Labour probe claims a little awkward for the Sunday Times

There is nothing journalists like more than reporting on themselves, so the Sunday Times must have felt like all their Christmases had come at once when it emerged a think tank linked to Keir Starmer’s leadership had hired lobbyists to investigate a reporter who had looked into its funding.

Labour Together, the Starmerite group once run by Morgan McSweeney, is said to have paid £36,000 to Apco, a US public affairs firm, to probe the “backgrounds and motivations” of hacks Gabriel Pogrund, the Sunday Times’s Whitehall editor, and Harry Yorke, its deputy political editor.

The pair had been behind a 2023 report that Labour Together had failed to declare £730,000 of donations between 2017 and 2020. The Electoral Commission found the group guilty of 20 breaches of campaign finance laws and issued a fine in 2021.

According to the paper, following up reporting by Peter Geoghegan and the Democracy For Sale Substack blog as well as Scotland’s The National paper, Apco produced a 58-page report “including almost ten pages of deeply personal and false claims” about Pogrund in particular, and falsely suggesting that the journalists might be part of a Russian conspiracy or had relied on emails hacked by the Kremlin.

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Nicknamed ‘Operation Cannon’, the report is said to have been prepared by Tom Harper, Apco’s senior director and a former Sunday Times employee. Harper wrote that he had examined the “sourcing, funding and origins of the Sunday Times story” using documents and “discreet human source enquiries”.

“The likeliest culprit is the Russian state, or proxies of the Russian state,” he wrote.

That was enough for the paper to lead with the story at the weekend, as well as devote its main editorial to it, writing: “How revealing it is that Labour Together [employed] the kind of shadowy agents the left has (sometimes rightly) been swift to condemn. A fact well worth remembering the next time a Labour minister takes to the airwaves demanding yet another inquiry into the ethics and working practices of the British press. Hypocrisy doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

What it didn’t mention, however, is the rather awkward position this has put the Sunday Times’s political team in. For “shadowy agent” Harper is married to… Caroline Wheeler, the paper’s political editor and thus, technically, Pogrund and Yorke’s boss – a conflict of interest within its own newsroom the paper neglected to report.

The pair got hitched at Christmas 2023 at a Graceland chapel in Las Vegas with an Elvis impersonator in attendance. There’ll certainly be a little less conversation between them all in future!