Keir Starmer will ask his independent ethics adviser to investigate whether Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons breached the ministerial code, following claims he was involved in a smear campaign targeting journalists.

Simons was director of Labour Together when it allegedly paid thousands of pounds to a PR firm to investigate the backgrounds of journalists digging into how the think tank’s undeclared funding bankrolled Starmer’s party leadership campaign.

What is alleged?
In November 2023, The Sunday Times reported that the pro-Starmer think tank had failed to declare £730,000 in political donations between 2017 and 2020. Labour Together was headed at that time by Morgan McSweeney, who later served as Starmer’s chief of staff in Downing Street. The think tank attributed the discrepancy to an administrative error.

An investigation by Khadija Sharife and Peter Geoghegan, published on the latter’s Substack site Democracy for Sale, revealed that Labour Together paid PR firm Apco “at least £30,000” for material on the journalists. At the time of the payment, the directorship of the think tank had passed to Simons.

Apco’s report, codenamed “Operation Cannon”, divulged personal information about the journalists involved, including claims about the “faith, relationships and upbringing” of Sunday Times reporter Gabriel Pogrund, said the BBC. Labour Together then passed “some of Apco’s material” on to the security services, “raising serious questions about whether public authorities were drawn into an effort to discredit legitimate journalism”, said Geoghegan in The Guardian.

What has the response been?
While not denying that Labour Together hired Apco, Simons has said he was “surprised and shocked” that the report included “unnecessary information” on Pogrund. “I asked for this information to be removed before passing the report to GCHQ,” he told The Sunday Times.

Starmer has said he “didn’t know anything” about the Apco report, and has asked the Cabinet Office to “establish the facts”. An investigation has since been launched by its propriety, ethics and constitution group, but critics claim the government is effectively marking its own homework. More than 20 Labour MPs have written to the PM and Labour Party general secretary Hollie Ridley to demand an independent investigation.

The BBC has apologised for failing to edit out a racial slur shouted during the Bafta awards ceremony by a guest with Tourette syndrome. John Davidson, whose life story inspired the movie “I Swear”, yelled the N-word while Black actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting an award.

Shortly afterwards, ceremony host Alan Cumming apologised. A BBC spokesperson later also said sorry for “any offence caused by the language heard” during the broadcast. 

‘Empty’ apologies
“Can we stop making these kinds of apologies?” said Ava Vidal in The Independent. These vaguely worded hypotheticals “feel empty” and avoid the reality that “people were offended – Black people”. Jordan and Lindo (pictured above) were “violated in front of their peers” and then again “on almost-live TV”.

Grace is due to Davidson, too: “what some people have said about this disability campaigner is beyond disgusting”. Involuntary tics and outbursts don’t “indicate a person’s true feelings and are not a reflection of their character”, and he “will be absolutely mortified by his outburst”. Some Black commenters argued on social media that Davidson should have watched the ceremony from “a private, soundproofed box where he could not be heard”, but “people belonging to a community that knows about segregation should know better”.

Big error
The moment was “shocking”, said Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco in The Herald, but so is the fact that “two hours later, the BBC inexplicably aired the segment on television, with Davidson’s shout audible in the background”. In the predictable subsequent “pile-on”, some people suggested Davidson should “wear a muzzle” or “tape his mouth shut”. 

“Rather than pick a side between racism and ableism, we should instead direct our ire towards the BBC”, which “failed” in its “duty of care to all parties involved”. This is “another indictment of a failing public institution”.

The “big” error was “in the editing, or the lack of”, said Catherine Shoard in The Guardian. “No one could have stopped” Davidson “yelling out the N-word” but, given that BBC editors found time to “judiciously remove Akinola Davies Jr’s shout of ‘Free Palestine’” from the broadcast, it “seems a perverse decision” not to edit out the “appalling racial insult” too.

New York’s Robert John Burck, aka the Naked Cowboy, performs in Times Square. The street performer braved the cold yesterday as a snowstorm lashing the US Northeast triggered school closures and a travel ban across the city.

Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” has sparked “a new wave of Brontë pilgrims”, said Maria Crawford in the Financial Times. I made my own trip to West Yorkshire to experience the “tumult of windswept moors” that inspired Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, and the books of her sisters.

Today, it feels a bit like an “open-air literary theme park”. My first stop was the village of Thornton, near Bradford, to visit the Brontë Birthplace, which is “part museum, part magical guesthouse”. Charlotte, Anne, Emily and brother Branwell were all born here, and the community-owned property was revamped and opened to the public last year.

“Excitingly”, its three bedrooms can be booked by those eager to “sleep where their literary heroes once did”, said Cathy Toogood in The Telegraph. But it was the “handsome” village of Haworth, where Emily moved in 1820 as a toddler, and the “moody moors around it”, that inspired much of “Wuthering Heights”. Her old family home – now the Brontë Parsonage Museum – houses the world’s biggest collection of Brontë manuscripts, personal possessions and furnishings. Emily is buried in the family vault beneath St Michael and All Angels Church next door.

Stop for lunch at the Black Bull Inn, where Branwell “the struggling Brontë brother fed his addictions”, said Crawford. Then head out into the “untamed wilderness” of the countryside. It’s a four-mile walk to Top Withens – the ruined farmhouse said to have inspired “Wuthering Heights” – via the Brontë Waterfall, a tranquil spot beloved by the sisters.

The United States Is Dangerously Misreading Iran
Ali Hashem on Foreign Policy
There’s talk in Washington of a “limited strike” on Iran to force “concessions without starting a larger war”, writes Middle East expert Ali Hashem. But conflicts are “limited only when both sides want to keep them contained”. While the US views “military pressure as a means of diplomatic leverage”, Tehran is moving towards the “glorification of resistance in the face of existential threat”. A US strike could unite Iran’s leaders “around a wartime mindset”.

The QR code is killing off our paper trails
Laura Freeman in The Times
My three-year-old daughter is “passionately attached to her scraps”, writes Laura Freeman. For her, “the gift tag is better than the present” and “the Tesco receipt is a prize to be carried aloft”. But the paper trail of our lives – “the tickets and chits, stubs and tokens” – is disappearing as “the QR code conquers all”. With “nothing to prop on the mantlepiece” or “stick on the fridge”, our “experience is diminished, remembrance dimmed”.

El Mencho’s killing won’t solve Mexico’s cartel problem – or anything else
Belén Fernández on Al Jazeera
“As anyone who has ever paid remote attention to global affairs might have predicted”, writes Belén Fernández, the killing of drug lord El Mencho by Mexican security forces has triggered violence across the country. This is “what happens when you take out a cartel kingpin”. And yet his death “will do precisely nothing” to resolve Latin America’s “narcotrafficking problem”. If officials were “actually serious” about getting rid of cartels, they would make trading drugs “less fantastically lucrative” by decriminalising them.