2026-02-18
28 分钟This is The Guardian.
Today, Hal Kirstormer's favourite think tank smeared journalists just doing their job.
Back in February 2021, I was a 23 year old freelance journalist.
I'd left university and got a job and had just started writing.
And I had done a lot of stories going through records.
I had nothing else better to do.
This is Henry Dyer, one of The Guardian's investigations correspondence.
If you're a regular listener,
then you will recognize his voice from episodes we've made about corruption in the House of Lords and Boris Johnson's secret files.
He's like one of those journalists you see in films, always surrounded by papers,
taking whispered phone calls and spending hours and hours wading through spreadsheets and databases.
He's always been like that.
even as a callow youth trying to get his big break in the media.
In early 2021, I was going through more electoral commission records and I spotted that this group,
Labour Together, had declared hundreds of thousands of pounds of donations.
More than 700,000 pounds, in fact.
mostly donated by two very rich men,
all declared years after they'd actually been donated, a clear breach of electoral commission rules.
Now, the rules say you've got to declare your donations within 30 days,
so it was clear that these were well overdue.