When Will the Guardian Admit Its Part in the Labour Together Scandal?

There but for the grace of the Guardian goes Josh Simons. The Labour MP for Makerfield resigned from his ministerial post in February – though likely wouldn’t be an MP at all had the Guardian acted on information it was offered shortly before the general election.

Simons’ troubles began when the Sunday Times revealed that his shady think-tank-cum-Super-Pac, Labour Together, had paid the American PR firm Apco £36,000 to discredit journalists investigating the outfit (Simons claims his intention was never to investigate journalists). On Simons’ hit list was the Guardian’s very own Henry Dyer.

The paper had a golden opportunity to stop Simons in his tracks, but passed it up. In 2024, having been supplied with the Apco report, the Guardian contacted one of its subjects, independent journalist Paul Holden, threatening to run a story based on it. In response, Holden told the Guardian he had evidence that Labour Together was smearing him. Pippa Crerar, the paper’s political editor, didn’t seem interested.

Now, if a fellow journalist were to tip me that an organisation run by a soon-to-be Labour politician was seeding fake stories about them to the media, I would be all over it like a rash. Perhaps Holden was the wrong type of journalist for Crerar? Or perhaps Simons was just the right type of politician?

I’ve known for a long time that Simons isn’t always honest: I broke the story shortly before the 2024 election that he falsely claimed to have left Jeremy Corbyn’s office over antisemitism (he was demoted for suspected leaking, then left). Had Crerar read my report, perhaps she wouldn’t have been so credulous when Simons’ dodgy dossier made its way onto her desk. Or perhaps she would: Crerar’s colleagues say she and the rest of the lobby team pushed hard for the paper to back Keir Starmer “100%” in the 2024 general election.

In February 2024, Crerar wrote to Holden saying she was hours away from publishing a story about him, quite clearly based on the Apco report. Crerar’s story would suggest that Holden’s reporting on Labour Together in his then-forthcoming book, The Fraud, was based on information obtained from a 2021 hack of the Electoral Commission, likely by a hostile power such as China or Russia.

Crerar added she “understood” that the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ, was investigating Holden over the allegedly hacked data, and that she had “confirmed the nature and scope of the investigation with my own colleagues at the NCSC”.

Yet no such investigation into Holden ever existed, as the Guardian belatedly reported this year. Labour Together had approached the authority with the Apco report, but the NCSC politely told them to get lost. Did Crerar’s NCSC contacts mislead her, or did she mislead Holden?

Either way, Holden was suitably furious. “I want to make this very, very clear,” he replied. “If there is any hint in your reporting that I received material from the hack… I will immediately be bringing defamation proceedings against you and the Guardian.” 

“The allegation… is not only false, but I can positively prove it to be false” (his emphasis). Holden had evidence, which he supplied to the Sunday Times when it asked, that his book was sourced entirely legitimately from Labour whistleblowers. Holden was offering to share it with Crerar, too. No amount of emphasis could convince Crerar, however, who disappeared on Holden.

Cut to two years later, and the Guardian was loudly joining in the media chorus condemning Simons and his “alleged smear campaign” – conveniently forgetting that its own political editor had effectively been tipped off about the story two years earlier.

Instead of admitting to its own part in enabling Simons by ignoring crucial evidence of his wrongdoing just as he was about to get elected to parliament, Crerar defended her role in the scandal, tweeting that by not publishing Labour Together’s false allegations about Holden, she had done her due diligence. 

Yet Simons’ smears were a story in themselves, as Crerar’s counterparts at the Sunday Times recognised. Why didn’t Crerar, the political editor of the biggest progressive newspaper in the world, give shorter shrift to Labour Together’s claims, and greater weight to Holden’s? Neither Crerar nor the Guardian responded to Novara Media’s requests for comment, so there’s no knowing for certain – though one possible answer lies in the cosy, incestuous social world of UK journalism, particularly the Westminster lobby.

On Wednesday, Caroline Wheeler announced she was leaving the Sunday Times, where she has been political editor since 2021, to do the same job at the i Paper. Wheeler just so happens to be the wife of Tom Harper, the former Sunday Times journalist who authored the Apco report, a fact many linked to Wheeler’s sudden job change (arguably a demotion, given the i’s significantly smaller circulation). Who was straight out of the gate to congratulate her? None other than Pippa Crerar.

Responding to the Apco scandal, Simons claimed he’d wanted to “look into a suspected illegal hack, which had nothing to do with UK journalists at Sunday Times, Guardian or any other brilliant UK newspaper”. Simons’ implication was clear: that by not being employed by a “brilliant UK newspaper”, Holden – an investigative journalist of 15 years’ standing, whose work has appeared in a plethora of major media outlets (including the Guardian!), and supported corruption investigations in his home country of South Africa – was fair game. Simons calculated that no ‘real’ journalists were going to leap to Holden’s defence – and he was correct.

In the Guardian’s scoop directly linking Simons to the Apco report, the paper let an anonymous source say this: “Those close to [Labour Together] said they were concerned that the information accessed by Holden and Taibbi originated from a hack of the Electoral Commission itself,” the report said. Incredibly, the reporters – including, ironically, Apco mark Henry Dyer – hadn’t even approached Holden for comment. Only after Holden complained to the Guardian was his response added, almost three weeks later – by which point, everyone had moved on.

As well as hinting at the perverse loyalties Fleet Street encourages, Crerar’s actions suggest a troubling sickness in our media and political class. Whether it’s Starmer doubling down on his appointment of Peter Mandelson, or Crerar defending her decision not to take Paul Holden more seriously, the British establishment is anaphylactically allergic to admitting fault. Sometimes it’s best to take the L. 

In a recent piece about trumped-up allegations of antisemitism against the Green party, I admitted to having been fooled by the BBC’s Panorama documentary about Labour antisemitism. Miraculously, I survived! Yet some Malcolm Tucker has convinced politicians and political editors that apologising is cuck behaviour. Maybe they should make it their new kink.