The Wrong Kind of Intelligence:
Lessons from the Labour Together Scandal

In February 2026, investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan published a remarkable piece of reporting on his Democracy for Sale Substack. Labour Together — the think tank that, more than any other organisation, powered Keir Starmer's rise to the Labour leadership and ultimately to Downing Street — had hired a PR firm called APCO Worldwide to investigate the journalists who were writing critically about its finances. The work was led by Tom Harper, a former Sunday Times journalist who had become APCO's head of European media relations — a detail that lends the episode a particular edge.

The journalists in question were not producing gossip or speculation. They were reporting a straightforward and well-documented story: that Labour Together had failed to declare £730,000 in political donations between 2017 and 2020, in breach of electoral law. The Electoral Commission eventually fined the organisation £14,250. The story was true. The journalism was legitimate. And yet Labour Together paid at least £30,000 to identify the sources behind it.

APCO's briefing documents, seen by Geoghegan, named journalists from the Sunday Times, the Guardian and other outlets as "significant persons of interest" and discussed potential "leverage" over them. One memo suggested — without any supporting evidence — that the stories about Labour Together's funding might have originated in a Russian or Chinese hack of the Electoral Commission. That narrative was subsequently fed to other journalists, apparently in an attempt to discredit the original reporting. Some outlets spiked further coverage as a result.

This is worth sitting with for a moment. A political organisation used the tools of intelligence — source identification, background research, narrative construction — not to establish the truth, but to suppress it. And it nearly worked.

The Uses and Misuses of Investigation

The private intelligence industry exists, in its legitimate form, to help clients navigate situations where the publicly available picture is incomplete, unreliable or deliberately obscured. A company considering a major acquisition needs to know whether the counterparty is what it claims to be. A lawyer pursuing an asset recovery needs to understand where the money actually went. A communications firm advising a client needs to understand the landscape of a dispute before it speaks.

Those are proper uses of investigative capability. They are oriented towards establishing what is true — gathering facts, finding sources, building a picture that is accurate rather than convenient.

What APCO did for Labour Together was something categorically different. The objective was not to establish what was true. The facts were already established — the Electoral Commission had found them, the journalists had reported them, the fine had been paid. The objective was to undermine the people who had found the truth, to identify who had spoken to them, and to construct an alternative explanation that would redirect attention away from Labour Together's conduct.

That is not intelligence work. It is counter-intelligence — and deployed here not against a foreign adversary or a criminal enterprise, but against journalists doing their jobs. Jon Cruddas, one of Labour Together's founders, called it "dark shit." A public affairs veteran told Geoghegan they had "never seen or been involved in anything like this" in their career.

What Clients Ask For — and What They Get

The Labour Together case raises an uncomfortable question that anyone in the intelligence industry should be willing to answer: what do you do when a client asks you to do something you shouldn't?

Josh Simons, who ran Labour Together at the time, claimed the firm was "asked to look into a suspected hack" with nothing to do with the journalists concerned. APCO did not comment on the record. The documents seen by Geoghegan suggested a rather broader scope of work than that account implied.

The lesson here is not simply that bad actors sometimes commission bad work. It is that the quality of an intelligence operation is inseparable from its purpose. Techniques that are entirely legitimate when applied to establishing facts become instruments of harm when applied to suppressing them. The same skills that allow an investigator to identify who is behind a fraud can be turned, at a client's instruction, to identifying who is behind a news story. The methodology is identical. The ethics are not.

The Limits of the Industry's Self-Regulation

One of Peter Geoghegan's more pointed observations in his reporting is about oversight. London is, by most estimates, the global centre of the private intelligence industry — a sector worth a reported £15 billion a year. Its activities remain almost entirely opaque. APCO's work for Labour Together only became public because of a rare leak. Without it, as Geoghegan writes, "we would know nothing."

The Public Relations and Communications Association looked into APCO's conduct. But as Geoghegan noted, this is a voluntary industry association, not a statutory regulator. Its powers are limited. When it comes to what private intelligence and PR firms actually do for their clients — the full scope of it, the methodology, the instructions — meaningful oversight barely exists.

That places an unusual burden on practitioners themselves. In the absence of meaningful external regulation, the only reliable constraint on how intelligence work is conducted is the judgment — and the professional ethics — of the people doing it. Which means the question of who you hire, and what standards they hold themselves to, matters more than it might in a better-regulated industry.

A Cautionary Tale with Practical Implications

The Labour Together scandal will, in time, be studied as a case study in how not to manage a reputational crisis. The original story — undeclared donations, a fine, an administrative failing that was embarrassing but not catastrophic — was survivable. The response to it was not. The attempt to identify and undermine the journalists reporting it transformed a story about electoral law compliance into a story about the conduct of a prime minister's inner circle, the use of intelligence tools against the free press, and the relationship between dark money and democratic accountability.

The attempted cover-up, as so often, exceeded the original offence.

For anyone who commissions intelligence work — whether for litigation, due diligence, communications or any other purpose — the case offers a useful test. Not just: will this work? But: what are we actually trying to find out? Are we trying to establish facts, or to construct a narrative? Are we asking someone to investigate a situation, or to investigate the people who are already investigating it?

The answers to those questions matter — not only for the ethical reasons that should be sufficient on their own, but for entirely practical ones. Intelligence work conducted in bad faith, at a client's instruction, has a way of surfacing. When it does, the client tends to discover that the damage caused by its exposure considerably exceeds whatever problem the intelligence was intended to solve.

Labour Together learned that the hard way.