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7 hours ago
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A Cabinet Office minister under investigation over his role in allegedly smearing journalists has made a late declaration of personal donations.
Josh Simons is facing an investigation from the prime minister’s independent adviser on ministerial standards over his role in commissioning a PR agency to examine journalists who had written about £730,000 in undeclared donations to Labour Together, a thinktank he led at the time.
The money came from a donor whose undeclared gifts to Labour Together were a subject of the stories that prompted Simons to commission the firm’s investigation into the journalists.
Newly released data shows Simons received gifts of £1,250 on 21 October and 4 December 2025 from Trevor Chinn, a longstanding Labour donor.
House of Commons rules require MPs to publicly declare cumulative donations of more than £1,500 within 28 days of receiving them. Simons did not declare the gifts until early February – 32 days after he ought to have told Commons authorities.
The late declaration of donations may prove particularly embarrassing for Simons, already under mounting pressure, because of earlier questions about donations by Chinn to Labour Together, before Simons ran the thinktank.
In February 2021, the Electoral Commission revealed it was investigating Labour Together over a failure to declare £730,000 in donations within the required period. Some donations had been declared years after they were made – including more than £120,000 given by Chinn to the thinktank between 2017 and 2020.
The gifts had been made while Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, ran Labour Together.
The failure to declare the donations was attributed at the time by Labour Together to an “admin error”, but the Electoral Commission later fined the group £14,250 for repeated breaches of political financing laws.
A November 2023 story in the Sunday Times raised fresh questions about the late declarations. The article noted how McSweeney had used Labour Together to support Starmer’s campaign for the Labour leadership contest in 2020.
The story prompted Simons, by now running Labour Together, to commission Apco, an American public affairs agency, to investigate two Sunday Times journalists and the sources of their story.
After Apco completed its report early in 2024, Simons told intelligence officials at the National Cyber Security Centre that he believed the information came from a hack of the Electoral Commission. He told them that “our evidence” showed it had been “disseminated to people known to be operating in a pro-Kremlin propaganda network with links to Russian intelligence”.
At Simons’ direction, his chief of staff at Labour Together told the security officials that because the information “was disseminated to pro-Russian journalists linked to other ‘hack and leak’ operations, we believe that the likeliest culprit is the Russian state, or proxies of the Russian state”.
However, Paul Holden, a freelance journalist who provided the Sunday Times with documents for their original report, recently showed the Guardian his source materials. They indicate the story was based on files leaked from the Labour party by whistleblowers.
A spokesperson for Simons said: “Labour Together commissioned Apco to investigate the information Paul Holden obtained for his book, as has repeatedly been made clear.”
Simons was contacted for comment about the late declaration of donations from Chinn.
A Labour party spokesperson said: “This donation was declared slightly late due to an administrative error. As soon as this error was identified, action was taken to contact the parliamentary registrar to ensure the declaration could be made. All declarations have now been made.”
The latest data also reveals Chinn has given £2,500 to Angela Rayner “to assist in campaign activities”. The donation was declared on time.
