A huge moment for us

Dear readers, I hope you’re having a great bank holiday weekend. I wanted to send you a quick note about something we’re very excited about at Post HQ.

Keen readers of Private Eye may have spotted our name in the magazine this week. The reason: we have been shortlisted for the country’s most prestigious investigative journalism prize, the Paul Foot Award for Investigative and Campaigning Journalism.

The judges have recognised our investigations into Big Help, one of the city’s most lauded charity groups. Here’s what the listing says:

It’s hard to explain how proud I am about this news. We’ve never had a story listed for this award before, which usually goes to major investigations from the national newspapers and whose judges this year include the FT’s Janine Gibson and former Times editor Sir Simon Jenkins. We’re shortlisted alongside publications like The Guardian and the Financial Times.

This moment is the culmination of four years of work building up The Post into a publication that can truly serve Liverpool and Merseyside. But more specifically, it’s the result of a very conscious push we’ve made in the last two years to turn ourselves into a team that can publish high class investigative journalism.

I joined The Post in 2023 as part of this push – The Post wanted to do more agenda-setting investigations because we felt that Liverpool really needed that kind of work. There are so many areas of life in this region that need much better scrutiny, and we have built a publication and a team that’s capable of offering that scrutiny. These stories are teamwork with my editors and colleagues, and that teamwork is paying dividends.

The point of this work is not just to find juicy scoops, although of course we love those. It’s because Liverpool just doesn’t work well enough in too many areas, and that will only change if corruption and wrongdoing are exposed and bad actors are swept away.

You, our readers, deserve to know how the city is really run, how its businesses really behave, and which organisations that get relentless hype from the rest of the local media deserve it, and which do not. Light, as they say, is the best disinfectant.

The Big Help investigation took me nine months of reporting before we even published our first story. Since then, we have published three more, and in that time several entities within the Big Help empire have collapsed into administration. Crucially, readers now understand what the former Labour councillor Peter Mitchell was up to, and how millions of pounds were moving from charitable purposes to private companies controlled by Mitchell and his partner Colette Goulding, a serving Labour councillor.

The winner of the Paul Foot Award will be announced in the coming weeks, but whether or not we win, I’m just delighted about what this shortlisting says about how far we’ve come. I think it shows a tiny team really can have a huge impact if it has the right values and works incredibly hard. Oh, and gets incredible support from its readers and subscribers.

You can see from the other investigative work we’ve done – including exposing the historian Laurence Westgaph, revealing what’s going on at the Eldonian Village and showing how the city council and the metro mayor have wasted vast sums on no-hope investments – that we know how to do this kind of work.

Huge thanks to our paying members, who have come on this journey with us. It’s your backing that has allowed us to achieve these things, and it means your membership fees are paying off big time for the health and transparency of the city.