But the story didn’t end there. Earlier this month Khadija Sharife and I revealed on Democracy for Sale that Labour Together, when it was led by now government minister Josh Simons in 2023, hired a PR firm called APCO Worldwide to investigate the “sourcing, funding and origins” of the story and to dig dirt on journalists at the Sunday Times and elsewhere who were reporting its undeclared funding. APCO was paid £36,000 to dig up this dirt. The work was led by former Sunday Times journalist Tom Harper, who suggested, without evidence, that the journalists’ reporting may have originated in a leak orchestrated by Russia or China. Labour Together did not keep these insinuations to itself. It passed some of APCO’s material to the security services, raising serious questions about whether public authorities were drawn into an effort to discredit legitimate journalism.