America may feel divided, but laughing at the English always united us as a people. Thanks to the Keystone Cops government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, we should have plenty of entertainment this weekend.
Thursday, Racket reported on a snowballing scandal surrounding Parliamentary Secretary and House of Commons MP Josh Simons. In 2023, when Simons was at the Labour Together think tank, he hired a private PR firm called APCO to investigate a group of journalists that included Sunday Times writer Gabriel Pogrund, John McEvoy of Declassified UK, Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone, Shadow World Investigations Director Paul Holden, and me. We’d all published exposés using internal correspondence to expose financial shenanigans like future Starmer chief of staff Morgan McSweeney failing to declare £730,000 in donations to Labour Together. In return, they had us investigated and turned over the APCO report to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) — part of GCHQ, the British analog to the NSA.
First broken by Khadija Sharife and Peter Geoghegan at Democracy for Sale, the story is outrageous in its outlines but comic in a manner — forgive us, England — unique to our ex-masters in the Wanking Isles. This scandal should have been outed in full with an accompanying goring of skulls a while ago, but the Brits can’t even self-destruct efficiently. They adhere to a caste system even for public humiliation rituals.
The shoe that still hasn’t dropped is the final report prepared by APCO, a shady “global advisory” firm whose clients have included the Saudi Ministry of Economy, the Israeli arms company Elbit, and the U.S. State Department (former John Kerry aide Jonathan Winer is an APCO Senior Counselor). The APCO report, according to two sources with knowledge of its contents, falsely accuses Pogrund, Holden, and others (including me) of using material from a Russian hack in our reporting. APCO hired human operatives to “research” key figures, including South Africa resident Holden.
It was bad enough that Labour Together circulated this “research” internally, but delivering it to a spy agency in the NCSC elevated the affair to a new level of iniquity, leaving just one question — who was to blame, Simons or APCO?
Here, things get interesting. APCO’s head of media relations is Tom Harper, a former Sunday Times reporter married to current political editor Caroline Wheeler. That’s a problem only because Harper helped prepare the APCO report, which concluded that many journalists, including his former Sunday Times colleague Pogrund, were useful idiots for Russia. That was bad enough when the report’s contents were merely rumored, but late Friday night, word broke that the Sunday Times obtained a copy. “Now, he’s fucked,” said one source. The Times is owned by News UK, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. A different source added, “Simons is trying to throw APCO under the bus and distance himself.”
APCO and Simons spent a week issuing conflicting statements, each pointing a finger at the other. (Neither has responded to repeated requests for comment.) Simons first tweeted in response to a Guardian article that it was “nonsense” that he’d asked APCO to investigate journalists, adding that Labour Together had merely wanted to learn the origin of a “suspected illegal hack.” Subsequently, Simons’ office told British reporters the minister was “distressed” and “furious” to learn APCO had gone “beyond the contract,” and that he, Simons, intervened to make sure information on Pogrund — just Pogrund — had been withdrawn from the materials passed to the NCSC.
In anticipation of that statement coming out, APCO put out one of its own. The organization told Politico Europe’s Influence column a story that didn’t jibe with the Simons account about a hack. “We were retained by Labour Together to conduct research into a news article and upcoming published works to inform its communication strategy,” the firm said, adding it had a “profound respect for journalists.”
A lot now depends on what comes out in Fleet Street papers this weekend. Every string is being pulled to ensure that APCO takes the blame for a report not only commissioned by Simons (my name and Holden’s are reportedly on the contract) but delivered to the NCSC by Simons. We could see Simons resign and the APCO report published. Nothing would be surprising, though. Even some of the media organizations that were investigated by APCO played roles in Labour Together’s smear campaign.
That ball started rolling on February 8th, 2024, when Guardian Political Editor Pippa Crerar sent an email to Holden informing him the paper was running a story “tomorrow” 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.” As explained Thursday, this is a trick often deployed (see here for a case involving Klarenberg) to try to scare someone off an expose.
While the paper would underscore that there was no evidence Holden himself was involved in the “hack,” Crerar said they would still report “the NCSC probe centres on a series of private legal emails between the political think tank Labour Together, which was previously run by Morgan McSweeney, and the Electoral Commission.” The emails:
Holden replied that any “hint” that his information was obtained by hack was provably false and would incur “defamation proceedings” against her and The Guardian. “They were developing a dirty tricks campaign to spike genuine public interest reporting,” says Holden.
The promised “tomorrow” Guardian feature never came. For all intents and purposes, the matter was dormant until the Democracy For Sale piece in early February.
By the time The Guardian picked up that story last Friday, it was known that the APCO probe also ended up looking at their own writer, Henry Dyer. Nonetheless, the Guardian repeated the same scummy allegation about a Russian or Chinese hack, never mentioning this had been denied to them on the record by Holden years before:
The briefings supplied to the thinktank by APCO claim that one possible source of the Sunday Times story was a Russian or Chinese hack of the Electoral Commission.
The contract shows that Simons asked for information specifically on the sources for a book by Paul Holden about McSweeney’s role in Starmer’s rise, as well as related articles by the American journalist Matt Taibbi.
The Guardian went on to explain that APCO’s sophisticated “research” included “an examination of stories and social media posts written by the journalists,” and parroted the Labour Together accusation about an illegal hack multiple times. The internal documents in truth came either from standard freedom of information queries or from a famed leak of 500 gigabytes of material originally given to Al-Jazeera in 2022.
The one thing the Guardian got right was in noting that “Simons’ receipt of APCO’s research… has raised questions about his role as a Cabinet Office minister.” On the heels of the resignation of Downing Street chief McSweeney over Labour’s hire of Jeffrey Epstein-connected Lord Peter Mandelson, the loss of another minister so soon could be a “death blow” to the Starmer government, as one of the sources put it.
American readers should take interest in this story for several reasons. For one thing, APCO/Winer have longstanding ties to Christopher Steele and Orbis Business Intelligence, with the firms sharing sources and investigators on multiple opposition research projects dating back over a decade. APCO even employed human sources in this journalist probe that had been used by Steele in the relatively recent past. Though APCO is said to be confident it will be cleared by the UK’s Public Relations and Communications Association, which has begun a probe of its investigation of reporters, the nightmare scenario would be Trump administration officials taking an interest in its past activities.
In a broader sense, if authorities from any country dig into the private intelligence world, they’re going to find that episodes like this one are not isolated at all. It isn’t a matter of one minister hiring one firm to investigate 5-10 journalists, and a ruckus being raised only because someone picked on a Sunday Times reporter by mistake. This technique of politicians quashing damaging news by hiring private agencies to make assertions of foreign connections is in fact epidemic, and initiating NCSC investigations is only one way firms and political parties combat true information.
In another common technique, a rich person, company or political party hires a private intelligence firm to do “research.” The private spy firm then hands the material to a member of parliament or Congress, who then repeats it on the floor under privilege, perhaps citing something nebulous-sounding, like “intelligence.” Presto-blammo, even totally unsourced material is safe for newspapers to write up:
Paid smears dominate media, and many of the core swindles were on display in this British case. The main thing is finding a firm morally flexible enough to use pretend sources or phrenology or “examination of stories and social media posts” to call someone a Russian or Chinese asset in print.
From there, you just need an editor nutless enough to print it, while letting his or her own reporters be spied on. We have plenty in the States, but Fleet Street is the world’s great Mecca for jellyfish media. Will it prove it again this weekend?
Update: Our sources were right. The Sunday Times did get the APCO report, and used it as the basis of its A1 headline story yesterday:
We told Racket readers about the tension that had been caused by Labour Together’s hire of APCO to investigate the Sunday Times (and others) using a former Sunday Times writer, Tom Harper. The Sunday Times wrote that Labour Together’s response was to “spend tens of thousands of pounds of donors’ money on investigating the source” of stories against it, and that “the lobbyist chosen to oversee the inquiry was a former staff member of The Sunday Times.” We said there was concern about the contents of the APCO report because it contained false accusations of using a hacked materials and being “useful idiots for Russia.” The Sunday Times wrote:
We now know a big section of the report is devoted to what amounts to a character assassination of one of our reporters. It questions his political a\liations (thereby casting doubt on his non-partisan reporting), invents friendships with political figures with whom he has no social connection and makes false and outrageous comments about his faith, family background and anything else that can be used to smear him. Finally, another blatant lie was published: the suggestion that the reporters had been receiving hacked information from a Russian source.
As usual, there was no concern expressed for journalists who don’t belong to the club, like Paul Holden, Kit Klarenberg, or me. At least this will get a hearing.
At least they acknowledged “journalist” Matt Taibbi…..unlike some American congresswoman
Wow- but not shocking at all. I wonder if the British people are as jaded as we are regarding their government. The Russia as villains trope just doesn’t work anymore.