Declassified UK: Will this scandal bring down Keir Starmer?

Posted: 20th February 2026

Such is the omnicrisis of the Labour government that it’s hard to tell what the final nail in Keir Starmer’s coffin will be. But the Labour Together scandal has got to be up there.

It was revealed two weeks ago that Labour Together, a thinktank once run by Starmer’s right-hand man Morgan McSweeney, secretly paid a PR firm to investigate journalists.

The director of Labour Together at the time was Josh Simons, who is currently the MP for Makerfield and is a minister in the cabinet office.

The PR firm brought in to do Labour Together’s dirty work was APCO Worldwide, whose previous clients include Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms firm.

Under a £36,000 contract, APCO was tasked with investigating the source of a leak about Labour Together’s failure to declare £730,000 in donations. The PR firm subsequently compiled a dossier naming several UK journalists as “significant persons of interest”.

I was among those journalists to be investigated by APCO alongside The Sunday Times’ Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, The Guardian’s Henry Dyer, The Racket’s Matt Taibbi, and The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg.

The main target, however, was investigative journalist Paul Holden.

He was the key figure looking into Labour Together’s expenses, and his recently-published book The Fraud exposes that thinktank’s dodgy operations in astonishing detail.

Simons reportedly forwarded a version of APCO’s dossier to Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) which contained unsubstantiated claims about the information coming from a Russian hack.

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After this, Labour Together briefed the press about the NCSC’s involvement in the affair, and the Guardian’s Pippa Crerar emailed Holden to say a story would be published about “an Electoral Commission hack” – effectively laundering the thinktank’s smear campaign.

But it gets even worse. Simons also reportedly instructed powerhouse law firm Mishcon de Reya to warn The Telegraph about Holden’s “motivation” in an attempt to kill the message by delegitimising the messenger.

Simons, whose job is looking more precarious by the day, declared last week that “the work of journalists is vital to our democracy” – an odd statement given that Labour Together had previously spearheaded a smear campaign against media organisation The Canary.

For his part, Starmer says he “didn’t know anything” about all of this. One might be more inclined to believe the PM had his former chief of staff not known about it, and had his former head of communications not been the partner of the head of APCO’s office.

The prime minister has now ordered an investigation into the scandal which will be conducted by the Cabinet Office, where Simons and several other Labour Together-linked ministers sit.

So what can we conclude from this sordid affair?

Britain’s corporate media was happy to look the other way or even conspire inLabour Together’s dirty tricks when they were being deployed against the left.

But with establishment journalists caught up in the foray, and the Starmer project looking like a busted flush, it seems safe to now admit that a line was crossed.

John McEvoy

Chief Reporter
Declassified UK