Peter Geoghegan

And at that stage, money started coming in, money often from big former Labour donors who'd stopped giving money to party under Jeremy Corbyn.

So all the big money that used to go into Labour really started to flow away from Jeremy Corbyn.

And it started going to Labour Together.

So people like Martin Taylor, the hedge fund manager, Trevor Chin, the businessman, other people like that started funding Labour Together.

And one of the things that happened was under Max Sweeney's watch was they didn't declare this money to the Electoral Commission for a very, very, very long time.

So the Electoral Commission found that Labour Together had breached electoral rules more than 20 times by failing to declare this money.

And fast forward to 2023, by which stage Morgan MacSweeney is now Chief of Staff to Keir Starmer.

He's a really important character.

He's really in the driving seat of British politics.

And Labour Together has now been run by a guy called Josh Simons.

And at that point, a story appears in the Sunday Times in November 2023.

And the story is all about this undeclared funding.

It's about this money that hadn't been declared, which at this stage, the Electoral Commission had fined Labour Together for, but no one had really looked at it that much.

And I was looking at how this money was spent and how this money was spent to help Keir Starmer's campaign into the Labour leadership.

So after this story appears in the Sunday Times about this £730,000 of undeclared funding, Labour Together, under Josh Simons, decided to do something that I think, you know, you and I would, this is what you do if a negative press story came out.

They hired a lobbying firm, a PR firm, a company called Abco Worldwide.

I struggle to say exactly what they are because they sit in that kind of grey box of, you know, consultancy, advisory, intelligence, etc.

But

a big, big, well-known company.

They hired APCO Worldwide, and they hired APCO Worldwide to investigate the sources of this story, particularly a journalist called Paul Holden, who was an important source for the Sunday Times story, but also Gabriel Pogron and Harry York at the Sunday Times.