The New Risk

If there were to be a by-election at Makerfield, then let us hope that Labour would not have the wit to field Andy Burnham. Its sitting MP is the Minister for Digital ID, having falsely reported to GCHQ that critical journalists, including Keir Starmer’s Independent opponent at the General Election, were Russian spies. That is as bad as it sounds. So bad that even The Times feels moved to opine:

Josh Simons is a rising star of the Labour Party. He may have only been elected in 2024 as the MP for Makerfield, but he has rapidly risen to become a junior minister in the Cabinet Office. At the start of the year, the 32-year-old was handed extra responsibilities for implementing the digital ID scheme. A former academic who studied at Cambridge and Harvard before a private sector career (rare in Labour), he could expect to rise through the ministerial ranks in the coming years. Yet Mr Simons has plunged the government into scandal, once again, after revelations about his conduct during his time leading Labour Together, the influential think tank that took on the hard left and played a major role in making Sir Keir Starmer prime minister. Between 2017 and 2020, when the organisation was led by Morgan McSweeney, £730,000 of donations were not declared — a strikingly large sum for a Westminster think tank. This mistake, which was later made public by The Sunday Times, resulted in a significant fine by the Electoral Commission. The watchdog did not buy Labour Together’s explanation that it was an unintentional administrative error.

Labour Together should have accepted its mistake and moved on. Instead it commissioned a murky investigation into the journalists who broke the story. By now, Mr McSweeney had gone to work directly for Sir Keir and Mr Simons took his place as director. The latter paid £36,000 to Apco Worldwide, a public relations agency, to investigate the “backgrounds and motivations” of several journalists, including Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke from The Sunday Times. The resulting 58-page dossier included a baseless allegation that the story originated from Russian hacking and besmirched the character of the reporters.

The Apco dossier was circulated widely in the upper echelons of the Labour Party. The document was used to start a whispering campaign to discredit Mr Pogrund and Mr Yorke. Mr Simons was convinced enough by the Russian plot allegation to submit a version to the National Cyber Security Centre, an arm of GCHQ. Mr Simons has said that details about the British journalists were not passed on to intelligence officials, but reports now suggest otherwise. The reality is, these reporters were doing nothing more than their jobs.

Mr Simons has said he was shocked and furious that the report “extended beyond the contract” by going into Mr Pogrund’s private life, adding that it was “nonsense” that Labour Together wanted to investigate British journalists. Yesterday that was seemingly belied as an email was published between Apco and Mr Simons setting out the agreement to “investigate the sourcing, funding and origins of a Sunday Times article”. The email said it would include “human intelligence investigation”, going beyond looking into an alleged hack.

On social media, Mr Simons described the Labour Together saga as “a think tank paid a PR firm to find out if it’s private were [sic] obtained through an illegal hack”, adding: “HOWZATT.” That seems to have been undermined by the leaked email setting out the breadth of the Apco brief. The Cabinet Office has launched an investigation into the claims, the very department in which Mr Simons now serves. It was already clear that he should step aside, even temporarily, to allow for a full investigation. With the new risk that he may have breached the ministerial code with misleading statements, he must do so immediately.