Peter Geoghegan

Henry Dyer, who by that stage had gone to The Guardian, had also written about Labour Together as well.

And so Abco Worldwide were given a brief to go and investigate where did these sources have come from, but also to put out information into the media to try and change the narrative around this.

I think you can, actually.

It should be a little bit less.

They paid APCO Worldwide to discredit these journalists, to discredit their work, where they come from, and that was how they were trying to stop this story dead.

So when I was coming up to publication on this story, and this, as a journalist, what you often do is, I ring people in worlds to sense check.

You know, to sense check, am I right about this?

Spoke to senior political reporters, like, I have never heard of this report.

I also spoke to a very good contact in the public affairs world, which is the same word as APCO.

And they were shocked.

They were like, APCO did this?

Wow.

And my favourite one was I actually spoke to John Cruddas, who set up Labour Together.

And he said, Peter, this is dark shit.

So what APCO did was they put together, there was a brief which we were able to obtain that APCO put together for Labour Together.

So they paid just over £30,000 to do this work.

And they did things like what we call OSINT, human intelligence.

So effectively, which means going and talking to people, talking to sources, putting together a kind of a report, a brief, kind of online sleuthing, looking for information online.

and just effectively trying to find any intelligence they could from anyone.

So talking surreptitiously to people who might know some of the people involved.