WINSTON CHURCHILL once declared that “a free Press is the sleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny”.
The flame of liberty — like the Olympic torch — should be inspirational and therefore burn high in triumph.
But today that flame is flickering low at the heart of our political system.
As Sir Keir Starmer’s Government sinks in a quagmire of sleaze and failure, the Prime Minister’s panic-stricken supporters have resorted to desperate tactics to cover up their abuses and prevent investigations by the media.
Engulfed by the fallout from the ever-darkening crisis over Peter Mandelson’s links to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Sir Keir would have hoped for some respite this week as Parliament goes into recess. No such luck.
The foul stench of new scandal hangs over Downing Street, and just as in the Paedogate affair, Sir Keir’s disgraced former Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney is at its centre.
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Shocking contempt
And again, as with Paedogate, the incriminating elements of this saga seem scarcely believable, including smear campaigns against journalists, claims of dirty tricks by foreign intelligence agencies, skullduggery within the Cabinet Office, serious allegations of law-breaking and a shocking contempt for the basic liberty of the Press.
McSweeney had been the driving force behind the creation of a think-tank called Labour Together, whose purpose was to help bring Starmer to power.
Now, in an extraordinary and sinister twist, it has emerged that Labour Together paid researchers to snoop on journalists who had been looking into the group’s murky business dealings.
For a political outfit to launch a hidden spying operation against a legitimate part of the media is totally unBritish.
It is the kind of practice that belongs to East Germany during the Soviet era, not to one of the world’s oldest democracies.
But that is what seems to have occurred after McSweeney’s ally Josh Simons, the director of Labour Together, became alarmed by a damning article that appeared in the Sunday Times in late 2023.
It has emerged that Labour Together paid researchers to snoop on journalists who had been looking into the group’s murky business dealings
Written by Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke — two highly respected journalists on the paper — this report revealed that between 2017 and 2020, Labour Together had raked in £730,000 in donations which had not been registered with the Electoral Commission, resulting in a heavy fine for breaking the law.
But instead of showing any embarrassment, Labour Together secretly went on the offensive by paying the company Apco Worldwide £30,000 to scrutinise the two journalists’ sources.
Then, to provide some spurious cover for its disgraceful action, it contacted the Government’s surveillance headquarters of GCHQ with a far-fetched story of how Labour’s IT operations may have been hacked by a foreign power.
GCHQ soon showed them the door.
The fiasco drags on, plumbing new depths of absurdity as Downing Street instructs the Cabinet Office to conduct an internal investigation into the affair.
And who happens to be the Cabinet Office Minister? None other than Josh Simons himself, the former Labour Together director.
For a political outfit to launch a hidden spying operation against a legitimate part of the media is totally unBritish
The conflict of interest would be laughable were it not so serious.
Simons now feebly says that Apco went “beyond what was asked” in researching the backgrounds of the Sunday Times journalists, but the real outrage was recruiting the firm in the first place.
During his years in opposition, Starmer loved to pose as a moral crusader who would clean up politics once he had kicked out the sleazy Tories.
The protection of the Press would be a key part of this mission, he promised.
He was still preaching the same gospel after he reached No 10.
“Journalism is the lifeblood of democracy,” he wrote in 2024, adding that his “Government will always champion Press freedoms.”
How hollow those words now sound as the Cabinet becomes ever more authoritarian.
The Labour Together controversy is far from unique.
In another savage blow to Press independence, the Ministry of Justice is to close the Courtsdesk archive, an invaluable online tool that helped reporters go through legal archives and court records.
Justice Secretary David Lammy, whose respect for liberty can be gauged by his eagerness to slash jury trials, has ordered the wholesale deletion of data and the removal of search engines — steps that will make the work of journalists much more difficult.
Injustices will multiply
Oldham Times reporter Nat Goodlad says this piece of archival vandalism will mean “serious cases will slip through the cracks and cases of genuine public interest will be missed”.
Injustices will also multiply.
As the senior Tory Nick Timothy pointed out, it was the British Press that exposed the industrial-scale horror of the grooming gangs scandal after years of covering up by the authorities.
But journalists could never have achieved that if they had not been able to cross-reference cases to establish patterns of exploitation across the North and the Midlands.
“Change is coming,” radical Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn warned the Press with a malevolent grin in 2019.
But it is his successor who is implementing this oppressive programme.
Unless there is a change in direction, an essential pillar of our democratic life will be lost.