McSweeney’s sabotage outfit spied on Murdoch hacks

‘Labour Together’ — the sabotage outfit that brought down Jeremy Corbyn and conned Labour members into choosing Keir Starmer — paid investigators to spy on, and smear two Times journalists. Unsurprisingly, the pair — Harry Yorke and Gabriel Pogrund — have publicised their experience as unique.

@Gabriel_Pogrund and I were the subject of a disgraceful smear campaign — just for doing our jobs

I’m proud that The Sunday Times is calling it out on the front page tomorrow

Labour activists paid for smear campaign against journalists https://t.co/Uw9UjNJtzm

— Harry Yorke (@HarryYorke1) February 14, 2026

Labour Together pursues journalists

The Sunday Times, which covered the story, reported that:

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”.

Old news

But Pogrund and Yorke only stand out for being the only ‘mainstream’ hacks known to have been targeted by Labour Together. The pressure group was formerly run by disgraced Starmer adviser Morgan McSweeney and other ‘red Tories’ in Starmer’s faction. But these latest revelations and Labour Together’s spying activities are not new — not in any real sense. Their not-so-covert operations have been in the public domain for months.

In fact, news of the spying broke on the Canary in September 2025. McSweeney’s outfit set investigators on Paul Holden, the author of The Fraud. The book exposes Labour Together’s dark tactics and Starmer’s dishonesty. Furthermore, the book has been serialised by the Canary.

Labour Together did the same to Andrew Feinstein, the author and former Mandela government minister. He stood against Starmer in the 2024 general election and decimated his majority. It did the same to journalists John McEvoy, Khadija Sharife and Peter Geoghegan.

Labour Together’s spies targeted Pogrund for being Jewish — ironic given its weaponisation of supposed ‘Labour antisemitism’ against Corbyn and the left. They did the same to the Jewish Feinstein. They smeared Pogrund and Yorke as being linked to Russia — they’d done the same to Feinstein and Holden.

In fact, not even the ‘news’ about Yorke and Pogrund is new. The Canary reported it last week. No wonder McSweeney and his cadre are scared of the Canary. They have tried and failed to destroy it while Corbyn was still leading Labour.

Featured image via the Canary