A political scandal is shaking Britain after reports that Labour-linked figures hired a PR firm to spy on journalists probing funding tied to PM Keir Starmer.
An extraordinary political scandal has erupted in Britain, raising the prospect that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s already embattled government could tumble. On February 5, it was revealed that Labour Together, a dubious ‘think tank’ intimately intertwined with the Labour Party, paid shady PR firm APCO Worldwide tens of thousands of pounds to spy on journalists. Primary targets were reporters exposing damning information on Labour Together's finances and central role in Starmer’s corrupt rise to power. Others were considered “significant persons of interest” for reasons unclear - including me.
The controversy became turbocharged on February 14, when The Times published a front-page investigation into how two of the outlet’s journalists, Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, were subjects of intense interest to APCO. In November 2023, the pair revealed how £730,000 had been surreptitiously funnelled to Starmer’s 2020 leadership campaign via Labour Together. The organization’s then-chief, Morgan McSweeney - who resigned as the Prime Minister’s top advisor on February 8 in disgrace - failed to declare the funding, a longstanding criminal offence under British law.
The story prompted Labour Together to hire APCO, which runs propaganda campaigns for notorious Zionist entity weapons merchant Elbit Systems. The company was tasked with digging up dirt on a number of journalists, including Pogrund and Yorke, and identifying their information sources. A resultant APCO report charged - without evidence - that damaging leaked information on Labour Together’s finances originated from a Russian hack of Britain’s Electoral Commission in 2023. The report was shared with the National Cyber Security Council, a unit of the notorious signals spying agency GCHQ.
While the NCSC declined to launch an investigation, senior government ministers briefed pliant reporters that the non-existent “Russian hack” had been referred to GCHQ. These undisclosed interventions successfully blunted media interest in Labour Together’s undeclared donation scandal, with mainstream outlets leaving the story alone thereafter. Meanwhile, The Guardian threatened Paul Holden, who led investigations into Labour Together, with publication of a libelous article alleging he was under investigation by British authorities for receiving illegally obtained information from Russia. The Guardian dropped the story due to legal threats. (more...)
Britain’s Labour party spied on journalists, including me
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