WHAT do Josh Simons and Nigel Farage have in common — apart from the nationalism, obviously?

Answer: They both blame embarrassing revelations on Russian hacks.

The disgraced ex-minister, and now ex-MP, was running Labour Together when it contrived, with the full knowledge of key Keir Starmer aide Morgan McSweeney, to blame the exposure of its law-breaking on a Russian hack.

The truth was that investigative journalist Paul Holden had uncovered the truth behind Labour Together’s failure to declare donations in line with the law through entirely legitimate journalistic enterprise.

It suited Simons to spin another narrative to the media — that his organisation, then busy shifting the Labour Party to the right and preparing, most inadequately as it turned out, to take office, was the victim of interference by a hostile state.

The lie — for that it what it was — would, in his reasoning, divert attention from the original offence and would protect McSweeney, above all, from the consequences of his wrongdoing which, Holden had revealed, may perhaps not have been as accidental as first asserted.

Starmer’s top confidante and strategist had been running Labour Together at the time of the failure to report the donations, and was therefore vulnerable to any exposé.

And now the leader of Reform is caught in the headlights of the revelation of a personal donation of five million pounds from crypto billionaire Nigel Harborne, the party’s main founder.

The slippery Farage has test-driven several excuses since the gift was first disclosed in The Guardian.

First, it was to ensure his personal security for evermore. Then, it was a reward for his tireless campaigning to secure Brexit.

When neither of these appeared to land well, Farage defaulted on — a Russian hack. Why the Putin government should be interested in embarrassing one of the British politicians most friendly to it was unexplained.

A former director of the National Cyber-Security Centre has dismissed Farage’s claims, just as the NCSC declined the invitation to participate in Simons’s media plan by investigating his unevidenced nonsense.

So far, all this proves is that Russophobia is now the go-to cover story for all sorts of dodgy political dealings. Of course, Russia has its own intelligence operation and Britain is one of its targets, as Moscow is one of MI6’s.

But the idea that the hand of the Kremlin is behind every episode that someone powerful would rather keep secret is risible, and only serves to protect the most ignoble chancers in politics.

However, there is a significant difference between the tale of Simons and Farage’s story.  In the case of the latter, The Guardian is outraged, surely rightly, to have its reporting smeared as a Russian manipulation.

Yet when Simons came to peddle his innuendo the urinal into which he chose to leak was — The Guardian.

Its reporters were nothing loathe to give his wild assertions credibility and told Holden they were about to run a story saying, falsely, that the security services were investigating his sources.

In the end, legal threats stayed the paper’s hand. But the double standards are striking.

They are testimony to the degree to which, before the election, wide sections of the media bought into the Starmer agenda and were only too happy to be led by the nose by its spinners and smear-merchants, just as their forebears once were by Peter Mandelson.

Perhaps the eminent bastion of the liberal media will have learned a lesson. For the rest of us, a lesson is the importance of the working class having its own independent press and media which cannot be suborned by the self-serving fairy tales of the powerful and unscrupulous.