Labour Together was fined \u00a314,250 by the Electoral Commission in September 2021 over late reporting of donations.<\/p>\n
Josh Simons said it was “nonsense” to claim he wanted to investigate journalists and he had asked APCO Worldwide to “look into a suspected illegal hack, which had nothing to do with UK journalists at Sunday Times, Guardian or any other brilliant UK newspaper”.<\/p>\n
“APCO’s investigation never fully got to the bottom of this,” he wrote on X. <\/p>\n
“Those who know me know I think the work of journalists is vital to our democracy.”<\/p>\n
Labour Together and ACPO Worldwide have not responded to requests for comment. <\/p>\n
A government source said: “We are looking into the claims”.<\/p>\n
The think tank is alleged to have hired journalist-turned-lobbyist Tom Harper from APCO Worldwide to investigate reporting by The Sunday Times and other outlets to identify their sources. Harper has not responded to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
In the leaked contract, APCO Worldwide said it intended to “establish who and what are behind the coordinated attacks on Labour Together”.<\/p>\n
The firm said it would use open source, human intelligence and digital forensics work and its approach should “provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up for use in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Labour Together was fined \u00a314,250 by the Electoral Commission in September 2021 over late reporting of donations. Josh…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-412641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}