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It's Kremlin-worthy stuff. A Labour think tank conducted a smear campaign against two journalists
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who were looking into its activities. So how did we get here? It all goes back to factional
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infighting within the Labour Party. Ever since the Bolsheviks split from the Mensheviks
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socialists have had a habit of falling out with each other. And Keir Starmer's Labour is no
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different. Much of the present discontent on his government benches has its root in the Prime
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Minister's purge of the Corbynites and his resting away of the party's internal democracy from the
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left. Now personally I think this was probably a good thing but it was a project that was always
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based on deceit. Starmer tricked the Labour Party by running as a continuity Corbyn candidate
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pledging things like wealth taxes, free movement and climate reparations but by the time he stood
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for general election this had all undergone homeopathic levels of watering down to become
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just a bland anemic promise of change. Now that pivot to the centre returned Labour to electability
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and its chief architect was Morgan McSweeney then the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff and the vehicle
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he used to conduct this purge was a think tank which was actually really a fifth column campaign
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group called Labour Together. Do not underestimate the ruthlessness with which McSweeney took on the
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left of the party to reconnect Labour with its working class and actually much more socially
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conservative roots. He despised what he viewed as this kind of middle class Islington left-wing
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ideology which he would describe as being based on no gender no borders and no queen His betrayal therefore of people who believed in that sort of version of Labour government has bred lasting resentment alienating MPs large section of membership and
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media outriders and that's big reason why McSweeney has been forced from his job. That's the anger he
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helped provoke coming home to roost. But the full extent of Labour Together's deception is only now
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beginning to emerge. The Sunday Times found that Labour Together paid a US PR firm, Apco, about £36,000
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to compile a dossier on two of its journalists after they found that the group had failed to properly declare £730,000 of donations
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The document examined the backgrounds and motivations of journalists Harry York and Gabriel Pogron
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and it included really distasteful assertions about Pogron's Jewish heritage and his supposed ideological motivations
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Now this smear campaign, which was codenamed Operation Cannon, was aimed at discrediting the journalists
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by falsely suggesting they were part of a Russian conspiracy and had relied on emails hacked from the Kremlin
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It's just absurd, particularly when you consider that Gabriel Progren is actually sanctioned by Russia at the moment
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All of us who believe in a free press should be appalled by this. Journalists should be able to accurately report matters of national interest without being harassed, intimidated and introduced as spies
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And likewise, foreign PR companies and lobbyists should not be able to operate in the shadows
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Frontbenchers Lisa Nandy and Steve Reid were legal directors of Labour together at the time
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and Cabinet Office Minister Josh Simons directly commissioned this report. So they all have very serious questions to answer
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But so too does the man who most benefited from Labour Together's dirty tricks, Keir Starmer
