney was the person who should have reported donations. They suggested that McSweeney knew he was supposed to report donations, yet failed to do so. Labour Together were also repeatedly telling the public that they were reporting donations when they weren’t. Moreover, my documents suggested that Labour Together may not have been entirely candid with the Electoral Commission when they were placed under investigation, and considered withholding important details of what really went on.

In November 2023, the Sunday Times ran a front-page story on McSweeney and Labour Together’s undeclared funds: “The secretive guru who plotted Sir Keir Starmer’s path to power with undeclared cash.” 

The article noted that I was the source of documents related to the Electoral Commission. It also announced that I was writing a book on Starmer, Labour Together and McSweeney. My publisher put up a brief blurb that made it clear I was already deep into an investigation into McSweeney and his secret projects.

Days later, I published the first of what was meant to be a multi-part series of stories with the American journalist Matt Taibbi on his Substack, Racket News. My stories exposed, for the first time, some of what Labour Together and McSweeney did with this undisclosed cash. 

This story is long and bit complicated, but the key takeaway was that McSweeney and his allies had played a central – and entirely covert – role in inflaming the “antisemitism crisis” that was besetting Corbyn’s Labour party. As part of this campaign, McSweeney and his allies had launched an astroturfed campaign that demonetised legitimate leftwing media outlets whose reporting McSweeney saw as an obstacle to his political ambitions. 

Many good journalists, several of whom were longstanding members of the National Union of Journalists, lost their jobs and livelihoods as a result. 

In response to these articles, Labour Together appointed a reputation management firm called Apco Worldwide in about November 2023. 

Josh Simons, the director of Labour Together, signed the contract. Simons is a longtime friend and political ally of McSweeney and one of McSweeney’s closest collaborators, Imran Ahmed. Ahmed was the co-founder, alongside McSweeney and Steve Reed, of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a controversial anti-misinformation outfit that wields considerable influence within the Labour party. My reporting with Taibbi had exposed the murky roots of CCDH, and the role of Labour Together in its creation.

Simons claimed, after the Apco story broke, that he had appointed Apco to investigate a potential “hack”. But there was no mention of a hack in the contract signed between Apco and Labour Together. Instead, it stated that: 

“Apco will investigate the sourcing, funding and origins of a Sunday Times article about Labour Together, as well as upcoming works by authors Paul Holden and Matt Taibbi – to establish who and what are behind the coordinated attacks on Labour Together. The approach should provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up for use in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together.”  

Apco listed the potentially invasive investigative methods they would use to conduct their investigation, including gathering “human intelligence” and conducting “financial investigations”.

The Apco investigation was led by a former journalist called Tom Harper, who had once been part of the Sunday Times stable. At the time of his investigation, his wife, Caroline Wheeler, was the political editor of the Sunday Times. 

To the best of my knowledge, Apco produced three reports to fulfil the Labour Together brief. The first, given the codename “Grimsby Town”, gave a high-level overview of what Apco was intending to investigate. It noted my upcoming book and highlighted a desperate need to find out what else I might report. It concluded with a list of “persons of interest”, with the strong implication that they would fall to be investigated. 

I was included in the list alongside other US and UK journalists who had reported on either Labour Together or CCDH. The journalists included Pogrund and Harry Yorke of the Sunday Times, John McEvoy (now at DeClassified), Henry Dyer (now at the Guardian), Paul Thacker, Kit Klarenberg and Taibbi.

The second report was dated the end of December 2023. It investigated my organisation, SWI, and the various journalists we had collaborated with. The report’s big revelation was that SWI had shared office space with DeClassified, the excellent investigative outlet that has done so much to expose UK’s complicity with Israeli war crimes in Gaza. 

But it wasn’t much of a revelation: the offices we share in central London are generously provided by a philanthropic organisation called the Bertha Foundation, which runs a hub for media practitioners and civil society organisations. (It is also where the Nerve was allowed to “squat” in its embryonic stages. It is not unlikely that the Nerve would also have fallen under the glare of Apco’s investigators if it had moved in earlier.)

Most strikingly, the report noted that SWI received funding from the Open Society Foundation. This was grant money used to fund my work on South African state capture, including working with law enforcement and regulatory bodies to trace and recover stolen assets. The report described this funding as a point of “leverage”. 

The third report was called Operation Cannon. I have only recently seen extracts as they pertain to Andrew and me, but it is an outrageous document. It shows that Apco had identified my family members and my partner, Jessica. They had discovered our relationship by “tracing” us to my home address. 

The Operation Cannon report falsely claimed that Jess’s father, Andrew Murray, was suspected by MI5 of being a Russian agent. This was plainly untrue: Andrew has twice received security clearance for a parliamentary pass as a lobby journalist and one-time peripatetic adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. 

The report stretched every sinew to find that I and my colleagues were part of some elaborate pro-Kremlin network of journalists. This was used to put me in the frame for receiving documents hacked from the Electoral Commission by actors connected to Russia: even though, as we now know, the Electoral Commission was actually hacked by China.

I will not deign to repeat the insulting and deeply stupid libels that were presented to “prove” this connection: suffice to note that, if they were ever published or treated as fact, they would have utterly destroyed my reputation and posed real material threats to the various criminal and civil cases I am still involved with in South Africa and other countries.

Remarkably, Operation Cannon also targeted Pogrund, with whom I’d collaborated on the November 2023 article. I have not seen this part of the report. But from what has been reported so far, it sounds similarly discreditable.

On 23 January 2024, Simons submitted a complaint to the NCSC via its online portal. Over the next week, he and his colleague Ben Szreter urged the NCSC to open an investigation into me and my colleagues. 

“Our evidence suggests that sensitive personal and political information obtained in this hack that was only held by the Electoral Commission and our lawyers has been disseminated to people known to be operating in a pro-Kremlin propaganda network with links to Russian intelligence,” Simons wrote to the NCSC.

This was, of course, an absurd allegation, not least because Andrew and I have faced legal and extra-legal threats because of our investigations into Russian oligarchs and the Russian arms trade. It was also untrue in a more fundamental sense. The documents I had access to were not “only” held by the Electoral Commission or Labour Together’s lawyers at all. They had come from my leak of Labour party documents.

“We suspect the articles may be a coordinated effort to discredit Labour Together in order to undermine Morgan McSweeney and, by extension, Mr Starmer in the run-up to next year’s general election,” Szreter complained, arguing that the “likeliest culprit is the Russian state, or proxies of the Russian state”.

Szreter attached a truncated version of the Operation Cannon report to support the allegations. Simons had removed the section on Pogrund, and later claimed that he did so because he never intended Apco’s investigation to include Pogrund or any other British newspaper journalists, and because he could see that its reporting on Pogrund was wrong and hurtful. But if Simons knew the Pogrund materials to be so misguided, why did he have any confidence in the rest of this ridiculous investigation?

According to the Guardian’s most recent reporting, the NCSC never instituted an investigation into me and my colleagues. The Guardian has also claimed that Simons was informed that this was the case after a face-to-face meeting with NCSC officials.

This puts me, the Guardian and Pippa Crerar in something of a tangle. Crerar had, after all, told me that she had confirmed the “scope” of the NCSC investigation with her own sources. Now the Guardian was saying there was no investigation, and that Simons had been told that there would be no investigation. I have asked the Guardian and the NCSC for answers. I’m still waiting.

Where Operation Cannon went from there is still unclear. The Sunday Times’s Emanuele Midolo has reported that details from the operation had been “disseminated widely in Westminster and Fleet Street”, while the Times even suggested that its more out-there allegations had been raised in conversation by Peter Mandelson. 

My interactions with Crerar in February 2024 confirmed to me that I had attracted the ugly attention of powerful individuals, who would soon be taking up high positions in an imminent Labour government.

At the time of Crerar’s email, Jess was seven months pregnant with our second daughter. The anxiety that something else might be coming our way – some other mad claim that would drop a bomb on our lives – refused to dissipate. And if Crerar was right, and there was an NCSC investigation, would we get the dreaded knock on the door? 

Despite our best efforts, it couldn’t help but colour our lives as we brought our second child into the world. It also curtailed my investigations. I could no longer approach sources in case it somehow got back to Labour Together that I was still on the case. After working with the Telegraph on a story in late February and a follow-up with Novara Media, I decided it was no longer safe to push the issue. Jess, heavily pregnant, had recurring panic attacks, which started when the Telegraph article came out mentioning my upcoming book. Despite my overwhelming desire to warn the public about the true nature of this political project, it would simply have to wait until I’d finished my book – and developed a proper defensive strategy.

This was why it was such a godsend that I was contacted by the stellar investigative journalist Khadija Sharife in the months after Starmer’s election. She had been investigating reputation management firms like Apco, and similar, more hands-on, outfits like Audere International, and the way they conducted their business.

Khadija explained that my name had come up in her investigations. She confirmed that Labour Together had hired Apco. She told me that they were looking into all aspects of my life, although she did not know the full details.

The upside was it allowed me to write about the experience in the preface to my book and make a plan to, in effect, smuggle the book into the public domain without attracting further unhelpful interventions.

But it also meant that Jess and I lived, for months, with severe anxiety. It was unnerving to know that our family was so exposed. And it was deeply, profoundly lonely. How can you tell people that you are being targeted by a thinktank without seeming like a crank? We might as well have told people we were being stalked by an ice-cream truck.

Two years later, that anxiety has passed, only to be replaced by deep and abiding frustration: there has been little accountability. 

Simons has faced only the most limited comeuppance. He has displayed little public remorse for how Apco targeted me, my family and SWI colleagues. In execrable exchanges on X, he agreed that the Apco story was a “nothingburger”. In another late-night post, he dismissively characterised the story thus: “A think tank paid a PR firm to find out if it’s private [sic] were obtained through an illegal hack. HOWZATT.” 

Starmer soon sent the matter to the Cabinet Office for investigation – the same office in which Simons was a junior minister. When the details of the Operation Cannon report became public, Starmer referred the Cabinet Office investigation to Sir Laurie Magnus, the independent adviser on ethics. Magnus was asked to establish whether Simons had violated the ministerial code, which requires ministers to act with honesty.

On the same day that Starmer referred it to Magnus, Simons mistakenly posted to a Labour party WhatsApp group: “Jonny [Reynolds – the Labour chief whip] rang. PM will ask Laurie to look into it. Aim is to move fast. But PET did find I had not broken the code.” 

PET refers to the Propriety and Ethics Team of the cabinet, which had conducted a “fact-finding” exercise into Simons’s conduct. This was, incidentally, the same unit that conducted the risible “due diligence” on Peter Mandelson prior to his appointment.

Alarmed by Simons’s message, I wrote to Magnus. I sent him an email via the Cabinet Office inbox and a physical letter. I told him that I would shortly be sending him a detailed letter setting out my evidence. I told him that I believed that Simons probably did break the ministerial code on honesty. 

For example: soon after the story first broke, in early February this year, Simons had reached out to the journalist Kevin Maguire. Maguire had posted in response to the Apco revelations on X, commenting that Simons shouldn’t be a minister. The following day, Maguire posted on X that he had heard from Simons, who had told him that “he didn’t ask for British reporters to be investigated”. 

I quickly contacted Maguire to explain that I had been targeted by the Apco investigation, that I was British, and that I am a member of the National Union of Journalists. Maguire, to his credit, posted on X to reflect my version the following day. “This controversy is far from over,” he commented.

On 27 February, I sent Magnus a detailed, 14-page letter. I gave him examples of how I believed Simons had broken the ministerial code, like the one above. 

Later that day, Magnus wrote to Starmer, saying that he had found no reason to find that Simons had broken the ministerial code. However, he warned Starmer that fallout from the scandal might distract the government from its duties.

It was a typical Westminster two-step. Simons agreed to resign as minister but could wield Magnus’s letter as proof of his exoneration. In his published letter of resignation, Simons took an ugly swipe at Andrew and me. 

I was furious. 

“I simply do not understand why you did not give me the chance to give you evidence when I asked,” I wrote to Magnus a week after he had cleared Simons. “I now have serious doubts that you read it, let alone weighed it in your decision-making.”

In late March, Magnus wrote back. He confirmed that he hadn’t read my evidence – because the Cabinet Office had not sent him my emails and letters until after he had concluded his investigation into Simons.

Despite my remonstrations, Magnus has been adamant he cannot reconsider his findings because Simons is no longer a cabinet minister.

At the end of March, Simons appeared on BBC’s Newscast with Laura Kuenssberg. He was given 45 minutes to explain his conduct. Kuenssberg helpfully asked him if he was simply “naive” when he appointed a multinational firm to investigate multiple journalists looking into the slush fund that gave us a Starmer government. Simons agreed. He faced the gentlest pushback from his solicitous hosts. 

By the end, Kuenssberg was commenting that she expected him back in cabinet soon, such was the strength of his ideas and personality. She confidently informed listeners that Magnus had found Simons had done some things that might embarrass the government, but that he was basically cleared. 

I was not told about Simons’s BBC appearance or given any right of reply, even though I was mentioned repeatedly through the episode. Nor was my colleague, Andrew, or our organisation, SWI, despite also being discussed. I only found out that Simons was being rehabilitated through a softball interview after it had already aired, via a text from a friend. 

When I put this to the BBC, it said: “Mr Simons was challenged and questioned on many points he made during his Newscast interview, and alternative perspectives were included.”

The Electoral Commission has refused to reopen its investigation into Labour Together after I published my book and new documents. The decision not to reopen a probe of McSweeney was eagerly reported by sympathetic press. Less well reported was the absurd reason why the Electoral Commission declined to do so. 

In a terse statement, the Commission confirmed that it had failed to issue a formal notice of investigation to Labour Together during its investigation in 2021. This meant that the commission could not investigate Labour Together for lying or withholding evidence, because the Commission had failed to put them under oath. 

The Electoral Commission also refuses to publish anything but the scantest details of its investigation. They have rejected multiple freedom of information requests. They have told me, absurdly, that the public interest test has not been met. I am now on the dispiriting path of challenging their rejections via the Information Commissioner’s Office. If needs be, I will take it to the ICO Tribunal. But this will probably take years.

Apco has been reported to the Public Relations and Communications Association, the regulatory body that is supposed to oversee their work. I’m not getting my hopes up.

Apco has still not given me the documents to which I’m entitled under a subject access request I submitted in February. I was told it would take months to process as it was a complex, voluminous request. 

But only days ago, Democracy For Sale alleged that an Apco contractor who worked on the Labour Together investigation had been instructed by Apco’s Tom Harper to delete materials related to the investigation (although it is not clear whether the instruction was carried out). The instruction was issued even though the evidence was under a “legal hold”. 

The Financial Times says it has an audio recording of the instruction, and that Harper also sought advice on how to delete an encrypted email account he had used during the investigation. Harper explained that he had used the account to send his report to the “client” to “muddy the waters of the trace, you know, the audit trail”. Apco told the FT that it had acted promptly to preserve files and has said that Harper has denied issuing the instruction.  

My solicitors are on the case.

It is now two and a half years since I first went to the Sunday Times with my stories about Labour Together, McSweeney and Starmer. Then, many predicted that Starmer’s imminent victory would herald a return to a government of service and decency. Very few people wanted to hear that things were not quite so simple.

Now Starmer is beset by scandal. His polling is dire. Few people believe his government will last much longer. Many fret that the McSweeney and Starmer project has mortally wounded the Labour party. 

There is a tendency on the left to seek comfort in schadenfreude: to enjoy a rare moment of “I told you so”. I feel little appetite to join in. Starmer might soon be out, along with McSweeney, but the Labour Together project is not so easily dismantled. 

For years, McSweeney and his allies transformed the DNA of the Labour party. They exercised an iron grip over the bureaucracy, filling it with their factional lieutenants. Parliament is stacked with hundreds of uber-loyal MPs handpicked by McSweeney. Many have been funded by Labour Together or its associated donors; many have dutifully voted with the party leadership to proscribe Palestine Action, cut back jury trials and reduce disability benefits. 

Temporary humiliations aside, this is still McSweeney’s Labour party, filled with his friends, his associates, and even his MP wife, who is now an assistant chief whip. Any leader who replaces Starmer will confront a party radically remade in McSweeney’s image, comporting itself with Mandelson’s mien. 

The infuriating story of Labour Together strongly suggests that our democratic institutions and regulators will do little to curb the excesses of this political project, either now or in the future. Justice of the legal or regulatory variety seems far from reach. 

But there might be a more brutal, honest and undeniable sort of justice: the disdain of voters, who have come to despise this group the more they have learned about it. The public is finally clocking a political project that I have been trying to expose for years, and the threat it poses to our teetering, unhappy and febrile democracy. 

For my part, I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you all sooner.

Paul Holden is an investigative journalist and author of “The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Labour Together and the Crisis of British Democracy”