I’ve long had a theory – despite knowing many clever and nice people who work in the sector – that consultancy firms don’t have a scooby-doo what they’re doing. They radiate immense power and authority as brands, they are fluent in corporate bull-pucky, and they charge truly obscene fees but I suspect their main superpower is getting someone to the C-suite to spend a lot of the company’s money on telling the company what it wants to hear.
I mean, in the first place, isn’t it the job of those people in the C-suite to manage stuff themselves? Aren’t they being paid, usually quite well, to be managers? If they need a flock of teenagers in clipboards on whatever it is per hour to sign off on their decisions, they aren’t doing their jobs, right? Yet, runs this theory, if they want to fire half the staff, they feel much safer doing so if they’ve invited CamelCaseGlobalStrategies to write a 1,200-page report first.
Then it’s not just you being a bastard (and being firmly on the hook for the consequences if the share price goes south): it’s you leveraging the iterative solution-based praxis of CamelCase. It’s practically scientific. They have letterheads and everything. And if this report, with all its graphs and flowcharts, costs a small fortune, so be it: it’s not your money, personally, and if it makes a hole in the company’s budget that’s — eureka! – easily made good by firing half the staff.
So it’s with a certain amount of head-shaking that I read reports yesterday of Labour activists’ quite obscene dirty-tricks campaign against a pair of Sunday Times hacks, Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke. Keir Starmer’s Labour was brought to power with the help of an activist organisation called Labour Together, closely associated with the PM’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.
And, obviously, when the next-door company sees that this first company is spending eyewatering sums on CamelCaseGlobalStrategies, they will tend to hire BullPoopSolutions at similar cost, for fear of losing their competitive edge. And thus the whole circus continues, with thyroidal teenagers plucked from the milk-round becoming wealthy, and their bosses becoming extremely wealthy, by doing this thing that isn’t really a thing at all.
In the run-up to the last election, these two reporters established that the organisation had failed to declare nearly £750,000 worth of donations over a three-year period. It was found to be in breach of electoral law on 20 counts over what McSweeney, on the advice of lawyers, has only ever described as an ‘admin error’. Two current frontbenchers, Lisa Nandy and Steve Reed, incidentally, were among the legal directors of the organisation at the time these breaches were committed. We’re told that ‘there is no suggestion they were responsible for compliance with electoral law at the time’ – which tends to make the layman wonder idly what the point of being a legal director might be.
Anyway, rather than investigate whether their story was true – it was; and Labour Together, assuming they could find their own backside with both hands and a flashlight, will have known that it was – they decided the logical next step was to commission the US lobbying and consultancy firm Apco to investigate the ‘background and motivations’ of the reporters behind the story. They paid £36,000 for a 58-page report on the subject. No doubt this demonstrated a public-spirited desire to get to the bottom of a sinister campaign to damage Labour Together’s reputation by publishing stories about it which were true.
And so, enter the consultants. Apco is One Of Those Companies. Their glossy website contains the usual fine-sounding vacuities: it’s all ‘bold leadership’, ‘stakeholder expectations’, and blether about ‘values’ (‘boldness’, ‘inclusivity’, ‘curiosity’, ‘empathy’, obviously). ‘In a rapidly evolving global context and a time of transformational change, Apco strives to add value to our clients’ enterprises and benefit society. We enable clients to achieve their objectives through insightful counsel, compelling narratives and creative solutions.’
And what were the compelling narratives and creative solutions they cooked up for Labour Together? A bunch of conspiratorial rubbish, by the sound of it. At least ten pages of the report concentrated on what the Sunday Times calls ‘deeply personal and false claims’ about the reporters themselves (including distasteful speculation on the meaning of Pogrund’s being Jewish) and argued, basically, that the story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign and relied on emails sourced directly or indirectly from Russian hackers.
It’s not the wickedness of this ad hominem stuff that really catches the eye, so much as the amateurishness. The report’s author Tom Harper, cosplaying as a spy (they called the report ‘Operation Cannon’, and designated Pogrund and Yorke ‘persons of significant interest’), boasted of examining the ‘sourcing, funding and origins’ of the story using documents and ‘discreet human source enquiries’. He decided that the emails underpinning the story emerged from a hack of the Electoral Commission and that the ‘likeliest culprit is the Russian state, or proxies of the Russian state’.
But as the Sunday Times reports, acidly, ‘There is no evidence that Harper considered an alternative scenario or at any point sought basic IT or cybersecurity expertise. Apco is not a cybersecurity company.’ Occam’s razor, at a cost of £0, meanwhile, could have told these idiots that when a skilled investigative journalist publishes a true story about a major UK political party ahead of a general election, it’s usually because they are investigative journalists and that’s their job.
There’s a very great deal of egg on the face of Labour Together
Labour Together then used this nonsense to try to smear the hacks concerned and discredit the Sunday Times’s reporting. They shared the file with GCHQ, perhaps in the hopes of triggering an investigation there, and were, quite rightly, sent packing – but they were then able to launder the bare fact of having shared the file with GCHQ into backstairs briefings against the journalists. That’s shabby as hell. It’s brass-necked, too, when one of the journalists, Gabriel Pogrund, is on a no-travel list maintained by the Russian state (not traditionally a sign of favour); while among Labour Together’s sugar-daddies is the hedgie Martin Taylor, who made his stash investing in Putin’s Russia via a vehicle called, er, Nevsky Capital.
So there’s a very great deal of egg on the face of Labour Together and all those involved with it. Good. This sort of retaliatory smear is a threat to the freedom of the press and a shameful traduction of common decency, and it’s a tide of filth that laps against the toes of Sir Keir Starmer’s highly polished shoes.
But it’s also, I’m pleased to observe, extremely exposing of Apco. Nobody believes it for a second when such a company boasts that ‘our commitment to operating responsibly includes acting with strong ethics and integrity’. But if you’re paying them tens of thousands of pounds to run a smear campaign you’re entitled to expect the services of Lord Voldemort rather than Frank Spencer from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em.
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