Keir Starmer has lost another minister. Josh Simons has resigned from government after weeks of furore over an alleged smear campaign against journalists by Labour Together, the think tank he led before entering parliament in July 2024.
In an exchange of letters published, rather conveniently, after 5pm on a Saturday afternoon while news coverage is dominated by Iran, Simons said he was resigning because he had become a “distraction” from the work of government. In a short reply, the prime minister accepted his resignation, putting on record that “no breach of the ministerial code” had been found.
The former Labour Together director is accused of paying a PR firm at least £30,000 to investigate the personal, religious and political backgrounds of journalists reporting on the think tank’s undeclared funding. After receiving the report, Simons also reportedly passed information on journalists to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a division of the spy agency GCHQ, in 2024, while falsely claiming they had links to the Kremlin.
“The work of reporters like Gabriel Pogrund, Harry Yorke, and Henry Dyer sustains our democracy,” Simons wrote in his resignation letter of three of the journalists targeted by the report he commissioned. He said he “did not expect APCO’s [the PR firm he hired] report to include reprehensible material on [Sunday Times journalist] Gabriel Pogrund, and nor did I welcome it. I took immediate action and removed it.”
Simons described Pogrund’s treatment as “a disgrace”, although the letter does not include an apology. It also notably declines to praise the journalism or acknowledge the treatment of Paul Holden, the South African journalist and author of The Fraud, who initially obtained the details of Labour Together’s undeclared funding and shared his reporting with Pogrund. Holden’s “book diminishes the antisemitism that infected Labour under its previous leadership,” Simons writes in his resignation letter.
Laurie Magnus, the prime minister’s independent adviser on ministerial standards, had been tasked with looking into whether Simons had breached the standards expected of him as a minister in his response to the Labour Together allegations, and in particular whether he had adhered to the standard of “honesty” in public office. Magnus’s letter says he did not find a breach of the ministerial code in Simons’ response to the Labour Together allegations but noted the “distraction and potential reputational damage” of keeping him in government. Simons has duly gone. To his internal critics, his decision should have come sooner. “Ayatollah I didn’t break the ministerial code!” one unimpressed Labour insider joked of the timing, adding: “He has been a distraction for weeks and has no shame.”
Now that Simons, holder of a glittering CV from Cambridge and Harvard, once considered a “rising star” of the 2024 intake hailing from the McSweeneyite right of the Labour party has fallen on his sword, Starmer has the opportunity, should he wish to take it, of conducting a much-rumoured-about reshuffle among his junior ministers, potentially elevating figures from the soft left as part of his wider bid to keep his restive parliamentary party happy. But part of that will involve finding a replacement to take on Simons’ “hospital pass” brief of introducing Digital ID to Britain: a job even the most ambitious of MPs don’t seem particularly keen to take on.
This episode has been another blow for the scandal-hit right of the Labour party, after weeks dominated by Peter Mandelson, Matthew Doyle and this alleged smear campaign by the vehicle that helped to get Starmer elected. For all that Starmer and Simons emphasised the importance of journalistic freedoms in their exchange of letters, the revelations have appalled journalists of all stripes and undermined a faction and a party now struggling with questions of integrity, judgement and standards.
[Further reading: Josh Simons’s accidental message to Labour MPs]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment