Peter Geoghegan

Laurie Magnus, who advises on ministerial ethics, did an investigation in which he did talk about how Simons had become a distraction.

And so the pressure did start to mount.

Simons eventually resigned from his post in the Cabinet Office just a couple of hours after the first bombs dropped on Tehran, if people remember that from Donald Trump.

So some might suggest that might have been a good time to bury bad news.

Josh Simons was forced to resign on the back of this story.

Since then, we've actually published more stories about it as well.

Tom Harper's had to leave APCO.

There's, I think, rightly a sense in which the story asks big questions, not just about who knew what within the Labour Party, who knew what within Labour together at the time, but also how do these companies operate?

As you say, we only find out about these things when it comes into the public domain.

This only came into the public domain through a lot of journalism.

It took months to do this story, to tell this story.