Why was a Labour campaign group spying on journalists?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
The Prime Minister has called for an investigation by the Cabinet Office into the campaign group Labour Together which helped get him into power. The think tank is accused of having dug up dirt on journalists investigating its use of political donations. Who signed off the dark arts smear campaign? And why are we just hearing about it now?
Later, is Trump’s attorney General part of that Epstein cover up? Why is she so resistant to getting to the bottom of the crimes it reveals?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.0 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.4 | There will be a cabinet office investigation into the allegations are quite right to. |
| 0:19.5 | And so that is already in place. I didn't know anything |
| 0:23.4 | about this investigation and it absolutely needs to be looked into. So the Cabinet Office |
| 0:28.3 | will be establishing the facts. That is Kirstama, not for the first time announcing another |
| 0:34.7 | Cabinet Office inquiry and not for the first time saying, |
| 0:39.5 | I knew nothing about it. |
| 0:41.3 | The story that's emerging about what Labour together did |
| 0:45.9 | is complicated and pretty outrageous. |
| 0:49.8 | We're going to try and talk you through |
| 0:51.3 | what we understand and where it could take us. Welcome to the |
| 0:56.1 | newsagents. The news agents. It's John. Yay. Yay. Yay a bit. Hello. Welcome back. Thank you very much. |
| 1:09.7 | How many continents have we done? How many weeks? |
| 1:11.7 | I've been in Australia and I have been in South Africa, so Oceania and Africa in the past three weeks. |
| 1:20.0 | Those poor Asians, those poor Europeans, not this time. |
| 1:23.2 | Anyway, I'm glad that while I was away, nothing much happened. |
| 1:29.3 | So, okay, we're going to start by talking about Labour Together and these extraordinary allegations about work that that body commissioned. |
| 1:38.3 | And just to go back a step, Labour Together is essentially a sort of working group, a campaign group. Think tank. A think tank that got Kirstarmer to power. In other words, they do the groundwork. They say, this is how people are voting. This is what you need to do. These are the place you need to target. This is what's going on in this part of the country. It's not going on in that part of the country. And they paved the way, well they did pave the way, |
| 2:02.3 | essentially, for the rise to power of labour. And of course the eminence greys of labour together |
| 2:09.4 | was Morgan McSweeney, who until last week was the chief of staff of the Downing Street operation |
| 2:15.7 | and the closest person to Kirstama. And what happened was, |
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