PC Plod, Private Dicks and the secret war against journalists

The British state suffers a serious case of mediaphobia

FOR the past three years, I have co-hosted a podcast called Media Confidential with Alan Rusbridger, the former Guardian and Prospect magazine editor. It’s been a blast.

We’ve interviewed star guests on the show - best-selling authors Michael Lewis, Maggie Haberman and Patrick Radden Keefe as well as top editors Joe Kahn of the New York Times and Zanny Minton Beddoes of the Economist.

We’ve also zeroed in on media start-ups such as Joshi Herrmann’s The Manchester Mill, Jim Waterson’s London Centric and Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, an edgy leftist venture first launched in the US and now available in the UK.

Sadly, in a bid to save pennies, Prospect is cancelling the show. No hard feelings at my end. Philip Collins, the ex Blair speechwriter, academic and new(ish) editor, is paid to make the right calls. At any rate, if you have a spare moment, do check out the Media Confidential archive.

A recurring theme is the threat to independent journalism. Some instances are clear and present, as shown in Gaza where we interviewed Israeli and Palestinian journalists on the frontline. Others were more insidious - and closer to home.

These cases involve legal and political threats against reporters and editors who are simply doing their job. This is what I wish to address in this post, with particular reference not to Trumpist America (a target-rich environment) but to my own country, the UK.

In the past week, evidence has emerged in three separate cases that the police, the security services and powerful politically-connected individuals have engaged in co-ordinated attempts to intimidate or muzzle the media.

1. The case of the Cambridge professor and fabulist Jason Arday: Young, apparently gifted and black, Arday peddled a compelling narrative of overcoming autism, bullying and epilepsy to become a renowned athlete, author and sociologist. Despite his limited academic output, he was awarded a professorship at Cambridge. When questions began to circulate about plagiarism, Jack Grove, a reporter on the Times Higher Education Supplement, contacted Arday for comment. His account is worth reading in full.

First, Arday’s fearsome lawyers Carter Ruck (where did he find the money to hire them?) suggested his carefully assembled reporting “may be….racially motivated”. Then, unbeknown to Grove, the Metropolitan Police spent four months investigating him after a formal complaint for harassment. Grove only became aware of this after a phone call from a Metropolitan Police officer. PC Plod told Grove no further action would be taken but, unprompted, advised the reporter to stop posting or contacting Arday because his inquiries had affected the professor’s “mental health”.

Met Police chief Mark Rowley says his force had ‘dropped the ball” by looking into Grove. That’s an understatement. For a fuller analysis of how the Arday case impacts the business of legitimate journalistic inquiry and the principles of free speech, I would recommend this excellent substack post.

The Strange Affair of the Cambridge Professor

2. Arron “Bad Boy” Banks and the Farage party funding scandal

This summer, the Guardian broke the story that Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage had accepted a £5m “gift” from an offshore crypto billionaire. British politics has not been the same since. The Sunday Times Insight team headed by Gabriel Pogrund has revealed a separate money trail running through “Posh” George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster and Farage’s close aide. Farage, to his fury, has failed to kill the story and is sinking in the polls.

Late last week, the New Statesman revealed that Arron Banks, a multimillionaire, prominent Reform UK member and donor, had hired private investigators to look into Pogrund. The firm Precision Risk and Intelligence - previously owned by Banks - has since been dissolved.

When asked whether he had hired the investigation to snoop on Pogrund, Banks did not deny the charge but said there was reason to believe that the Sunday Times had obtained information through hacking.

“When you live by the sword, you die by the sword,” he said.

Banks has serious form when it comes to targeting journalists. The Brexit backer sued investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr in 2019 for linking him to Russia in a TED talk. Cadwalladr won in 2022, but Banks partially won the case on appeal, leaving Cadwalladr saddled with more than £1.2m in legal costs. She’s back on her horse, though, with a new female-founded media venture called The Nerve. We can now expect more from Carol who says she has spent a decade trying to draw back the curtain on who funds Farage.

3. Security service snooping on journalists in Northern Ireland

Last week, a former BBC journalist was awarded £20,000 damages after MI5 and the Police Service of Northern Ireland unlawfully obtained data from his mobile phone. A specialist tribunal composed of senior judges ordered the security agencies to pay the compensation to Vincent Kearney for attempts to identify his sources while he was serving as the BBC’s Northern Ireland correspondent. The investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) said the surveillance had been disproportionate. Each agency was ordered to pay £10,000.

The Kearney case is far from isolated. Two Northern Ireland journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey investigated collusion between Northern Ireland police and loyalist paramilitaries. The state’s response was to spy on them and then arrest them. You can read the full story in Prospect here and an interview with the two intrepid reporters on our own Media Confidential Podcast. It’s a shocking indictment of state indifference to mass murder and journalists seeking to uncover the truth.

4. Labour Together and the Pesky Mr Pogrund: No apologies for name-checking the award-winning Sunday Times Insight editor again. Earlier this year, it emerged that Labour Together, the think tank instrumental in securing Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership victory, had ordered a secret dossier to be compiled on Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, his Sunday Times colleague. Both journalists had been investigating undisclosed donations to Labour Together. The black PR operation - codenamed Operation Cannon - was conducted by Apco Worldwide. It ended up in a 58-page report smear campaign which included the fact that Pogrund was Jewish and speculated about his ideological bent.

Once again, as in the case of Arron Banks, snooping on journalists was justified because the journalists were suspected of accessing or receiving hacked information. In this case, Labour Together’s director, Josh Simons, said he believed Russia was behind the hack and that Pogrund and Yorke may have been linked to a “pro-Kremlin network”. Once again, the Sunday Times insisted it had obtained the embarrassing information legitimately - and they were vindicated.

Labour Together paid a fine over more than 20 breaches of the electoral law. In April it announced a complete overhaul of its operations and a new name ThinkLabour. Simons, however, continues his ascent up the greasy pole of politics. In the summer, he vacated his seat in Makerfield to allow Andy Burnham to stand. Burnham won resoundingly and was elected Labour leader and thereby prime minister. Simons is reported to be in line for a top job in Downing Street.

In sum, these stories are disturbing. Together with a lopsided libel law and the continuing abuse of SLAPPs suits, they suggest British journalists are operating in newly hostile territory.

Further reading:

Charles Moore on the Arday affair: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/08/arday-scandal-exposes-decay-britain-great-universities/

Jason Arday’s Fairy Tale https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/08/jason-arday-cambridge-academic-memoir-resignation/688206/

Emily Lawford: Bad Boy Arron Banks launched secret probe into Sunday Times star reporter https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2026/08/exclusive-brexit-bad-boy-arron-banks-launched-secret-probe-into-sunday-times-star-reporter

Ends