The Death Throes of Keir Starmer's Government

America may feel divided, but laughing at the English always united us as a people. Thanks to the Keystone Cops government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, we should have plenty of entertainment this weekend.

Thursday, Racket reported on a snowballing scandal surrounding Parliamentary Secretary and House of Commons MP Josh Simons. In 2023, when Simons was at the Labour Together think tank, he hired a private PR firm called APCO to investigate a group of journalists that included Sunday Times writer Gabriel Pogrund, John McEvoy of Declassified UK, Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone, Shadow World Investigations Director Paul Holden, and me. We’d all published exposés using internal correspondence to expose financial shenanigans like future Starmer chief of staff Morgan McSweeney failing to declare £730,000 in donations to Labour Together. In return, they had us investigated and turned over the APCO report to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) — part of GCHQ, the British analog to the NSA.

First broken by Khadija Sharife and Peter Geoghegan at Democracy for Sale, the story is outrageous in its outlines but comic in a manner — forgive us, England — unique to our ex-masters in the Wanking Isles. This scandal should have been outed in full with an accompanying goring of skulls a while ago, but the Brits can’t even self-destruct efficiently. They adhere to a caste system even for public humiliation rituals.

The shoe that still hasn’t dropped is the final report prepared by APCO, a shady “global advisory” firm whose clients have included the Saudi Ministry of Economy, the Israeli arms company Elbit, and the U.S. State Department (former John Kerry aide Jonathan Winer is an APCO Senior Counselor). The APCO report, according to two sources with knowledge of its contents, falsely accuses Pogrund, Holden, and others (including me) of using material from a Russian hack in our reporting. APCO hired human operatives to “research” key figures, including South Africa resident Holden.

It was bad enough that Labour Together circulated this “research” internally, but delivering it to a spy agency in the NCSC elevated the affair to a new level of iniquity, leaving just one question — who was to blame, Simons or APCO?

Here, things get interesting. APCO’s head of media relations is Tom Harper, a former Sunday Times reporter married to current political editor Caroline Wheeler. That’s a problem only