The State of It: Gabriel Pogrund speaks out on the Labour Together scandal
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Labour Together scandal is the latest storm threatening to capsize the government - and Gabriel has been right at the heart. For the first time, he describes what happened when a Labour think tank set private investigators on a journalist. Their secret report falsely accused Gabriel of acting as a Russian agitator and "grotesquely subverted" his faith in an attack on his and his colleagues' reporting in The Sunday Times.
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Hosts:
- Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times
- Gabriel Pogrund, Whitehall editor, The Sunday Times
Producer: Euan Dawtrey.
Executive Producer: Dan Box.
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Further listening: ‘This is dark s***’: inside the political smear campaign to discredit journalists
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Manvim. |
| 0:08.8 | In this morning's episode, we looked at how Labour Together, a shadowy group of activists who helped to get Kirstama elected |
| 0:16.2 | had spent thousands of pounds paying for a reputation management company |
| 0:21.5 | to investigate journalists at the Sunday Times. |
| 0:26.2 | What followed was an intensely personal smear campaign. |
| 0:30.9 | Do have a listen to that episode for the background on this extraordinary story. |
| 0:35.9 | But one of the journalists in the eye of the storm, |
| 0:38.9 | who was actually the focus of most of these investigations, |
| 0:42.5 | was Gabriel Pogrand. |
| 0:44.6 | In this week's episode of our politics podcast, The State of It, |
| 0:48.4 | Gabriel talks very honestly about what he's been through. |
| 0:52.1 | We thought you'd want to hear it, so here it is. |
| 1:02.0 | Labor activists paid for smear campaign against journalists. |
| 1:06.5 | The whole of the Labour governance is an absolute cesspit. |
| 1:10.0 | It's the kind of thing you'd expect in Putin's Kremlin. |
| 1:13.9 | And I think we need to know the guilty men. |
| 1:16.2 | And if they're in government, they should be fired. |
| 1:19.5 | The journalists in question here, I think, are second to none in the investigative work they do, |
| 1:26.4 | but causes problems for us, but that is their job. |
| 1:29.7 | We were all lumped together as essentially useful idiots for Russia in this report. |
| 1:37.0 | You know what it's like as a journalist. If someone damages your reputation, it could be |
| 1:42.3 | career ending, couldn't it? I didn't know anything about |
... |
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