Declassified UK reporter John McEvoy was among the journalists probed by a PR company hired by Labour Together, which has ties to the top of the U.K. government, Phil Miller reports.
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer outside his office in London on the way to take questions in Parliament, October 2025. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street/Flickr/ CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
By Phil Miller
Declassified UK
A think tank with ties to the top of the Labour government paid a PR firm £30,000 to investigate journalists from media outlets including Declassified UK, it has emerged.
Declassified‘s chief reporter John McEvoy was among the journalists targeted by the group Labour Together in November 2023, according to a report by Democracy for Sale.
Labour Together turned to PR firm APCO Worldwide for help after media revelations about its undeclared funding, which resulted in a penalty from the Electoral Commission.
The PR firm, which has also represented Israel’s largest arms firm Elbit Systems, was reportedly tasked with profiling journalists that might be investigating Labour Together’s funding.
U.K. Government Minister Josh Simons in a 2024 official portrait. (Roger Harris/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 3.0)
McEvoy had not, at that point, written about Labour Together for Declassified. However he believes an article he wrote in 2020 for The Canary could have put him on their radar.
“It was the first time anyone had made the connection between Labour Together, Morgan McSweeney, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and Stop Funding Fake News, which was running an astroturf campaign against The Canary, where I worked at the time,” McEvoy commented.
This article may have been particularly sensitive for McSweeney, who resigned on Sunday after the fallout of the Peter Mandelson/Epstein affair. McSweeny reportedly told Labour Together MPs: “Destroy The Canary or The Canary destroys us.”
By 2023 McSweeney was Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, having passed command of Labour Together to Josh Simons, who is now a government minister.
Simons personally commissioned and reviewed the intelligence report prepared by APCO on behalf of Labour Together, according to a report in The Guardian.
Labour Together was instrumental in making Starmer leader of the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure.
McSweeney steered the party back to the right, frequently turning to Mandelson [who just resigned from the House of Lords over his involvement with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein] for advice and pushing for him to become Britain’s ambassador to the U.S.
Then U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy with Mandelson, then U.K. ambassador to the U.S., in Washington, D.C.,February 2025. (Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Labour Together has received significant funding from Sir Trevor Chinn, one of the most prominent pro-Israel donors in the U.K.
Stuart Polak, a stalwart of the pro-Israel lobby in Britain, was a senior counsellor at APCO between 2020 and 2025.
In a statement on social media, Simons described the claims as “nonsense,” saying: “APCO were asked to look into a suspected illegal hack, which had nothing to do with U.K. journalists at Sunday Times, Guardian, or any other brilliant U.K. newspaper.”
Simons did not add any further comment on whether he will commit to releasing the report.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) said the reports about APCO’s probe were “deeply concerning and raise serious questions about political interference and respect for press freedom in the U.K.”
“Journalists must be able to pursue stories in the public interest and hold those in power to account without fear of intimidation,” said NUJ General Secretary Laura Davison.
“Any actions taken to block journalists from investigating, scrutinising financial information or reporting freely in the public interest are unacceptable and a threat to the role of journalism in a functioning democracy.”
Phil Miller is the editor of Declassified UK. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes.
This article is from Declassified UK.
The views expressed are solely those of the authors and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.