Keir Starmer Allies Funded Smear Campaign Against Journalists

A think tank that helped get Keir Starmer into power paid for a smear campaign against journalists who were investigating how it was funded. 

Labour Together gave the US lobby group Apco £36k to look into the “backgrounds and motivations” of two Sunday Times journalists who reported on undeclared donations.

The aim of Apco’s work was to discredit the story by falsely suggesting it was part of a Russian conspiracy, or based on emails hacked by the Kremlin, the newspaper reported on Sunday.   

Apco produced a 58-page report containing “deeply personal and false claims” about the two reporters – Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke – the newspaper said. Pogrund, the paper’s Whitehall editor, and Yorke, its deputy political editor, were named as “persons of significant interest” in the report.  

The journalists revealed in 2023 that Labour Together had failed to declare £730k of donations between 2017 and 2020. The group claimed this was an administrative error – but it was fined just over £14k by the Electoral Commission for committing 20 breaches of campaign finance laws.

At the time of the undeclared donations, Labour Together was run by Morgan McSweeney, who resigned as Starmer’s chief of staff this month over his role in appointing Peter Mandelson, a friend of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as US ambassador. 

McSweeney used the group as a vehicle for researching how to remove Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour leadership and replace him with rightwingers. 

It has previously been reported that Labour Together investigated Corbyn ally Andrew Feinstein, who stood against Keir Starmer in the 2024 general election, as well as Declassified UK reporter John McEvoy.   

The think tank also hired a private investigator to look into Paul Holden, whose book The Fraud helped force the resignation of Starmer’s director of strategy, Paul Ovenden, in September last year.

It sought information on Holden’s personal life hoping to find “leverage” to use against him and tried to place damaging stories about him in the media, an investigation by the National found.

“I suspect they’re deeply worried about what I intend to reveal about the political project that brought Starmer to power,” Holden told the newspaper in September.