Sir Keir Starmer is facing calls to order an inquiry into a Labour think tank’s investigation into journalists as he struggles to move on from the woes facing his premiership.
Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty said it would be “only right” to have a probe into Labour Together, which helped Sir Keir win the Labour leadership.
The calls heap pressure on government minister Josh Simons, who commissioned the 2023 report on reporters investigating the group’s funding.
The Sunday Times reported that the contents of an investigation by PR consultancy Apco were informally shared with Labour figures in 2024, including current cabinet ministers and special advisers. Apco was paid £36,000 to carry out the investigation in 2023.
The paper said it contained pages of “deeply personal and false claims” about one of the journalists, Gabriel Pogrund. It also discussed his Jewish background and included false claims about personal and professional relationships. It was also reported to have made “baseless claims” that the emails underpinning the journalists’ story were likely to have come from a hack of the Electoral Commission, suspected to have been carried out by the Kremlin .
The Conservative Party has written to Labour Party chair Anna Turley, urging her to investigate Mr Simons’s role in the decision to hire Apco.
It also urged Labour to investigate the role of other Labour Together directors, who include “serving cabinet ministers”, and to set out whether the party still considers it appropriate for Labour MPs to receive cash from the think tank.
The Labour Party should suspend all engagement with Labour Together “until all allegations have been independently investigated”, the Tories said.
The letter, from Tory chair Kevin Hollinrake, concluded: “Once again, the government is distracted from the serious challenges facing our country.
“The public deserve the full, unredacted facts about this latest scandal to engulf the top of the Labour Party. Nothing less will suffice.”
In a statement, Mr Hollinrake said: “Labour Together’s behaviour shows a worrying contempt for the free press, a fundamental foundation of our democracy.
“With its close and widely known links to the heart of government, serious questions must be answered about who was aware of these actions, including whether senior figures around the prime minister knew.
“After Starmer’s attempts to deflect from the Mandelson-Epstein affair, the public will accept nothing less than full transparency.”
Mr Simons was an ally of Morgan McSweeney, who previously ran Labour Together and who resigned from No 10 last week as the Mandelson scandal engulfed Downing Street. Mr Simons told the paper he said he had asked for information to be removed before passing the report to the intelligence agency GCHQ. No other British journalists were investigated as part of any document he or Labour Together ever received, he also said.
John McDonnell, Labour’s former chancellor, has called for an independent inquiry into the affair.
He said it was clear to him as ”secretary of the NUJ’s parliamentary group if true this is unacceptable”.
Another Labour MP, Karl Turner, called on the prime minister himself to look at the issue and said he should meet Mr McDonnell “to discuss” it.
Nadhim Zahawi, the former Conservative chancellor who has since defected to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, led demands for Sir Keir to reveal what he knew of the investigation.
He said: “This is a huge story. If this was any other party, the calls for an investigation would be deafening..”
Mr Doughty told Times Radio: “It’s only right that if there is an investigation, that’s able to run its course, and that we understand what happened. I want to see a country where journalists are able to do their job without fear or favour.”
Source: UK Politics - www.independent.co.uk
