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Sir Keir Starmer has asked his ethics adviser to investigate Josh Simons, a minister accused of hiring a public affairs company to look into the source of leaks to journalists when he ran a pro-Labour think-tank.
The UK prime minister has told Sir Laurie Magnus, the independent adviser on ministerial standards, to examine whether Simons had broken the ministerial code, Darren Jones said on Monday.
Jones, chief secretary to the prime minister, told the House of Commons that the Cabinet Office had completed a probe to “establish the facts” around the allegations.
“That work has now concluded, and the facts have been reported to the prime minister,” said Jones. “The prime minister has been advised that the matter should be referred to the independent adviser on ministerial standards, which the prime minister has done.”
While Simons ran Labour Together in 2023 the group paid more than £30,000 to APCO Worldwide after The Sunday Times reported that the think-tank had been fined two years earlier by the Electoral Commission for hiding the source of its funding.
Simons, a junior minister in the Cabinet Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, has since said he was “shocked” that APCO had “extended beyond the contract” by including “unnecessary information on Gabriel Pogrund”, a Sunday Times journalist.
Simons, who entered the House of Commons after the 2024 general election, is a close ally of Morgan McSweeney, founder of Labour Together and Starmer’s chief of staff until he resigned this month.
At the time of the Electoral Commission fine in 2021 — which came after Labour Together failed to declare hundreds of thousands of pounds of donations — the think-tank was being run by McSweeney.
Simons has acknowledged that he asked APCO to look into whether Labour Together’s data was obtained through a hack and that he passed information from the report to signals intelligence agency GCHQ.
The APCO report falsely suggested that several journalists were part of a Russian influence operation, including Pogrund and Paul Holden, an investigative reporter.
Alex Burghart, Conservative shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, told the Commons: “This looks . . . like a deliberate attempt to smear and intimidate journalists, whose only crime had been to report that Labour Together had broken electoral law.
“It is very difficult to see how the minister’s position is tenable,” he added.
Previous probes by Magnus, appointed in 2022, have ended the ministerial careers of Tulip Siddiq, who was City minister, and Angela Rayner, former deputy prime minister.
The ministerial code states that “ministers are expected to maintain high standards of behaviour and to behave in a way that upholds the highest standards of propriety”.
The Cabinet Office probe was carried out by its propriety and ethics section, known as “PET”.
On Monday, Simons accidentally wrote to a mass WhatsApp group of Labour MPs, saying: “PM [prime minister] will ask Laurie [Magnus] to look into it. Aim is to move fast. But PET did find I had not broken the code.” He swiftly deleted the message.