The group that helped to get Sir Keir Starmer elected as Labour leader hired lobbyists to investigate the personal, political and religious background of a Sunday Times journalist behind an article about secret donations that funded its work. Labour Together paid £36,000 to Apco, a US public affairs firm, to examine the “backgrounds and motivations” of reporters behind a story before the general election. The aim was to discredit The Sunday Times’s reporting by falsely suggesting its journalists might be part of a Russian conspiracy or had relied on emails hacked by the Kremlin. Apco produced a 58-page report including almost ten pages of deeply personal and false claims about Gabriel Pogrund, the Sunday Times Whitehall editor. He and Harry Yorke, the newspaper’s deputy political editor, were named as “persons of significant interest”.