In late 2023, Labour Together was ascendant. Under Keir Starmer, the group’s anointed torchbearer, Labour had a double-digit lead in the polls. Morgan McSweeney, the man who built Labour Together, was preparing Starmer for government with great hopes of cleaning up politics. Now McSweeney is out of a job, Labour Together is mired in controversy and Starmer faces urgent questions about what he knew and when.

Stories began appearing about Labour Together’s funding around November 2023. The most damaging, in a detailed report by Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, showed how, between 2017 and 2020, McSweeney had failed to declare £730,000 in political donations to the organisation. The group attributed this to administrative error.

But the story didn’t end there. Earlier this month Khadija Sharife and I revealed on Democracy for Sale that Labour Together, when it was led by now government minister Josh Simons in 2023, hired a PR firm called APCO Worldwide to investigate the “sourcing, funding and origins” of the story and to dig dirt on journalists at the Sunday Times and elsewhere who were reporting its undeclared funding. APCO was paid £36,000 to dig up this dirt. The work was led by former Sunday Times journalist Tom Harper, who suggested, without evidence, that the journalists’ reporting may have originated in a leak orchestrated by Russia or China. Labour Together did not keep these insinuations to itself. It passed some of APCO’s material to the security services, raising serious questions about whether public authorities were drawn into an effort to discredit legitimate journalism.

After closing ranks and apparently hoping that the story would go away, now........

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