The Cabinet Office is looking into a Labour think tank’s investigation into journalists, a minister has said, amid calls for Sir Keir Starmer to order an inquiry.
The Prime Minister said he “didn’t know anything about” the probe, said to have been carried out by PR firm Apco Worldwide after it was hired by Labour Together following stories about the campaign group’s failure to declare more than £700,000 in donations.
Sir Keir confirmed that the Cabinet Office would be looking into the accusations “and quite right too”.
The Sunday Times said Apco was paid £36,000 to carry out the investigation in 2023, when the think tank was run by Josh Simons, now Labour MP for Makerfield and a Cabinet Office minister.
Asked whether he would launch an inquiry into the accusations during a visit to a community centre in London on Monday, Sir Keir said: “There will be a Cabinet Office investigation into the allegations, and quite right too.
“I didn’t know anything about this investigation, and it absolutely needs to be looked into, so the Cabinet Office will be establishing the facts.”
Technology secretary Liz Kendall said the government will be "looking at the facts" of the report commissioned by Labour Together, which helped Sir Keir win the Labour leadership.
“It’s right that this issue is being investigated by the relevant body here, the regulatory body, which is looking at public affairs companies,” Ms Kendall told Times Radio on Monday.
“And the Cabinet Office will also be looking into this to make sure all the facts are established.”
It comes as the prime minister is facing calls to order an inquiry into the investigation, with Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty saying it would be “only right” to have a probe into the think tank.
Mr Doughty told Times Radio: “It's only right that if there is an investigation, that's able to run its course, and that we understand what happened. I want to see a country where journalists are able to do their job without fear or favour.”
The Sunday Times reported that the contents of an investigation by PR consultancy Apco were informally shared with Labour figures in 2024, including current cabinet ministers and special advisers.
The paper said it contained pages of “deeply personal and false claims” about one of the journalists, Gabriel Pogrund. It also discussed his Jewish background and included false claims about personal and professional relationships. It was also reported to have made “baseless claims” that the emails underpinning the journalists’ story were likely to have come from a hack of the Electoral Commission, suspected to have been carried out by the Kremlin.
The scrutiny heaps pressure on government minister Josh Simons, who commissioned the 2023 report on reporters investigating the group’s funding. But the prime minister said he still had confidence in the minister, with his spokesperson describing the Cabinet Office investigation as a “fact finding mission”.
Meanwhile, asked whether Mr Simons’s position – as a minister in her department and also the Cabinet Office – was “tenable”, Ms Kendall told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “He has welcomed the investigation, rightly so, by the regulatory body, the body responsible for regulating public affairs.
“As I said, the Cabinet Office will also be looking into the facts of this case, but it is absolutely essential that we protect the freedom of the press.”
Labour MP John McDonnell said he has asked Sir Keir to launch an investigation into potential links between the government and the Labour Together think tank.
Mr McDonnell, secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) parliamentary group, told Today programme: “I’ve written four times now to the general secretary of the Labour Party, including to Keir Starmer, to say this is serious, launch an investigation, but that’s not happened.”
He also said: “I got a reply from the general secretary that said this isn’t a Labour organisation, even though I said look it’s managed and controlled by Labour Party members, quite senior Labour Party members, and I was referred to the complaints department about individual members of the party and I said that doesn’t meet the seriousness of this case.”
The Conservative Party has written to Labour Party chair Anna Turley, urging her to investigate Mr Simons’s role in the decision to hire Apco.
It also urged Labour to investigate the role of other Labour Together directors, who include “serving cabinet ministers”, and to set out whether the party still considers it appropriate for Labour MPs to receive cash from the think tank.
The Labour Party should suspend all engagement with Labour Together “until all allegations have been independently investigated”, the Tories said.
The letter, from Tory chair Kevin Hollinrake, concluded: “Once again, the government is distracted from the serious challenges facing our country.
“The public deserve the full, unredacted facts about this latest scandal to engulf the top of the Labour Party. Nothing less will suffice.”
In a statement, Mr Hollinrake said: “Labour Together’s behaviour shows a worrying contempt for the free press, a fundamental foundation of our democracy.
“With its close and widely known links to the heart of government, serious questions must be answered about who was aware of these actions, including whether senior figures around the prime minister knew.
“After Starmer’s attempts to deflect from the Mandelson-Epstein affair, the public will accept nothing less than full transparency.”
Mr Simons was an ally of Morgan McSweeney, who previously ran Labour Together and who resigned from No 10 last week as the Mandelson scandal engulfed Downing Street. Mr Simons told the paper he said he had asked for information to be removed before passing the report to the intelligence agency GCHQ. No other British journalists were investigated as part of any document he or Labour Together ever received, he also said.
John McDonnell, Labour’s former chancellor, has called for an independent inquiry into the affair.
He said it was clear to him as ”secretary of the NUJ’s parliamentary group if true this is unacceptable”.
Another Labour MP, Karl Turner, called on the prime minister himself to look at the issue and said he should meet Mr McDonnell “to discuss” it.
Nadhim Zahawi, the former Conservative chancellor who has since defected to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, led demands for Sir Keir to reveal what he knew of the investigation.
He said: “This is a huge story. If this was any other party, the calls for an investigation would be deafening..”
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