A government minister has been accused of paying a PR and lobbying firm to investigate the sources of journalists before he entered Parliament.
Josh Simons, cabinet office minister and chief executive of the pro-Starmer think-tank Labour Together, employed the global advisory and advocacy firm, APCO Worldwide, to attempt to identify how reporters had discovered details about the group’s funding.
APCO Worldwide confirmed it would “investigate the sourcing, funding and origins of a Sunday Times article about Labour Together” as well as future work by two political journalists, in a contract seen by the BBC.
The investigative website, Democracy for Sale, was the first publication to report the allegations. The site analysed Labour Together’s response to the media outlets covering the fact the think tank did not declare more than £700,000 in donations between 2017 and 2020.
In September 2021, Labour Together was fined £14,250 by the Electoral Commission over late reporting of donations.
According to Democracy For Sale, APCO was paid at least £30,000 to carry out the investigation in 2023, when the think tank was run by Mr Simons.
In a briefing provided to Labour Together, the firm identified two potential sources of the story – either a leak from the Electoral Commission or the think tank, or “illegally-gathered information collected from the 2023 hack of the Electoral Commission that has been passed on to the author”, the website said.
Briefings from APCO are reported to have identified other journalists as “significant persons of interest”, while discussing points of “leverage” over some reporters.
According to the website, APCO also produced a memo that seemed intended to discredit South African journalist Paul Holden, who collaborated on The Sunday Times story.
In the leaked contract, APCO Worldwide said it intended to “establish who and what are behind the coordinated attacks on Labour Together”, according to the BBC.
The firm said it would “provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up for use in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together” using open source and digital forensics work, the broadcaster reported.
Mr Simons said on social media platform X, that the claims that he wanted to investigate journalists are “nonsense”. He said he asked APCO Worldwide 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”.
“APCO’s investigation never fully got to the bottom of this,” he wrote on X.
“Those who know me know I think the work of journalists is vital to our democracy.”
Labour Together and APCO Worldwide have not responded toThe Independent’s requests for comment.
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