Peter Geoghegan

The briefs themselves, the material that APCO put together, I have to say, it's quite shocking, actually.

What they said in their material is full of aspersions.

It suggests that the stories, these negative stories, are the product of a Russian hack of the Electoral Commission, of which there's no evidence whatsoever.

And when I was breaking this story, I asked both Abco and Labour together, you know, if you thought you were hacked, why did you hire a PR firm?

They didn't do any investigation into cybersecurity.

It was all about, like, understanding where this material had come from and trying to smoke out the sources.

Which, as a journalist, is incredibly dangerous if you're trying to find out where the sources of someone's story is.

And it was done by a guy called Tom Harper, who used to work for the Sunday Times.

So Tom Harper was the Sunday Times, and he headed up APCO Worldwide's Europe division.

He's now left APCO.

And Tom was the person in charge of putting together these briefs.

And in the briefs, they talk about the persons of significant interest who were these journalists.

They suggest where these stories might have come from.

They cast aspersions about the religious and political identity of the journalists involved.

It's quite murky stuff.

And this was fed... The idea was to feed this into the media ecosystem to discredit the work.

And it's quite striking that...

What could and should have been a huge story, you know, this is a story of undeclared funding that powers the next prime minister.

It really did disappear.

It didn't go very far.