Labour minister falsely linked reporters to 'pro-Russia' network

A Labour minister who has claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” at a PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf was personally involved in naming them to British intelligence officials and falsely linking them to pro-Russia propaganda, the Guardian can reveal.

- Henry Dyer Dan Sabbagh

Josh Simons, who was running the thinktank Labour Together at the time, was also involved in telling security officials another journalist was “living with” the daughter of a former Jeremy Corbyn adviser. Officials were told by Simons's team that the former adviser was “suspected of links to Russian intelligence”.

The extraordinary disclosures are contained in emails that Simons and his chief of staff at Labour Together sent to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a division of the intelligence agency GCHQ, in 2024.

A spokesperson for Simons, now a Cabinet Office minister, said: “These claims are untrue.”

The emails, seen by the Guardian, lay out in detail what Simons and his team wrote to intelligence officials to persuade them to investigate the sourcing behind a story in the Sunday Times about Labour Together’s failure to disclose political donations.

When informed by the Guardian about what had been communicated about them to intelligence officials, some of those named in the emails accused Simons of orchestrating a “McCarthyite smear” campaign that left them feeling “violated”.

Simons commissioned an American lobbying and public affairs agency, APCO Worldwide, in late 2023 to investigate the “sourcing, funding and origin” behind the story.

He has in recent days claimed he was disturbed to find the APCO report had delved into unnecessary information about one of the Sunday Times journalists. But the emails show that, weeks after receiving the report, he was involved in naming the same journalist in an email to intelligence officials.

Simons and his chief of staff at the thinktank, Ben Szreter, told the NCSC they suspected the Sunday Times article might have been linked to a wider “coordinated effort to discredit” Labour Together in order to undermine Keir Starmer and his then chief adviser, Morgan McSweeney.