The former director of an anti-Breitbart censorship group has resigned from British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s government amid reports he spread fake Russiagate-style allegations against journalists critical of the organisation he ran.
Labour MP for Makerfield, Josh Simons, resigned from his post as a junior Cabinet Office minister over the weekend, conveniently timed while the British and international media turned its focus to the conflict in the Middle East.
Simons, once tipped as a rising star in the Labour ranks, had come under fire in recent weeks amid a flurry of reports exposing the mud-slinging way of the Labour Together think tank he previously ran.
Founded by Prime Minister Starmer’s disgraced former chief of staff and senior strategist, Morgan McSweeney, Labour Together began as a venue for the Blairite wing of the Labour Party to attack the previously ascendant far-left wing represented by former party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Alongside its undeclared cutout cadet organisations such as Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Labour Together sought to diminish far-left pro-Corbyn media, such as The Canary.
However, according to South African investigative journalist Paul Holden, through large-scale astroturfing campaigns, the groups soon found they had achieved their initial aims and decided to move onto right wing media next. Seeking to destroy “non-conformist media and free speech on both sides of the Atlantic”, this push included attempts to cancel Brexit-aligned media in Britain and conservative media outlets in the United States, including Breitbart News.
The censorship scheme came under heavy scrutiny late last year, as the Trump administration levied sanctions against pro-censorship figures in Europe and Britain, including longtime McSweeney ally and head of his Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Imran Ahmed.
Amid the fallout, more details began to emerge about Labour Together’s hardball tactics. Last month, the Cabinet Office was ordered to investigate the think tank amid allegations that during Simons’ tenure, it had paid an American public relations firm, APCO Worldwide, to dig up dirt on journalists who had reported on Labour Together’s failure to disclose £730,000 in donations under McSweeney.
Independent investigative outlet Democracy For Sale claimed that funding was intentionally obscured “so the think tank would look like a humble, grassroots initiative when in fact it was a well-funded vehicle to take over the party”, but they were eventually caught.
After the failure to disclose the donation was reported in the Sunday Times by Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, with information from Paul Holden, Simons reportedly tasked APCO to turn private-eyes and look into their “backgrounds and motivations”, the findings of which were claimed to have been the basis of a backroom smear campaign to discredit the journalists in Westminster.
Additionally, the APCO dossier reportedly falsely accused the reporters of obtaining their information about Labour Together’s finances from a Russian hack of the UK Electoral Commission. Adding insult to injury, Simons then reportedly passed on the false claims of Russian collusion to the British GCHQ spy agency in an apparent bid to use the power of the security state to silence his opponents.
Others reportedly caught up in the dragnet included Guardian reporter Henry Dyer after he wrote a follow-up to the story exposing the financial improprieties of Labour Together, and American independent journalist Matt Taibi, who previously collaborated with Holden.
Simons was investigated by the independent adviser to the Prime Minister on ministerial standards, Sir Laurie Magnus, who cleared the MP but said that there was a risk of “distraction and potential reputational damage” if Simons remained in the Cabinet Office, the Times of London reported.
Simons apparently agreed with this assessment and wrote in his resignation letter that his “remaining in office has now become a distraction from this government’s important work”.
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