British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has ordered an investigation into a report compiled by a Labour-aligned think tank that attempted to implicate journalists in a non-existent Russian conspiracy.
Left-wing think tank Labour Together allegedly paid $49,000 to APCO Worldwide, a U.S.-based public affairs firm, seeking to expose the “backgrounds and motivations” of reporters who wrote a damaging story about the think tank in 2023.
Starmer said on Monday that he had no knowledge of the alleged smear campaign, which sought to link the Sunday Times reporters to the Kremlin, and that it “absolutely needs to be looked into.”
“There will be a Cabinet Office investigation into the allegations. And quite right too — so, that is already in place,” Starmer told the press.
The covert blitz against the Sunday Times reporters — Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke — began after they published a 2023 report detailing Labour Together’s failure to declare approximately $990,000 of donations between 2017 and 2020.
Their article outlined how Labour Together had been fined in 2021 by the nation’s Electoral Commission after authorities found 20 breaches of campaign finance law.
Then-head of Labour Together, Josh Simons, commissioned APCO to produce an intelligence report on the “backgrounds and motivations” of Pogrund and Yorke, with the project name “Operation Cannon.”
APCO Senior Director Tom Harper, a former employee of the Sunday Times, reportedly prepared the dossier.
The Operation Cannon report cited “discreet human source enquiries” to allege that emails used as the foundation for the Sunday Times’s exposé were likely to have been obtained through a Kremlin hacking operation against the Electoral Commission.
“The likeliest culprit is the Russian state, or proxies of the Russian state,” Harper wrote in the report, speculating that the Sunday Times story “could be seen as destabilizing to the UK and also in the interests of Russia’s strategic foreign policy objectives.”
APCO also provided thorough details about Pogrund’s Jewish faith and perceived ideological agenda.
These details about Pogrund were redacted when APCO passed the Operation Cannon report to the Government Communications Headquarters’ National Cyber Security Centre, which declined to investigate the Russian conspiracy hypothesis.
“We are deeply committed to upholding our values and standards as an organisation and treat any suggestion that we have failed to do so very seriously,” APCO said of the investigation into its work, according to the Financial Times. “We are in the process of undertaking a detailed internal review of the project.”
Simons, who is now a member of parliament and Cabinet Office minister, initially dismissed the idea that Labour Together targeted the journalists as “nonsense,” asserting that APCO was commissioned to “look into a suspected illegal hack” that had “nothing to do” with the Sunday Times.
However, his tone changed after various outlets, including the BBC, independently confirmed that the contract with APCO instructed the firm to investigate “the sourcing, funding and origins” of the Sunday Times story.
Democracy for Sale, citing a copy of the contract, asserts that it explicitly states the Operation Cannon report “should provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up for us in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together.”
“I was surprised and shocked to read the report extended beyond the contract by including unnecessary information on Gabriel Pogrund,” Simons said, according to the BBC. “I asked for this information to be removed before passing the report to GCHQ.”
At the time that APCO was hired by Labour Together, its London office was being run by Labour Party adviser Kate Forrester — the wife of Paul Ovenden, Starmer’s then-head of communications.
“I was aware of the work happening. I may have been copied in on some emails,” Forrester told Democracy for Sale, but maintained that her “involvement was very sort of peripheral.”
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Additionally, Morgan McSweeney, who recently stepped down as Starmer’s chief of staff following revelations about his role in the Lord Peter Mandelson affair, was head of Labour Together at the time of the campaign finance law violations later reported by the Sunday Times.
The Labour Together scandal comes at the worst possible time as Starmer remains mired in the Mandelson affair and is promising to provide transparency on how his government failed to flag the former ambassador’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
