ONE of the most disgraceful episodes in the sordid history of the right-wing Labour Together faction was its hiring of professional snoopers to spy on and smear journalists looking into its misdeeds.

Their main target was Paul Holden, author of The Fraud, an immensely detailed exposé of the dishonesty, unscrupulous factionalism and outright illegality which attended Keir Starmer’s rise to power in the Labour Party and the country.

His own privacy and that of his family was rudely violated and absurd allegations about them passed off as fact. APCO, the blundering contractor hired to do this dirty work, extended their scope to also smear Gabriel Pogrund, a Sunday Times reporter who wrote up some of Holden’s findings, and Andrew Feinstein, a professional colleague of Holden who also, not irrelevantly, ran a powerful campaign to unseat Starmer in his Camden constituency in the 2024 election.

Still worse, this report was then submitted to the security services to try to provoke a probe into Russian-inspired hacking, an allegation for which there was not the slightest evidence. 

Indeed, Labour Together probably did not believe the claim itself, since the reference to GCHQ was purely part of a media strategy to divert attention from their perhaps conscious failure to declare £730,000 in donations despite repeated official reminders to do so, the subject of Holden’s reporting.

Labour Together’s director at the time of this failure was Morgan McSweeney, architect of Starmer’s rise and subsequently his chief of staff in Downing Street.

This cynical hit job was initiated by McSweeney’s successor at Labour Together, Josh Simons, later parachuted into the Commons as a Labour MP, later still made a Cabinet Office minister, a post the scandal forced him to resign from.

More recently, Simons has left Parliament altogether, purportedly to create the vacancy in Makerfield which Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is now contesting. It may be that this particular kitchen was getting too hot for him.

It has been rumoured that Burnham has offered Simons a top Downing Street job if his drive to succeed Starmer is crowned with success, as a reward for services rendered. We must hope that there is no foundation to the tale.

Documents released by Labour Together, now rebranding itself as Think Labour in an attempt to move on from its squalid – indeed, criminal – past, in response to subject access requests have shed further light on the episode.

They reveal that Simons, along with APCO snoop Tom Harper, met McSweeney and Paul Ovenden, both senior Labour Party officials at the time, both later forced to leave Downing Street amid separate scandals, to discuss the smear report on Holden, Pogrund and others in early 2024.

This places the Labour Party itself at the heart of the operation against independent journalism. It also raises the most relevant question of all – did McSweeney and Ovenden tell their boss what Labour Together was up to?

McSweeney’s dismissive attitude towards Starmer is well known. However, it strains credulity to imagine that he said nothing to the Labour leader about what his former associates at Labour Together had told him.

At any event, it is past time that this scandal was subject to proper independent investigation, as John McDonnell and other Labour MPs have urged.

Trade unions should be heard on the subject, too. Every affiliate must be alarmed at what is dribbling out. Their party was being run by people that would have been happily at home in Rochard Nixon’s Watergate-era White House.

Unions should use their leverage to get behind the demands for an independent investigation. They cannot stand aside from a scandal which is further staining Labour.