Outrage over Labour group which paid £36,000 to PR firm to dig
dirt on Sunday Times journalists
No one does outrage quite like Fleet Street. It is in the DNA. At the drop of Desmond Hackett’s chocolate bowler, we could conjure up fury… and never mind the target, we’d find one later.
So I was amused to pick up my Sunday Times and find they had gone off the deep end at what they saw as a smear campaign against their journalists. First, some background…
The paper discovered that Labour Together, a think tank that helped to get Keir Starmer installed as Labour leader and then into Downing Street as Prime Minister, paid a PR firm to look into the “backgrounds and motivations” of Sunday Times reporters who had written a disobliging story about them.
Labour Together, they reported, had failed to declare £730,000 of donations to the Electoral Commission. The man in charge of Labour Together at the time was Morgan McSweeney, who recently stood down as Starmer’s chief of staff after recommending Peter Mandelson for the plum role of Ambassador to the United States.
In retaliation, Labour Together paid £36,000 to Apco, an American firm, to dig up some dirt on Sunday Times reporters Gabriel Pogrund, Whitehall editor, and Harry Yorke, deputy political editor.
Apco is one of those Rottweiler public affairs firms beloved of oligarchs. Their aim is not merely to repair a client’s reputation but to shred the other guy’s while they’re at it. It has worked to polish the images of tobacco firms, oil-rich Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.
Its findings, codenamed Operation Cannon, appear flimsy, naïve and insulting. They included what the Sunday Times called “baseless claims about Pogrund’s faith, upbringing and personal and professional relationships.”
Pogrund is Jewish and the report, allegedly quoting a Sunday Times source, pointed to an “odd” mismatch between his faith and his own political beliefs. His reporting on the Royal Family, it said, could be seen as destabilising to the UK.
The paper does not say what the PR company turned up on Yorke but it painted the whole episode as a Russian conspiracy to hurt Starmer. Operation Cannon, written by Tom Harper, Apco’s senior director and a former Sunday Times reporter, claimed emails the story was based on probably came from a Kremlin hack of the Electoral Commission.
Labour Together tried to give the story to another newspaper and sent it to GCHQ. Both gave it a wide berth. But Cabinet Ministers and special advisers began a whispering campaign that discredited the Sunday Times and painted it as a dupe of the Kremlin.
Keir Starmer has said: “I didn’t know anything about this investigation and it absolutely needs to be looked into.”
Okay, got all that? Are you feeling furious? No, me neither.
The first thing that strikes you is that if Apco got 36 grand for that load of old cobblers (how about that for your next codename, Mr Harper?) I’ve been in the wrong game all these years.
The second is that politics is a dirty business. And Labour politics is a midden. If you mix it with people like McSweeney and Starmer the stains don’t easily rub off.
You can, if you like, see the affair as an attack on Press freedom by attempting to intimidate the Sunday Times and two top reporters. But the Cabinet Office is now investigating the conduct of Labour Together, which slightly undermines that argument.
In any case, if you wrote a story like that in Russia, you’d find yourself sharing a freezing Siberian prison cell with a toxic South American dart frog. They know how to do intimidation of journalists there.
Putin’s gangsters shot investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, 48, dead as she got into the lift in the stairwell of her block of flats. She had dared to criticise his prosecution of the second war in Chechnya.
The Sunday Times’s own Marie Colvin, 56, died alongside a French photographer she was working with when they came under fierce bombardment in Homs, Syria, after being lured into a trap by Assad’s butchers.
They died in pursuit of the truth. They knew the risks: Colvin wore an eye patch after being wounded in Sri Lanka’s civil war. But that did not stop them. They asked and gave no quarter.
They would have laughed at the Sunday Times’s confected outrage. Oh, no, they’re saying nasty things about us!
We have the most free, unfettered and effective Press in the world. The way to keep it that way is to carry on doing what we do.
And accepting that if you dish it out, you have to be able to take it, too.
*****
For years it was a dark, disturbing rumour, sometimes dismissed as an urban myth.
Now we have a first-hand account of how wealthy men paid to shoot human beings, often women and children, in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo during the Balkans war.
For £88,000 up front, these vile, merciless brutes, some of them Britons, would train the sights of their sniper rifles on innocent Sarajevo residents from Bosnian Serb positions in the hills above the city.
Some of these depraved “safari snipers” paid extra to kill children and pregnant women. And afterwards, the blood lust sated, they repaired to a café to feast all night on roast pork, beer and brandy.
The witness is Aleksandar Licanin, 63, a volunteer with a Serb tank unit at the time. He told his dreadful story – one that reads like the plot of a Freddie Forsyth novel – to The Times on Saturday.
His unit had set up a position in the city’s Jewish cemetery, which commanded views over the entire city. But they shared the vantage point with 200 Serb militiamen, the Novosarajevo Chetnik Detachment, commanded by former postie Slavko Aleksic.
“They were out of control and Aleksic was obviously a psychopath,” Licanin told The Times. The foreigners, who included some women, were easy to spot in their expensive leather jackets.
They travelled to Sarajevo by helicopter, bus or truck and were put up in a compound near the cemetery. Many were from Italy where magistrates are investigating the claims. An 80-year-old lorry driver and gun collector has been quizzed and others will follow.
I have seldom read a more affecting story. It is immaculately reported by Tom Kington. All it lacks is a Forsythian hero, perhaps a dogged Serbian policeman, to bring these savages to justice.
*****
True, Wales took a pasting on Sunday at the hands of the soon-to-be Six Nations champions France. But they never gave up and that bodes well for the future of Welsh rugby.
Before the match at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, where they were giving tickets away, the BBC sent a reporter on to the streets to ask locals about the state of the great game there.
One man was distraught, on the point of tears, ripping into the Welsh Rugby Union, which he dismissed as a bunch of amateurs. Others were sad, perplexed, longing for the glory days to come back.
In the stand sat one of the greatest who ever wore the red jersey, Sir Gareth Edwards. He looked bewildered at the unfolding rout. It ended 54-12 and Wales even lost the singing! French fans made the stadium echo to the Marseillaise and chants of “Allez les Bleus”.
But I thought Wales could hold their heads up. And it is hard to beat Welsh commentators. Jonathan Davies was shrewd as ever, Sam Warburton offered insight and Alun Wyn Jones imparted this wisdom: “It’s not an 80-minute game, it’s a game of 80 individual minutes.” Translation: As a player, live in the moment and play what’s in front of you as well as you can.
The Six Nations, rugby’s greatest tournament, needs Wales, a team that has given us some of the sport’s finest moments.
*****
The ordeal of Gisèle Pelicot defies belief. Drugged and raped by her husband, her body was lent out to strangers to be abused further.
You can only admire her resilience; indeed, she seems to bask in the fame her dreadful experience has brought. The Times has bought her story to serialise. Not only can I not bring myself to read it, but I find her revelling in the notoriety of others faintly distasteful.
*****
An old Express colleague, Jim Cassels, has posted on Facebook some hilarious exam answers. They were given, it is claimed, by 15-year-old students in Caithness, Scotland. I’m usually a little sceptical about such things and these could be the work of Woody Allen. But they are so funny I pass them on anyway.
Q: Use the word judicious in a sentence to show you understand its meaning.
A: Hands that judicious can be soft as your face.
Q: What is the correct use of a semi-colon?
A: Only to be used as a last resort, a semi-colon is a partial removal of the intestines.
Q: What is Britain’s highest award for valour in war?
A: Nelson’s column.
Q: (religious instruction) Who did not welcome the return of the prodigal son?
A: The fatted calf.
Q: Name the four seasons.
A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.
There are lots more. Look them up on Jim’s FB page.
RICHARD DISMORE
18 February 2026
