Josh Simons is the ex-cabinet minister who had to resign in disgrace because he’d been running a spying operation on UK journalists. Or, if you’re the BBC or in specific Laura Kuenssberg, he’s a naive young man who simply didn’t realise it was wrong to do blatantly bad things in secret:
‘I was naive,’ says minister who quit over Labour Together claims https://t.co/wRYLeZmJlW
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) March 28, 2026
What the above headline doesn’t convey is that Laura Kuenssberg raised the idea that Simons was simply “naive” and “foolish”. And she suggested it in one of those wretched moments in which an establishment journalist provides an answer and then asks the interviewee if they’d like to claim it as their own.
Young, dumb, and full of shit
Simons resigned from the government on 28 February. As Skwawkbox reported for the Canary:
Just in case readers are unfamiliar with the case, or are tempted to take anything Simons says at face value, Labour Together were caught paying tens of thousands to a firm run by a fellow Labour right-winger’s wife to spy on independent journalists.
This has been known for months, but the ‘mainstream’ media only started to pay attention when two of MSM-aligned journalists were targeted.
Additionally:
From 2022 to 2024, Simons ran the sabotage outfit, Labour Togther. He took over after disgraced Morgan McSweeney moved on to become Keir Starmer’s (now former) chief of staff.
As we reported, the Canary was among those who Labour Together spied on.
The following is the clip in which Kuenssberg furnished Simons with his excuses.
I am trying to imagine a universe in which an actually left-wing politician would spy on journalists, report them to the security services, belatedly get called out for doing so, and then Laura Kuenssberg would sympathetically ask “were you just a bit naive?” pic.twitter.com/GK1RT3ivMy
— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) March 28, 2026
In the clip above, Kuenssberg says:
Do you now think that you were naive? Do you think you were foolish? You say you weren’t meaning to do anything wrong – it wasn’t what you intended for a journalist to be investigated. But, if you went to a PR firm saying, ‘please, can you find out about where this story came from?’ – surely, actually, it was inevitable they were going to look into what the journalists had been doing, if you’re asking where a story comes from.
So looking back now, do you think, were you naive? Were you foolish? Were you mistaken? How do you characterise it?
We’re going to write this in capitals so it’s clear:
THIS IS NOT HOW INTERVIEWS SHOULD WORK.
You can’t give someone a helpful answer and then ask if they want to claim it.
And of course he did want to claim it, because it presented him in the most flattering light possible.
This was how he answered:
Absolutely, I was naive. And there’s a lot I’ve learned from it. And there’s things that I would have done differently.
And this is how the BBC wrote it up:
A Labour MP who resigned as a Cabinet Office minister has said he was “naive” and “so sorry” in his first full interview since leaving his role.
This should read ‘Laura Kuenssberg suggested he was naive, and Simons agreed‘.
Abysmal stuff.
Kuenssberg — Form
As academic Nicholas Guyatt added, Kuenssberg has a history of laundering the reputation of Britain’s worst politicians:
Laura Kuenssberg is the GOAT of rehabilitating disgraced Labour right figures: she also threw a lifeline to Peter Mandelson back in January, hailing his “unique perspective” on Trump and giving him twenty minutes to pose as a geopolitical expert before even mentioning Epstein pic.twitter.com/dZG2BqsKxn
— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) March 28, 2026
20% off at the reputation laundry https://t.co/0Qm1lffMRB
— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) March 28, 2026
Guyatt also provided further commentary:
I imagine that Paul Holden, author of The Fraud (@StarmertheFraud) and one of the journalists targeted by Josh Simons, will be looking very carefully at Simons’s remarks (transcript below); it’s quite the claim that you decided to investigate a journalist because of his publisher pic.twitter.com/80ndi9GgQO
— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) March 28, 2026
The Fraud
You can read a serialisation of the first chapter of Paul Holden’s The Fraud here. It covers the dirty tactics that Labour Together used to maneuver Keir Starmer into Downing Street — tactics they sorely needed because Starmer has all the political competence of a quiche.
To be absolutely fair, though, when they did all the bad stuff, many of these career politicians could simply have been a bit naive.
Featured image via BBC
