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Investigations

The £30,000 Spy Job That Put Burnham in the Commons

6 min read
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The Desk

Here is the money spine of the current PM-succession story, in four movements: a Labour-aligned think tank took £740,000 it did not declare. It got fined. It hired a US public-affairs firm to investigate the journalists who asked questions about it. And the man at the centre of it all stood down as an MP last May — triggering the by-election that lets Andy Burnham into the Commons.

Labour Together — now renamed ThinkLabour — paid APCO Worldwide at least £30,000 to “investigate the sourcing, funding and origins” of a Sunday Times story about the undeclared donations, according to the BBC. The Guardian and the Financial Times have both independently reported the same figure, and the investigation originated with Democracy for Sale’s Peter Geoghegan. That is a verified fact from multiple independent news organisations. What APCO produced was a dossier on the journalists themselves.

The dossier

APCO’s reports named Sunday Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, the Guardian’s Henry Dyer and Declassified UK’s John McEvoy as “significant persons of interest”. The final report, delivered by APCO senior director Tom Harper, included claims about Pogrund’s faith and relationships, and suggested his reporting “could be seen as destabilising to the UK and also in the interests of Russia’s strategic foreign policy objectives”, per the Guardian.

The Guardian also published a 14 January 2024 email from Josh Simons — then Labour Together’s director, later a Cabinet Office minister — to Morgan McSweeney (then and now Starmer’s chief of staff) and Paul Ovenden (director of political strategy). It reads: “Tom Harper (on copy) will be delivering his report on Paul Holden on Monday… Could we find a time for Tom, Morgan, Paul and me to zoom or meet in HQ sometime after that next week?”

McSweeney, the email suggests, knew about the investigation and approved the commissioning, though the material presented to him was heavily redacted so journalist names were unidentifiable.

The money trail

The undeclared donations story has a regulatory record: the Electoral Commission fined Labour Together £14,250 in September 2021 for failing to deliver donation reports within 30 days and inaccurately reporting them. That is the fine the think tank was trying to understand — by hiring investigators to look into the journalists who wrote about it.

Simons said he had asked APCO to look into a “suspected illegal hack” of the Electoral Commission, and claimed the firm had “gone beyond” its instructions by including “unnecessary information” about Pogrund. He says he asked for that information to be removed before passing the report to GCHQ.

The regulator’s shrug

The regulatory record is worth stating in full, because it is the part the cheerleaders skip. In September 2021 the Electoral Commission fined Labour Together £14,250 for failing to deliver donation reports on time and for reporting them inaccurately. When the APCO story broke in February 2026, the Commission was asked whether it would open a fresh inquiry — it said no. The Guardian had already reported, in September 2025, that Morgan McSweeney would not face a new donations probe, the Commission having found “no evidence of other offences”. So the think tank that helped install a prime minister was fined for its donations paperwork, hired a PR firm to look into the journalists who reported that fine, and the regulator then found nothing further to investigate. That is the accountability loop in full: fine, dossier, nothing.

The BBC reported Starmer ordered a Cabinet Office propriety-and-ethics investigation in February 2026 after the story broke. Simons was forced to step down as minister. In May, he stood down as an MP “in order to trigger a byelection in which Andy Burnham hopes to return to Westminster, in an effort to replace Starmer”, as the Guardian put it.

The defence

This is the part a fair reader gets to see too. Simons has said he was “surprised and shocked” by the report’s contents and asked for them to be removed. Starmer denies knowing about the investigation. Labour’s spokesperson said: “Any suggestion that the Labour party had any role in the commissioning of this report would be incorrect.” ThinkLabour’s current CEO, Alison Phillips — who joined after the report was commissioned — called the APCO work “indefensible”.

Tom Harper left APCO after telling a contractor to “get rid of” documents related to the Labour Together work, per the Guardian.

Why it matters

A think tank that helped install a prime minister spent tens of thousands of pounds investigating the journalists who asked awkward questions about its undeclared money — and its senior people in Downing Street were kept in the loop. The minister at the centre of it is gone, and the by-election he triggered is the mechanism by which the next prime minister enters Parliament.

The Left’s machine lectures everyone else about transparency. Its own donations took years to declare, its PR firm built dossiers on reporters, and its documents were allegedly told to be “got rid of”. Then it renamed itself.

Follow the money. It leads somewhere uncomfortable.

Sources