This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
When I walked into the Stubshaw Cross Labour Club in Ashton the week before the Makerfield by-election, two young female staffers were comparing notes on heartbreak. Josh Simons, Makerfield’s Labour MP who stood aside to make way for Andy Burnham, was doing what he does best.
Simons is endearing. He offers up his own humiliation to the young staffers. When he first met his wife, she rejected him, he says, leaning in, elbows on the table. They met at Harvard, where they both got their PhDs. He is four years younger than her and she mildly bullied him. That did the trick. Heartbroken, he decided he was done with Boston and paid £2,000 to ship all his belongings back to the UK. Then, on the eve of his departure, she changed her mind. He paid another £2,000 to ship it all back. Compulsive, certainly. But also, decisive. No time for sunk cost fallacies.
His former leader, on the other hand, is having his Joe Biden moment. Even as his most loyal cabinet ministers resign, Sir Keir Starmer insists he is going to lead Labour into the next election. If Morgan McSweeney eased Starmer into Downing Street, then Simons is playing his part in trying to drag him out of it. But unlike McSweeney, Josh Simons is more Faustian than Machiavellian. He got the safe seat and the ministerial position. Then we found out the sin. Why has his party not sent him to hell?
I have spent the last two months asking that question. I spoke to MPs, special advisers, people who worked with Simons when he was a policy advisor in Jeremy Corbyn’s office, his colleagues in the think tank world and during his Labour Together days, as well as to his former constituents and Labour campaigners.
Josh Simons, who describes himself on his X account as Burnham’s “Crown steward”, was initially one of those helping the Greater Manchester mayor find a parliamentary seat.
An offended backbencher asked, “Why doesn’t he give up his own?” Simons did, though he claimed it was a long-standing plan. The natural retort was that Simons was doing this to secure a position in Burnham’s No. 10. But if that is such an amazing reward, why didn’t anyone else do it?
Simons began working for Labour in 2015, following Corbyn’s election as leader. Things were different back then. He says he was fat. Others remember him as lanky. In photos, he has an ear piercing, longer hair and an untidy beard; he blended in. By the time I first met him, in May, there was none of that. Clean-shaven, white shirt, field jacket. Lean, tan, 6’4”. Is this man even in the Labour Party?
Like Obama at Columbia, he supposedly spent his undergraduate years at Cambridge smoking roll-ups and reading Marxist theory and had little patience for people who disagreed with him. That would be news to Michael Portillo. The former Conservative cabinet minister was interviewed in 2013 by a 20-year-old Simons for the student newspaper Varsity. When I mention it to Portillo, he is both apologetic that the interview ended up happening over the phone rather than in person and generous about the boy who conducted it. Competent, clever, polite: hardly the portrait of a hardcore ideologue.
The 2024 crop of Labour MPs is often accused of having been selected for their timidity and, like Blair’s Babes before them, for their loyalty to the leader who ushered them in. Amongst them, Simons, even though he worked in Jeremy Corbyn’s office, was considered by some a quintessential “Starmtrooper”. But he claims he wasn’t a Starmerite any more than Starmer was a Corbynite.
Whatever the label, having been parachuted into the once ultra-safe seat of Makerfield after his stint as director of Labour Together, he rose quickly to become a junior minister at just 31, tasked with pushing through the government’s Digital ID policy.
In February, it emerged that during his time running Labour Together, he had commissioned APCO, a private consultancy, to investigate journalists who were looking into the organisation’s funding. One member of Labour Together’s board at the time, Kate Forrester (the wife of Starmer’s then head of communications, Paul Overden), worked for APCO.
Simons passed the resulting dossier, which falsely suggested the reporters had links to Russian influence operations, to GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre and to the Guardian itself, which could report that GCHQ was investigating it. By handing it to a newspaper, the allegations could be given a wide public airing before any wrongdoing was established.
When the facts emerged, his name trended for a couple of weeks for all the wrong reasons. Some of his parliamentary colleagues were quietly pleased. Icarus, they felt, had finally flown too close to the sun.
Certainly, there were some curiosities to the reaction to the report. Companies regularly hire private firms to investigate journalists who investigate them. The moral standards are higher for a future minister than they are for corporations uncomfortable with scrutiny. But, there were no follow-up reports on Steve Reed — currently Keir Starmer’s housing secretary, and a director of Labour Together for seven years — when Inside Croydon revealed his connection to criminally hacked data, stolen from a local independent journalist’s email server, used to expose three confidential sources which were then used by Labour Party officials in disciplinary proceedings against Reed’s factional opponents, instead of reporting the stolen material to the police. In Westminster, not all journalists are created equal.
Another Simons facet that those who know him agree on is that he is genuinely interested in policy — something that’s rare in Westminster. Even a former senior adviser from his time in Corbyn’s office admitted he never thought Simons was a Blairite plant because “he was too focused on researching policy”. Any Labour deep-state spy worth their salt would save their energy for power struggles.
But he was not without guile. For a while, he told people he was 26, when he was 22. When he left Corbyn’s office, after a bitter demotion caused by suspicions about his allegiances, he was already in contact with the type of paternalistic Labour figures that take bright young things to one side and explain to them what they have to do to go far.
The first rule of a safe seat is, don’t act like a potential liability (i.e., don’t be too left-wing). He was encouraged by one bigwig of the anti-Corbyn resistance to leak his submissions to the Chakrabarti anti-Semitism report, which he felt were not taken seriously enough in the final report, published in June 2016. He didn’t, so they did it for him.
Shortly after, a preliminary version of the defence review was leaked to Newsnight. The document was politically toxic: the wider review had been put on ice following the Brexit referendum and shadow defence secretary Emily Thornberry had already committed Labour to retaining Trident. The leaked version contained a notably cooler formulation, and its emergence was damaging for Corbyn.
One of those involved at the time never believed the 22-year-old’s pleas of innocence:
Josh knew where we stood policy wise, and we’d worked closely with him to reach that point. So to leak a draft which told a different story was a deeply shitty thing to do, and even worse was that he denied point-blank being responsible. Our feeling was: “If you’re going to act that way, at least own it”; but he wouldn’t. I think the truth was he revelled in the whole double-dealing thing, and he’s never grown out of that.
Like Burnham taking refuge in Manchester, America saved Simons. He didn’t have to get his hands dirty whilst his future Labour benefactors orchestrated their internal witch hunt. That Labour, and the broader left, has had anti-Semites comfortably nesting in it is no secret. Thanks to multiple books written about the Starmer project, neither is the fact that Morgan McSweeney astroturfed both the framing of the problem and the solution to the Labour anti-Semitism crisis.
The first time Simons reached out to me, I had spent two months immersed in the various books on the Starmer project and Morgan McSweeney’s scheming. We met like two sleeper cells who survived the Cold War. He told me he was a pluralist, that he abhorred the stifling of intellectual curiosity and ideas. I’d heard all that before. It was what McSweeney told every Labour faction before funnelling them into a project that gripped the party like an electric collar. Even Wes Streeting is rebranding as a social democrat now. I had to test whether he had reckoned with the psychic trauma that the Starmer project had inflicted on the party.
In his resignation letter, Simons apologised profusely to the two establishment journalists targeted by the investigation, Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke of The Times, but referred to Paul Holden, a left-wing freelancer who investigates fraud in South Africa and who would be far more vulnerable to such smears, as a deserving target. Is he blind to this unfairness? He feels bad, he says. He drops his tone; he sighs; he looks at his hands. He is good at this.
He mentions the baby shoes left on Starmer’s porch, where his kids walk to school, which signified Palestinian children’s deaths. That stuff got to him then, but he is sorry now. He wanted to write a letter to Holden — who has threatened to sue him — but says he was told to ignore him by one of Labour’s attack dogs.
“He’s genuinely open to feedback,” one Labour SpAd tells me. “More than most.” David Littlefair, founder of Blue Collar Parliament, an initiative to get more working-class people into elected office, can attest to that. He was surprised when Simons approached him. Littlefair doesn’t mince his words.
He had spent the previous two months being publicly caustic about the Labour Together scandal and the practice of parachuting candidates into safe Northern seats, sometimes even mentioning Simons by name as an example of everything wrong with the system. Simons asked to meet him anyway. Blue Collar Parliament exists, in essence, to produce fewer Josh Simonses. He offered to help regardless.
The day after the Brexit referendum, Simons was at a drinks reception for Harvard Kennedy scholars in London. He had “just about” voted Remain; his former Cambridge supervisor, Helen Thompson, had just about voted Leave. A man approached them, a top QC at the time. With the confidence and detail characteristic of his profession, the QC explained exactly how he and his colleagues would use a judicial review to reverse the result voted for by people in places like the towns Simons would one day represent.
Simons tells me he found the man’s manner patronising and his argument facile, the archetype of what people had had enough of. It was, he recalls, the moment he found his populist, man-of-the-people streak.
His name recognition on the doorstep in Makerfield bears this out. He had been there less than two years, and locals are already writing letters mourning his departure, a testament to his personal touch. Westminster, however, was less forgiving. In the club that serves as Labour’s Makerfield campaign HQ, a journalist friend is baffled by Simons’s redemption arc. In the event of Burnham not only winning the by-election but going on to become prime minister, the reward for Simons is expected to be a senior policy role in Downing Street. But who else would trust him?
A few people have used the word “psychopath”, meaning a Peter Mandelson type who’ll proverbially run over their own grandmother for a safe seat. But Mandelson types don’t make themselves vulnerable. They don’t march first into the battles they encourage others to fight. They look over your shoulder when you speak to them.
Simons, meanwhile, has somehow managed to leave some of his former Corbynite comrades unable to be mean about him. Even people who have long since left Labour for the Greens still carry a residual warmth.
So why, to the fury of some on the Labour left, is Simons forgiven? Like Goethe’s Faust, he never stopped striving. He is bold in a party that is scared of its own shadow: a man who has tried to find an answer to Labour’s malaise when others have wrung their hands.
He was quick to see that Keir Starmer’s assumed professionalism was the antidote to Corbyn and to identify that Andy Burnham’s warmth could be the antidote to Starmer.
If Burnham ends up in Downing Street, could Simons’s pluralism and seriousness about policy be the antidote to McSweeny’s philistine McCarthyism?
Whatever becomes of Burnham’s leadership challenge, Simons will be fine. By Westminster standards, he is already extraordinarily powerful, because he has nothing to lose.
