Sunday Times journalist speaks of ‘revulsion’ after ‘grotesque’ smear on his Jewishness in secret report
Gabriel Pogrund, currently the Sunday Times Whitehall editor, is named in report which smeared him and others over Labour Together article
A senior Sunday Times journalist has said his Jewishness was “grotesquely subverted” in a secretive report that has sparked “revulsion” after it was commissioned to look into the writers of an article on a Labour-linked group.
Gabriel Pogrund, currently the title’s Whitehall editor and Political Journalist of the Year at the 2025 Press Awards, was named in a report compiled by US lobbying group Apco.
The £36,000 report, paid for by the think tank Labour Together, included Pogrund and other investigative journalists in its probe into the “backgrounds and motivations” of those who worked on a 2023 article revealing Labour Together’s failure to declare £730,000 in donations between 2017 and 2020.
The group was later fined over £14,000 by the Electoral Commission for 20 breaches of campaign finance law.
Speaking for the first time about the impact of the Apco report, which was shared with senior Labour Party figures and became Westminster gossip, Pogrund said: “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.”
He added the report had “grotesquely subverted that, and said that I must have an odd relationship with my ethno-religious background because of the views that it falsely purported that I hold.”
On The State Of It podcast, alongside Sunday Times columnist Patrick Maguire, Pogrund further addressed the report’s slurs: “A rabbi characterises gossip as being akin to taking a knife and ripping it through pillows stuffed with goose feathers and then asking somebody after you’ve shaken the pillow to collect every feather.”
Friends of the journalist- named last year among the Jewish News’ 60 under 40’ of the community’s top talents – said he has been left “angry and devastated” by the false smears contained in the report, which this newspaper is not repeating in full.
It is understood the report suggested there was a “odd” mismatch between Pogrund’s faith and what was wrongly described as his political and ideological views.
Pogrund told the podcast: “Some people who had the loyalty to me, or at least the integrity to double check what they’d been told about me, and to ask if it was true… to give me the opportunity to rebut the allegations circulating about me.
“But you know, there are goose feathers, whose whereabouts, no doubt, cannot be traced. There will be people who have believed what was said about me. And who believed there had to be something wrong, sinister, conspiratorial about the provenance and the execution of the Labour Together piece.”
The 58-page Apco report was commissioned by Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons, who is himself Jewish, and written by Apco’s senior director Tom Harper, a former Sunday Times employee. It also included baseless claims that the emails underpinning the story were likely to have come from a suspected Kremlin hack of the Electoral Commission. “The likeliest culprit is the Russian state, or proxies of the Russian state,” Harper reportedly wrote.
Simons, who led Labour Together at the time, said in a statement: “I was surprised and shocked to read the report extended beyond the contract by including unnecessary information on Gabriel Pogrund.” He added that the information relating to Pogrund had been “immediately removed” before the report was passed on to intelligence officials.
Simons and his chief of staff at the think tank, Ben Szreter, reportedly told the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ, that they suspected the Sunday Times article may be linked to a wider “coordinated effort to discredit” Labour Together and undermine Starmer and then-chief adviser Morgan McSweeney.
There is no suggestion that Starmer was aware of the report or attempts to share it.
The report also named investigative journalist Paul Holden, described as having “pro-Corbyn” sympathies, as a provider of documents used in the article. The Guardian obtained emails from Simons and Szreter making “other spurious connections to Russia, based on Holden’s private life.”
“We understand that Paul Holden, the pro-Corbyn investigative journalist who obtained the documents, is currently living with Jessica Murray,” Szreter wrote, according to The Guardian. Murray is the daughter of Andrew Murray, political adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. The emails reportedly made further false allegations about Murray.
An investigation into Apco’s research has been launched by the Public Relations and Communications Association’s standards committee, a move welcomed by Simons.
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