Labour MP reveals antisemitism fears drove decision that ended his ministerial career
Josh Simons MP has spoken for first time about his resignation as a Cabinet Office minister
A Jewish Labour MP who resigned as a Cabinet Office minister has revealed that concerns about a book he believed sought to downplay Labour’s antisemitism crisis under Jeremy Corbyn were a key factor in the events that led to his departure from government.
Josh Simons, the MP for Makerfield, quit his ministerial post on 28 February after a scandal over the commissioning of a controversial investigation into journalists.
Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and Paddy O’Connell, Simons explained for the first time the personal motivations that drove him to seek external advice — and ultimately to hire PR firm APCO Worldwide.
Simons said he became alarmed when he researched the background of journalist Paul Holden, whose work had contributed to a Sunday Times story about undeclared donations at the think tank Labour Together.
“I looked up who this guy Paul Holden was,” Simons told the BBC. “His book was being published by a publisher, OR Books. And the other book that was listed next to his book was a book called Weaponising Antisemitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Corbyn.”
He said he feared “that information might be used to retell the story of the antisemitism crisis that happened under [Labour] and to downplay it.”
“And as a Jewish person who resigned from Corbyn’s office, actually, where I worked for a period, because of their failure to deal with antisemitism, that made me really concerned about the motivations of the people who were writing this book,” Simons said.
He added that the material appeared to have come from the Electoral Commission, which deepened his concern.
“The fact that the material they had seemed to be private, confidential material that had actually come from the Electoral Commission, meant we thought, ‘Well, let’s ask for advice,'” he said.
“I had no experience of anything like this, so I asked for advice, you know, was referred to APCO, and they said they had a cyber security expert who could trail the dark web and look at where that material might have come from, and they could investigate it and provide us with some advice.”
Simons also insisted he never intended for APCO to investigate Sunday Times journalist Gabriel Pogrund.
“What I saw in the document about him was wrong, it was baseless and it was completely irrelevant to the question that we’d asked,” he said. “This was never about the journalists themselves.”
Simons has a long personal connection to the issue of Labour antisemitism.
He became a policy adviser in Corbyn’s Leader’s Office in 2015 but later cited “persistent failure” to tackle antisemitism as the reason for his departure.
He subsequently contributed to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s investigation into Labour antisemitism.
He was elected MP for Makerfield in the 2024 general election and was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital Government in January 2026, just weeks before the scandal broke.
The emerging scandal centred on Labour Together, an influential think tank that played a central role in Starmer’s successful Labour leadership campaign in 2020.
The organisation was originally founded by figures including Steve Reed and Morgan McSweeney — who later became Starmer’s chief of staff — before Simons took over as director.
In November 2023, the Sunday Times reported that Labour Together had failed to declare donations totalling £730,000 between 2017 and 2020.
In the wake of that story, Labour Together commissioned APCO Worldwide — paying the firm at least £30,000 — to investigate the sourcing, funding and origins of the reporting.
The resulting 58-page document, codenamed “Operation Cannon”, went significantly further than Simons says he intended.
Sources told the BBC that the report included information about journalist Pogrund’s Jewish beliefs and claims about his ideological position.
It also alleged, without evidence, that Pogrund’s reporting “could be seen as destabilising to the UK and also in the interests of Russia’s strategic foreign policy objectives.”
Pogrund is the Sunday Times’s Whitehall editor and was named Political Journalist of the Year at the 2025 Press Awards.
The report named Pogrund, Sunday Times deputy political editor Harry Yorke, Guardian journalist Henry Dyer, and others as “significant persons of interest.”
A shorter, redacted version of the report — with the details about Pogrund removed — was passed to GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, which declined to investigate.
Jewish News revealed Pogrund had said of the report: “I think the detail which has probably ended up causing a lot of heat and a fair amount of revulsion too is the fact that the report used my Jewishness, which is a source of great pride for me.”
Simons said APCO had “gone beyond” its remit by including the personal information about journalists. In his resignation letter to the Prime Minister, he described the treatment of Pogrund as “a disgrace” and said he “never sought to smear” the journalists involved.
Starmer asked his Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards, Sir Laurie Magnus, to investigate whether Simons had breached the Ministerial Code. Sir Laurie found that Simons had acted “in good faith” but acknowledged that the terms he agreed with APCO were “wider than he had understood” and that he had acted “too hastily in confirming their appointment.”
Sir Laurie concluded there was “no basis for advising you of any breach of the Ministerial Code” but noted the “distraction and potential reputational damage” the affair had caused.
Despite being cleared, Simons resigned on 28 February, saying his continued presence in government had “become a distraction from this Government’s important work.” The PM accepted the resignation “with sadness.”
Holden’s book, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy, was published by OR Books.
In his resignation letter, Simons wrote that the book “diminishes the antisemitism that infected Labour under its previous leadership.”
APCO Worldwide has said it is conducting a detailed internal review of the project and is cooperating with the Public Relations and Communications Association’s own inquiry into the matter.
Holden issued a statement after Simons resigned saying:”Simons made entirely false, defamatory and conspiratorial claims about me, my colleagues and my family.
“His actions threatened my livelihood and reputation as was well as that of my colleagues. It risked undermining ongoing work we were doing tackling grand corruption around the world, including in collaboration with multiple law enforcement agencies.
“It has caused me and my young family significant distress. It is appalling that Simons cannot bring himself to apologise to me and my family after his conduct towards us has been exposed. ”
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