A Moment of Clarification

Professor Martin O’Neill writes:

A truism of political scandals is that the cover-up is often more damaging than the original offence. It was not the break-in at the Watergate building but the obstruction, misdirection, and weaponisation of federal agencies that forced Nixon from office. This pattern, in which the response to wrongdoing reveals as much as the wrongdoing itself, is worth keeping in mind as the story of Josh Simons and Labour Together continues to unfold.

Labour Together was established in 2015 by Labour MP Jon Cruddas, ostensibly to help bridge the divide between the party’s competing factions during the Jeremy Corbyn period. From 2017, however, it fell under the control of the now recently departed Morgan McSweeney. McSweeney had reportedly reacted in horror to Labour’s impressive performance at the 2017 general election, which had punctured the dogma that a left programme could not appeal to the British electorate, and was determined to defeat Corbyn and the left within the party.

In his project to remake the Labour Party, McSweeney encountered little difficulty in finding wealthy donors. Funding flowed in from figures including City financier and hedge-fund manager Martin Taylor and businessman Sir Trevor Chinn, who, as Declassified UK has reported, has funded both Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel since the 1980s. (In 2024, Chinn received the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honor for service to the state of Israel.) For McSweeney, it was essential to defeat the left, but his method for doing so was not to engage in public debate about ideas. Instead, he preferred methods that avoided public scrutiny — with the result that both the true aims of the Labour Together project and the identity of its funders were not publicly disclosed.

Whatever one’s view of battles between left and right wings of the Labour Party, transparency in political finance is a fundamental requirement of democratic politics. Citizens are entitled to know who finances organised political activity and draw their own conclusions about the interests at play. This does not seem to have been a principle that McSweeney was keen to honour.

It took several years for Labour Together’s opaque funding to come to light. Inquiries from the Electoral Commission to McSweeney eventually exposed £730,000 in unreported donations. The matter only entered the public domain in November 2023 after investigative journalist Paul Holden — willing to pursue stories about which Westminster lobby journalists were strikingly incurious — shared his findings with Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke of The Sunday Times. Holden had uncovered the irregularities while researching his book, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy, a work that the establishment press has been trying hard to ignore.

Labour Together had been largely quiescent since 2020, when Keir Starmer ascended to the party leadership, and McSweeney took up his role of Starmer’s Chief of Staff in opposition. In 2022, however, McSweeney handed the directorship to Simons, an ambitious young researcher. The New Statesman described Simons’s incarnation of Labour Together as ‘the provisional wing of Starmerism’, while a Financial Times labelled it, more ominously, ‘Morgan McSweeney’s Wagner group.’

Silencing Scrutiny

What followed, when questions arose in the press over Labour Together’s financial reporting to the Electoral Commission, was both shocking and revealing. Rather than addressing the statutory failures publicly and apologising, Simons hired APCO, a ‘reputation management company’, to conduct a private investigation into the lives, connections, and backgrounds of the journalists scrutinising the organisation. APCO is reported to have been paid £36,000 to produce and deliver to Simons a dossier scrutinising not only Holden, Pogrund, and Yorke, but also other journalists who had taken an interest in Labour Together’s activities, including US journalist Matt Taibbi, Guardian writer Henry Dyer, Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone, and John McAvoy of Declassified UK.

The affair took a more troubling turn when Simons, by his own admission, forwarded a version of the dossier to Britain’s security services, sending the material to the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre). The document reportedly contained unsubstantiated allegations seeking to link the journalists in question to Russian intelligence.

Subsequently, information that these reporters were ‘under investigation’ by the NCSC was then passed on by a law firm, acting on Simons’s instructions, to journalists at national newspapers. Holden has stated publicly that in February 2024, he received an email from Pippa Crerar of The Guardian, informing him that the paper had seen information that he was being investigated by the security services and that The Guardian intended to run the story. Holden stood firm and told Crerar that the claim was defamatory and warned that he would sue if it were published. The story then evaporated, and Holden heard nothing whatever from the NCSC. One can only speculate how the security services regarded these attempts to draw them into political disputes.

The Chilling Effect

This sequence of events demands close attention. The threat that national security bodies might be drawn, even indirectly, into a dispute about party funding casts a long shadow. It suggests a marked escalation in the tactics party operatives may be prepared to deploy. Democratic politics depends on investigative journalism. Reporters must be able to examine the financial and organisational practices of powerful actors without being subjected to reputational contamination through insinuation. It may seem easy to silence inconvenient scrutiny or opposition by whispering that critics are a ‘security risk’, but once such a tactic is permissible, democratic standards are deeply degraded.

Simons and Labour Together were engaged in a smear operation to deter and discredit journalists asking questions about the £730,000 in unreported donations. It is to the credit of journalists such as Holden that they were not cowed by these tactics.

Following The Sunday Times story of 15 February 2026, this sordid story is now finally receiving broader public attention. The controversy around Simons and Labour Together is serious enough in its own right. Yet its full significance lies in what it reveals about the political culture that has taken shape inside the Labour Party during the Starmer era. 

Remaking Politics

The factional campaign waged by Labour Together and other opponents of Corbyn achieved a tactical victory against the party’s left, ensuring that his successor would pose no comparable challenge to the interests of the donor class. In doing so, however, it profoundly reshaped the party’s methods, allegiances, and instincts. The methods used to destroy Corbyn’s leadership — from coordinated smears and donor pressure to weaponised leaks — did not disappear after the 2019 election or with Starmer’s accession in 2020. Instead, this way of doing politics became standard operating procedure.

Figures such as McSweeney and Simons cut their teeth in a no-holds-barred factional war against Labour’s left. Now in government, they appear to have carried those methods with them. When journalists scrutinised their activities, they faced the same tactics once honed against internal party opponents. What is now unfolding in the Simons scandal looks less like an isolated controversy and more like the afterlife of that baleful cultural transformation within Labour.

To understand how such a situation could arise, it is worth recalling the climate inside Labour after 2015. Corbyn’s leadership prompted a determined effort by sections of the parliamentary party, donors and external advisers to reassert control and ensure that the party would never again threaten established economic interests. Labour Together was a central vehicle for that effort, coordinating funding and strategy in support of what its supporters viewed as a necessary correction.

This campaign was framed as a return to ‘seriousness’ and electoral ‘realism’. But in reality it fostered habits that transgressed Labour’s democratic traditions. Internal dissent was managed rather than engaged. Thoughtful left-wing MPs and parliamentary candidates, such as Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Faiza Shaheen, were defenestrated at the last moment before the 2024 election, replaced by pliant loyalists. There have been widespread reports, since the fall of Peter Mandelson, of his role working with McSweeney in vetting the party’s 2024 candidate list, to ensure that the left would be locked out of the Parliamentary Labour Party for a generation. Meanwhile party members who had joined in large numbers during the Corbyn period were often treated with contempt: Starmer invited them to leave the party, while another party source spoke of ‘shaking off the fleas’.

Political cultures rarely remain confined to the battles that produce them. Techniques developed for internal factional struggles have become a settled way of doing things. When the individuals and networks formed during that period moved into government, they carried those habits with them. It wasn’t only that Labour moved to the right under Starmer, it also normalised tactics that treat scrutiny and opposition as a security threat. One has only to think here of Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action, which reveals the same anti-democratic and authoritarian instincts. Cooper’s actions were held to have been unlawful by the High Court in its judgment of 13 February 2026 (a judgment now being appealed by her successor as Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood), on grounds of its violation of basic democratic rights of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. The cavalier attitude towards basic democratic rights and protections is all of a piece with the broader degeneration of values within the Labour Party.

Democracy and Its Enemies

The present controversy sits alongside broader questions about the current Labour Party’s relationship with wealth and corporate power. These issues raise even more troubling concerns about the worrying state of British democracy, and what may lie ahead of us. Observing the career of Simons since his time at Labour Together is one way of bringing these issues vividly to light.

As a reward for his work fighting against the party’s left, Simons was parachuted into the hitherto safe Labour seat of Makerfield just before the 2024 election. Given his reputation as an effective operator on the Labour right, and his connection to figures such as McSweeney, he was rapidly promoted to a ministerial role in the Cabinet Office. Simons’s current responsibilities in the Cabinet Office include work connected to Digital ID proposals — measures absent from Labour’s 2024 manifesto but closely aligned with a June 2025 Labour Together report titled BritCard: A Progressive Digital Identity for Britain. Digital identity infrastructure has long been advocated by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and is a central project of his Tony Blair Institute, which has received at least £250 million from technology billionaire Larry Ellison (who is also a major donor to the Friends of the IDF).

The Palantir State

Meanwhile, the government’s close alignment with the interests of Big Tech has even more troubling manifestations. It has entered into major contracts with Palantir, a CIA-linked data analytics firm founded by libertarian Peter Thiel, who once wrote that ‘freedom and democracy are no longer compatible’. Palantir has secured a £240 million contract with the Ministry of Defence and is being woven into NHS infrastructure.

The connection to Labour’s internal transformation runs deeper still. Palantir was a client of Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel, during a period when it was cultivating a relationship with Labour ministers. (For his part Simons previously worked at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta/Facebook.). The Palantir connection goes well beyond routine government contracting. It places sensitive public infrastructure in the hands of a company whose record has generated sustained human rights concern. Palantir has provided data infrastructure for ICE’s targeting of migrants in the United States, using medical records to identify people for deportation. It has provided systems for the IDF’s targeting operations in Gaza, raising concerns that have been documented by human rights organisations about possible complicity in violations of international law. Yet this is the firm now being entrusted with Britain’s health data and defence infrastructure.

A faction that made use of generous funding from wealthy donors to destroy its own party’s left wing now governs in partnership with a company whose founder declares democracy and freedom incompatible. The very people who will invoke ‘security concerns’ when they are confronted by inconvenient investigative journalists or octogenarian priests holding cardboard signs are at the same time content to put vital national infrastructure in the hands of a company that has no loyalty to the United Kingdom, and whose founder is on the record in saying that democracy itself should be abandoned.

Labour’s Future

The funding questions surrounding Labour Together, the attempt to discredit journalists through security-linked allegations, and the deepening entanglement between the state and major technology contractors are distinct issues. But they all point in a similar direction. In each case, significant power operates at some distance from public scrutiny. Decisions that shape the country’s direction become harder to see clearly. Democratic politics begins to look managed and controlled.

Treating the ‘Josh Simons Scandal’ as an isolated incident would miss that wider context. The Cabinet Office inquiry announced by Starmer on Monday 16 February may bring more of the facts of Labour Together’s modus operandi under McSweeney and Simons into the public domain. That Simons remains as a Cabinet Office minister, effectively presiding over scrutiny of his own conduct, suggests not. But the more troubling issue concerns the political environment that has developed within the Labour Party under Starmer’s leadership. The anti-left settlement for which Mandelson, McSweeney, and Simons worked so hard altered more than personnel. It reshaped Labour’s internal balance of power and its external alliances. Control, discipline and reassurance to influential economic actors became organising principles. Those priorities have inevitably left their mark on how this party has then behaved in government.

A functioning democracy rests on certain shared expectations: that political finance is transparent; that journalists can investigate without being tainted by insinuation; that public authority is exercised visibly and accountably; that powerful private actors do not acquire disproportionate influence over public infrastructure. When those requirements are undermined, it is wholly understandable that people would then lose faith in politics. People can see how Labour has governed under Starmer, and it is for good reason that they are now turning away from the party.

At a bare minimum, addressing the current scandal requires that Simons be immediately removed from ministerial office. His presence as a Cabinet Office minister completely undermines Starmer’s claims to have achieved a ‘reset’ since the departure of McSweeney and the expulsion of Mandelson from the party. But the questions facing Labour extend far beyond the immediate status of any individual minister. The central question is whether the internal damage done by the vicious factional reaction of Labour Together and its allies, in their tactical campaign to wrest control over the party, has so damaged Labour that its decline could now be near terminal. One may worry that there is no way back when one realises how many of the 2024 parliamentary intake were hand-picked by Mandelson and McSweeney, and generously supported by Labour Together and its donors, precisely for their acquiescence in this kind of politics. But what is the point of a Labour Party that has scorn for democracy, and puts itself at the service of the wealthy?

The case of Simons and Labour Together offers a moment of clarification. Has Labour fully capitulated to authoritarianism, secrecy, and promotion of the interests of the wealthy, or does it have the capacity to renew itself and re-engage with its own richer democratic traditions? Starmer was in many ways the creature of McSweeney’s grand project at Labour Together. He acted to remove Mandelson and McSweeney only when forced by pressure of circumstances. Removing Simons would be just a small first step in the deep structural changes that Labour now needs if it is to have any reason to survive.