Brits Spied on Me, According to Memo Marked “STRICTLY PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL”

British Labour Party operatives who put Prime Minister Keir Starmer in power hired APCO PR firm to investigate me and other journalists probing political corruption.

7 minute read

The British media has been consumed the last week over a scandal involving political operatives working for the British Labour Party who hired a PR firm to investigate seven reporters—one of whom is me. One close advisor to Prime Minister Starmer has resigned, and the British government has launched an investigation to uncover these attacks against the media.

A British Labour Party official denied during a phone call that I was a focus of their attention when I called for an explanation a couple days ago. I’m releasing one of the documents leaked to me from a London reporter that shows I was one of the British Labour Party’s targets.

The document is marked “STRICTLY PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.”

I became a Labour Party “significant person of interest” after I began reporting on the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), in 2023. The CCDH was created by a British think tank called Labour Together, which was run by Josh Simons in 2023. Simons hired the PR firm APCO to spy on myself and other reporters.

Simons is now a Member of Parliament and posted on X “APCO were asked to look into a suspected illegal hack.” However, the Simon’s memo discusses nothing about a hack.

Simons did not return repeated requests for comment that I sent to both his government and private email.

According to emails leaked to me, APCO’s work for Labour Together was overseen by Tom Harper, a former reporter for the British Sunday Times. Tom Harper did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

I became interested in CCDH because American legacy media such as The New York Times and Washington Post were quoting CCDH as purported experts on everything from vaccines, to online hate, misinformation and disinformation, both antisemitism and Islamaphobia, climate denial …. pretty much everything and anything.

But despite living for a decade in DC, I had never heard of CCDH nor their CEO Imran Ahmed.

So what was going on?

In a 2023 investigation for Tablet, I traced CCDH back to London, where they started sometime around 2018. Imran Ahmed, I had learned, was a UK political operative who had worked for the British Labour Party. And Ahmed’s best buddy was another British Labour Party operative named Morgan McSweeney who ran a think tank called Labour Together. McSweeney is widely credited as the architect of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s rise to power, and he served as Starmer’s chief of staff until earlier this month, when he resigned because of a separate scandal connected to Jeffrey Epstein.

Both Ahmed and McSweeney hid that they were behind CCDH for several years, although it later came out that CCDH was based inside McSweeney’s Labour Together think tank. When CCDH landed in America in 2021, they immediately got the attention of the Biden White House and multiple Democratic Party members of Congress. I found this bizarre.

DC is crowded with nonprofits and think thanks fighting for public attention. Yet this tiny nonprofit, run by a guy from London with no DC experience, was getting quoted by White House officials. Here’s how I explained this in Tablet:

For a tiny, unknown, nonprofit to gain so much attention in D.C.’s crowded, competitive policy space is akin to a pudgy, amateur athlete catching the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, while setting a new world record in the marathon, all in one week.

Digging through CCDH’s tax records, I found a possible explanation for CCDH’s magical success. CCDH’s chairman is Simon Clark, who once worked at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank founded by former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta that supported the Biden administration.

Clark, I figured, must have introduced Ahmed to the Biden White House and Democratic Party officials in DC.

I also tracked some of CCDH’s money back to Hollywood. You can read all the details I reported for Tablet, here: The New Push for Censorship Under the Guise of Combating Hate.

I published some further investigative details about CCDH, here at The DisInformation Chronicle, about a week after my Tablet investigation. In this piece, I reported that CCDH’s reports were rather flimsy and that CCDH’s “head of research” was some British dude named Callum Hood who had no employment history except working at CCDH. I later reported that Callum Hood was also a former Labour Party operative.

Both my investigation in Tablet and my report here at The DisInformation Chronicle stirred up APCO. Here’s a screenshot of what APCO wrote about me in their report to Labour Party offficials.

A whistleblower inside CCDH read my reporting and contacted me in 2024. We spoke dozens of times on the phone, and the whistleblower sent me tons of internal CCDH documents and several of Imran Ahmed’s emails. Based on these documents, I wrote a piece titled, “Election Exclusive: British Advisors to Kamala Harris Hope to “Kill Musk’s Twitter,” that rocketed around the globe.

Citing these documents I released, the State Department began deportation proceedings against Imran Ahmed a few days before Christmas.

The BBC interviewed me about Imran Ahmed’s deportation and I told them it was time for Ahmed to go back to England, because Americans were not going to tolerate his agenda to censor U.S. citizens.

In an interview on The DisInformation Chronicle Podcast with State Department Undersecretary Sarah Rogers, I noted that, by deporting Ahmed when he was so closely tied to Keir Starmer’s government, the State Department was “knocking on the door of the Prime Minister’s office.”

“We have a very special relationship with the British government,” Undersecretary Rogers told me, declining to detail her discussions with Starmer officials. “The issue has been communicated.”

To download the Labour Party’s document on investigating reporters, click the link below.

MEMO PREPARED FOR LABOUR TOGETHER

LABOUR TOGETHER’S DOCUMENT CAN BE DOWNLOADED HERE