MATT KENYON


Feature 08 Informed


as parliamentary secretary in the Cabinet Office.” Te story began in the summer of 2024 when Labour got into power and Geoghegan, who had been looking previously into Conservative party funding, turned his atention to the party’s finances. He was struck by how litle follow-


Surveillance and smears


Tara Conlan explores claims that Labour Together hired APCO Worldwide to investigate numerous reporters and their sources as the NUJ continues to campaign for transparency and accountability.


When Peter Geoghegan and Khadija Sharife won Private Eye’s Paul Foot prize for their entry ‘How Labour Together hired a PR Firm to target journalists’, it was in recognition of an investigation into the surveillance of reporters. But it has led to the revelation that politicians were also monitored – an issue that could have further consequences for the government and democracy. Te NUJ and its parliamentary group


are demanding an independent inquiry into the mater, which Geoghegan’s reader-funded newsleter Democracy for Sale first shone a spotlight on earlier this year. As Private Eye described it, Democracy


for Sale “uncovered how campaign group Labour Together hired a PR firm to build dossiers on reputable journalists with the intent to discredit them. Te investigation led to the resignation of former Labour Together chief Josh Simons from his post


up coverage there was from the 2023 story broken by Sunday Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, and investigative journalist Paul Holden, which revealed that influential thinktank Labour Together had not declared significant financial donations when it was under the influence of Morgan McSweeney and then Simons. McSweeney later became Kier Starmer’s head of staff, giving the story additional relevance. As Geoghegan explained: “Tat’s a


really big, significant story. If that was the Conservative party, people would be going crazy.” He realised Labour Together “was actually a very interesting organisation, something I hadn’t really seen in British politics” that was giving money from donors to potential prospective MPs, so “kind of acting like a political party, but without any of the regulations…around political parties”, which was unusual. He and Sharife, whom he had worked with on the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, began looking into the story and eventually obtained documents that showed how PR firm APCO Worldwide had been hired to investigate the journalists behind the Labour Together story to find its sources. “I was really shocked when I got these documents. I hadn’t really considered that Labour Together would do something like [that] but I could start to see maybe this is why the story had died.” Some journalists were allegedly


reluctant to follow up as they did not want to burn their contacts. But aſter much painstaking investigation into the background of the story and why it had not got more traction (“it was a lot of work,


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