Hi, it's Manvi.
In this morning's episode, we looked at how Labour Together,
a shadowy group of activists who helped to get Keir Starmer elected,
had spent thousands of pounds paying for a reputation management company to investigate journalists at the Sunday Times.
What followed was an intensely personal smear campaign.
Do you have a listen to that episode for the background on this extraordinary story?
But one of the journalists in the eye of the storm,
who was actually the focus of most of these investigations, was Gabriel Pogrand.
In this week's episode of our Politics Podcast, the state of it,
Gabriel talks very honestly about what he's been through.
We thought you'd want to hear it, so here it is.
Our activists paid for smear campaign against journalists.
The whole of the Labour governance is an absolute cesspit.
It's the kind of thing you would expect in Putin's Kremlin and I think we need to know the guilty men and
if they're in government they should be fired.
The journalists in question here I think are second to none in the investigative work they do but causes problems for us but that is their job.
We were all lumped together as essentially useful idiots for Russia in this report.
You know what it's like as a journalist, if someone damages your reputation,
it could be career-ending, couldn't it?
I didn't know anything about this investigation, and it absolutely needs to be looked into,