'I was naive,' says minister who quit over Labour Together claims

A Labour MP who resigned as a Cabinet Office minister has said he was "naive" and "so sorry" in his first full interview since leaving his role.

Josh Simons quit on 28 February after facing claims that the think tank he used to run before he became an MP commissioned a report that looked into journalists' backgrounds.

Labour Together paid APCO Worldwide at least £30,000 to "investigate the sourcing, funding and origins" of a Sunday Times story about undeclared donations at the think tank ahead of the 2024 election.

Simons previously said he "never sought to smear" the journalists investigated, and has now told the BBC's Newscast that "there's a lot I've learned from it".

Simons told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg and Paddy O'Connell that when the Sunday Times reported Labour Together had not declared its donations properly, he was "concerned that information that had been obtained was confidential information that might have come from a hack of the Electoral Commission".

He says he was also concerned "that information might be used to retell the story of the antisemitism crisis that happened under Labour Together and to downplay it".

APCO worldwide's report included information about journalist Gabriel Pogrund's Jewish beliefs and claims about his ideological position.

It also claimed, sources said, that Pogrund's previous reporting, including on the Royal Family, "could be seen as destabilising to the UK and also in the interests of Russia's strategic foreign policy objectives".

Simons, 32, had previously said the company that did the research for Labour Together had "gone beyond" what it had been asked to do.

"I was naive and there's a lot I've learned from it and there are things I would have done differently," he told the latest Newscast episode.

Simons said he approached APCO after the story emerged because he "was told this firm was credible, serious, international, and they could go away and find out whether that material was out there on the dark web and why it was being used".

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer launched an ethics investigation before Simons announced his resignation.

The prime minister's ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus later found Simons had not broken any rules.

Simons told the BBC that he nevertheless decided to resign because the story was a "distraction" for the government.

Simons said: "[Magnus] found that I hadn't breached the code because I was being honest and truthful.

"But it's still the case that I gave the impression that that's what I'd intended, even though it wasn't. And actually, I think it was right for me to take responsibility for that, to say, look, I'm so sorry this happened."

When Simons quit, the prime minister said he accepted the resignation "with sadness", expressing his thanks "for the commitment, focus, and energy you have brought to ministerial office".

Separately, Simons told BBC Newscast he had repeatedly warned those at the top of Meta about the risks of AI technology when he worked there between 2018-2022.

He was speaking days after a Los Angeles jury found that Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, and Google, owner of YouTube, had intentionally built addictive social media platforms. The two companies said they disagreed with the verdict and intended to appeal, while Meta also said teen mental health is "profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app."

Simons said he hoped this would "terrify" tech bosses.

"It was so obvious to me that when you build a set of AI systems to maximise things like clicks and likes and shares and angry faces and things like that, what you're doing is designing AI to addict people," he said.

"You're trying to make them keep coming back and you do that by making people feel shame or fear or anger or guilt."

Simons, who worked in the firm's AI ethics team, accused Meta of putting profit before the welfare of users.

He said that when he and others at the company wrote recommendations on potential AI harms, they were rarely followed through.

The former minister also called on the government to ban social media for under-16s and phones in schools.

But he said politicians shouldn't "let ourselves off the hook" for the wider problems of phone use across the population.

Sign up for the Off Air with Laura K newsletter to get Laura Kuenssberg's expert political insight and insider stories every Thursday.