No facts please, we're British

20 Jan 2009 | Uncategorized

This is a guest post by Chris Ames

So it turns out that another of the government’s claims about Iraq was baseless. As I revealed last week, it cannot prove a claim that former attorney general Lord Goldsmith decided that the war would be legal before meeting two of Tony Blair’s closest allies. The revelation also raises questions about the commitment to transparency of the information commissioner, of all people. Why did he allow the government to make an unsubstantiated assertion in a formal ‘disclosure statement’ under the Freedom of Information Act?

With hindsight, even Richard Thomas must realise now that it was a bad idea to let the Blair government to mix spin with fact, without even asking them to distinguish between the two. The subject of the disclosure that he ordered in 2006 was hugely contentious –– the process by which Goldsmith came to drop his concerns that the Iraq war might be illegal.

The meeting between Goldsmith and two members of Tony Blair’s inner circle, Sally Morgan and Lord Falconer, is probably the most contentious part of that process. It took place on 13 March 2003, a week before the invasion and just as Goldsmith was coming round to agreeing that the war would be legal after all. It’s not entirely clear what the purpose of the meeting was at such a sensitive time but the suggestion that Goldsmith was leaned on is unavoidable.

It appears that a record exists of a conversation that same day between Goldsmith and his legal secretary in which the attorney general stated that he had come around to Blair’s way of thinking. For the government to have simply revealed that this happened on the day he met Morgan and Falconer would have aroused huge suspicions that the change of heart followed the meeting.

But Thomas had made it easy for the government to assert that it happened the other way around. He did not require it to publish actual documents but to produce a narrative of events, and allowed it to include ‘information’ that was not backed by documentary evidence.

The suspicion that ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ would have been clearer at the time had Thomas required the government’s narrative to distinguish between those ‘events’ that were real and those that were embellishment. But Thomas didn’t see the need for this and now has egg on his face.

You could say the information commissioner is entitled to expect that the government will tell the truth when asked. But in the context — that the government had already mixed spin with fact in a dossier about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to include unsubstantiated assertions — Thomas should have been less naïve.

Surely the whole point of the freedom of information act is that the public gets to see the behind-the-scenes evidence — or lack of it — rather than having to accept the government’s account.

But of more concern is Thomas’ subsequent lack of transparency about his own involvement. When I asked him to confirm that the disclosure statement’s version of events was based on documentary evidence rather than spin, he was unwilling to do so. I had to make a new freedom of information request.

Three years down the line, the facts are a bit clearer. The attorney general met two of the prime minister’s closest allies on the day he changed his mind about the legality of the war. The government has admitted — or perhaps claimed — that it has ‘no information’ about which happened first.

We also know that the cabinet met on that very same day but not what it was told about Goldsmith’s view, whatever that was. Former minister Clare Short has suggested that the cabinet had no opportunity to question Goldsmith four days later, after he had given it a single page ‘opinion’ that the war would be legal.

I’m told that the information tribunal’s decision over the release of minutes from these two cabinet meetings is due towards the end of the month. If we could just have the unvarnished facts, that would be very helpful.