D'ARAMITZ

This is very interesting. Here, @ZackPolanski talks about disproportionate media scrutiny. He brings up Labour Together, Josh Simons and the scandal around Labour Together hiring APCO Worldwide to target journalists, including me. Before Polanski can complete his point, he is interrupted by @robpowellnews, who says that was appropriately reported by the media. But that's not what happened AT ALL. In fact, I can now reveal, for the first time, that an as-yet unknown journalist at the Guardian KNEW about this story for 2 years and didn't report it. I found this out in from my Subject Access Request to Labour Together. I've copied a screengrab below. It shows that in February 2024, Josh Simons forwarded a series of emails to the journalist. The emails had been sent by Simons and his Chief of Staff at Labour Together to the National Cyber Security Centre. You'll note in the attached image that the name of the Guardian journalist has been blacked out. But Labour Together have confirmed that they were, indeed, a Guardian journalist. The emails forwarded by Simons show that Labour Together had told the NCSC that I was at the centre of a mad conspiracy theory, making all sorts of wild, ludicrous, highly defamatory allegations about me, my colleague @andrewfeinstein, and my family. The emails explicitly mention that Labour Together had attached an extensive report on which these seriously defamatory allegations was based. It also made it clear that Labour Together had done this after I worked with the Sunday Times and other outlets to break stories about Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney's unlawful conduct. What makes this all particularly egregious is that me and @andrewfeinstein have had a long relationship with the Guardian. Andrew had worked with it's investigative team since the mid-2000s, focusing on investigating BAE Systems and corruption. The Guardian positively reviewed his book, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, on which I also worked. The award-winning feature documentary based on the book, made by recent Oscar nominee director Johan Grimonperez, featured a lengthy interview with the inimitable David Leigh about the BAE story. Leigh was the Guardian and Observer's long-time head of investigations. I started collaborating with the Guardian investigation team in the mid-2010s, focusing on corruption at AgustaWestland. The Guardian also splashed with an investigation based on my work in South Africa in 2022, which had been covered by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Andrew and I had both written for the paper, worked on joint investigations, and also acted as sources for Guardian stories. There are any number of stories where we are not credited but where we provided key information or connected the paper to whistleblowers. This is not to cloak me and Andrew in mainstream respectability or buff our credentials, but to point out that debunking the lunatic claims in the NCSC emails would have taken five minutes and a few phonecalls around the Guardian office. Perhaps then the Guardian could have reported on this despicable attempt to destroy the reputation of long-time Guardian contributors and collaborators with fabrications and conspiracy theories by the people on their way to forming the next government. But that didn't happen. Instead, a journalist at the Guardian KNEW that Simons and Labour Together had been doing all this outrageous stuff to protect Starmer and McSweeney. For two years: while Labour Together was funding 100 incoming MPs, Josh Simons was getting parachuted into Makerfield and Morgan McSweeney rose to the position of Chief of Staff. And nothing was reported. We now know, of course, that the highest levels of the Labour Party had also been copied into discussions about the mad Labour Together/APCO investigation, including McSweeney himself and head of Comms, Paul Ovenden (who was later forced to resign as Chief of Strategy in Number 10 because of revelations from my book). Just how many other people in Labour knew? Just how many other journalists knew? We still don't know. Can't say that mainstream outlets have done anything much to help me find out; half the time, as with the BBC, they don't even bother to ask me or Andrew to comment the scandal before amplifying the exculpatory self-justifications of Simons and his ilk. In the end it took brave INDEPENDENT journalists like Khadija Shariffe & Peter Geoghegan (rightly now nominated for the Paul Foot Award), @PulaRJS and @OborneTweets to break the story. While I'm endlessly grateful for that reporting, and this story breaking through into the mainstream through the dogged work of Peter and Khadija, it should never have taken this long, and it speaks volumes that it only really did so after it was revealed that the Labour Together/APCO investigation had also targeted journalists at the Guardian and Sunday Times. Just imagine the Guardian had reported on this back in February 2024. Just imagine the Guardian, which has NEVER, not once, properly reported on the Labour Together donations story, decided to look into McSweeney's unlawful conduct. Just imagine the public had been made aware of the character of Morgan McSweeney and the nature of this political project. Maybe, just maybe, McSweeney's wretched, scandalous proclivities wouldn't have destroyed the first Labour government in 15 years, opening up the way for Reform, and tainting the Labour Party with the stench of Mandelson and the horrors of Epstein. Maybe Starmer, so coddled and protected by the Guardian's soft-touch reporting, would have been made battle-hardened and ready for governance by some proper scrutiny and challenge. Or maybe we could have found out, long before this current crisis, that he wasn't up for the task. But don't try to pretend that there is an equality of scrutiny in the media, and that the mainstream media is fearlessly holding the powerful to task with the same rigour that makes it to literally go rooting around Polanski's dirty laundry.