KEY Starmerite group Labour Together getting caught hiring a lobbying firm that appears to have spied on and tried smearing journalists is becoming a major scandal.

But it’s only breaking out because Labour Together’s lobbyist used smears against mainstream newspaper journalists. Smears those newspapers frequently — and equally baselessly — use against the left.

In 2023 the Sunday Times published a story exposing how Labour Together failed to declare big donations from multimillionaires who funded their campaign to make Keir Starmer leader.

Labour Together’s campaign was fundamentally dishonest, using Starmer to pretend they wanted a “soft-left” Labour, rather than the right-wing, pro-multimillionaire Labour leadership they created.

Labour Together, then led by current Cabinet Office Minister Josh Simons, hired a lobbying firm, Apco, to investigate the journalists. With Labour Together’s backing, Apco created a cock-and-bull tale that a “Russian hack” had exposed the organisation’s wrongdoing, a fake tale to smear the journalists as somehow working with Vladimir Putin against the Labour leadership.

All newspapers are denouncing the smear. The scandal looks set to hurt Starmer and stop Simons’s career. All thoroughly deserved.

But we should note two things. First, the Labour Together-backed smear was not just against “respectable” Sunday Times journalists like Gabriel Pogrund, it was also aimed at smearing more radical and left investigative journalists who led the uncovering of both Labour Together’s “funny money” and the smear campaign itself. These included,  notably, Paul Holden, author of The Fraud, a book exposing the shenanigans behind Starmer’s rise.

Second, we should see while the Sunday Times, Times, Telegraph and so on are objecting to the “Russian hack” smear being used against “mainstream” journalists, they regularly support their use against the left.

Throughout 2018 these papers claimed Jeremy Corbyn was a paid agent of Czech secret services in the 1980s, even though this meant believing the absurd rambling of a former Czech spy who claimed his fellow spies were behind the Live Aid concert. In 2018 these papers also claimed Corbyn was hiding a file on him from East Germany’s Stasi spy agency, which might show their support. The file was supposedly created when Corbyn went on a 1979 East German motorbike holiday with Diane Abbott. The story was fake: there was no file. The motorbike holiday itself was completely made up.

Arguably this is a case of smearers being smeared. Some of the Sunday Times journalists now being attacked by Labour Together previously — and secretly — used Labour Together’s anti-left dossiers.

Labour Together trawled through Corbyn-supporting Facebook pages in 2018 to try and use extreme and unrepresentative comments by members of the public to tarnish Corbyn and his team.

The Sunday Times published a major anti-Corbyn story based on their smeary dossier, without admitting it was created secretly by Labour Together.

The Labour Together scandal is a bit like a mini version of president Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Nixon authorised a vast programme of spying, smears and destabilisation against anti-war, civil rights and other activists, called Cointelpro.

However Nixon only faced major press exposure when he used the same tactics against the moderate, respectable Democrat Party in the Watergate affair.

Watergate being uncovered by the mainstream press did lead to exposure of the bigger, more vicious Cointelpro.

We will have to make great efforts to make sure the current Labour Together-Apco smears story also leads to more exposure of the wider, more frequent smears of the left.