From The Times and The Sunday Times, this is the story.
I'm Manvin Rana.
The rough and tumble of journalism politics is just that,
and we don't normally complain when people complain about us.
The editor of The Sunday Times is normally behind the headlines, not the focus of them.
But on this occasion, I just think it went way too far.
When The Sunday Times published an explosive piece reporting on financial irregularities in the think tank that was fighting to get Kirstarmer elected,
they didn't like it.
That part was to be expected, but what came next definitely wasn't.
The response wasn't just to apologise except they got something wrong and learn from it.
It was to engage a corporate intelligence firm to try and analyse the sourcing the origins and the funding of the story.
It was a very, very odd thing to do.
This firm produced a report that attempted to discredit two of the most respected political journalists,
investigating their personal lives and claiming they were part of a Russian conspiracy against the state.
When the report came in,
Labour together were quite happy to talk about its conclusions widely around Westminster,
claimed that the Sunday Times was being used by the Russian state,
which is the most absurd thing I've ever heard.
These smear tactics weren't being used by the Kremlin or Tehran,
but by a group that was run by a current minister in the British government.