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How in the hell is Keir Starmer still in a job? I suppose it’s some kind of testament to his sheer, brazen chutzpah – not to mention the spinelessness of his party – that he’s still clinging to power.
After all, Starmer is not just the most unpopular UK PM on record, beating out even Liz Truss who was arseholed out of office after just 49 days. Even his second-in-command, Rachel Reeves, is more hated than Truss’s Kwasi Kwarteng, who had a rating of -53.
Add to that, Starmer has been belted with one shocking scandal after another, even by the standards of scandal-loving Brit politics. This includes the incandescent outrage over the continued invasion of criminal migrants, the Labour-run parliament’s refusal to investigate the mass rape of thousands white British girls by gangs of Pakistani Muslims and Starmer getting personally dragged into the Epstein child-trafficking scandal.
And now we can add yet another scandal.
A close ally of British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer faces an investigation over allegations he paid a PR firm to investigate two Sunday Times journalists.
Josh Simons, the digital government minister in the Department of Science, is accused of paying Apco Worldwide, a US-owned PR firm, to look into journalists reporting on undeclared funding by Labour Together, a think tank closely associated with the Labour Party, where he was formerly director.
So, what we have is dodgy politicians paying dodgy spin doctors to smear journalists sniffing around the dodgy politicians.
Sir Keir Starmer said the Cabinet Office was investigating the conduct of the think tank after it paid £36,000 ($69,000) to Apco to examine the “backgrounds and motivations” of journalists behind a story before the 2024 general election.
The Sunday Times reported that the group had failed to declare £730,000 of donations between 2017 and 2020. The Electoral Commission found the group guilty of 20 breaches of campaign finance laws and issued a fine in 2021.
Labour Together first contacted Apco in November 2023, with Kate Forrester, a lobbyist and former Labour staffer who had connections to both organisations, handling the relationship. She is the wife of Paul Ovenden, then Labour’s director of communications.
They were actually going to try the old ‘Russian collusion’ angle.
The aim was to discredit the newspaper’s reporting by falsely suggesting its journalists might be part of a Russian conspiracy or had relied on emails hacked by the Kremlin.
Seriously? They should be fired for being so obviously completely thick that they’d think anyone would fall for that one any more.
Apco produced a 58-page document including almost 10 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”.
Maybe Donald Trump will loan them his defo lawyers after he’s finished taking the BBC to the cleaners.
The Sunday Times report had posed questions of Morgan McSweeney, who quit last week as Sir Keir’s chief of staff. At the time, Mr McSweeney, as director of Labour Together, had been responsible for declaring donations. It also questioned whether the oversight had been deliberate to cover up fundraising from other factions, including the left.
Really upping the credibility stakes, Starmer’s office is now commissioning the dodgy spin doctors to investigate the dodgy politicians paying those very dodgy spin doctors to smear journalists sniffing around the same dodgy politicians.
Only in Starmer’s broken Britain.
