Tim Tate

NATIONAL INSECURITY

I am apparently – in the view of someone inside Number 10 Downing Street – a threat to national security.

This news, when conveyed to me by the Cabinet Office in January 2023, came as something of a surprise.

I’m 68 years old and have spent my entire working life – 45 years, all told – as a journalist, documentary film-maker and writer of books. Granted, my output has rarely been flattering to governments of assorted nationalities and political persuasions, but the notion that I pose some kind of danger to this country was – to put it kindly – unexpected.

Nonetheless, it remains the Government’s stated position – and the Information Commissioner’s Office has ruled that the Cabinet Office’s view is “legitimate” and requires no “further enquiries”.

Which rather begs the question ‘why ?’  What appalling crime could I have committed to be listed by Her Majesty’s Government as someone who poses a threat to the security of the United Kingdom ?

The answer (beyond the obvious fact that I do not – and never have – posed any such threat) lies in the murky saga of the 1980s Spycatcher Affair and my new book investigating the extraordinary saga of Margaret Thatcher’s administration’s quixotic legal crusade to prevent retired MI5 officer Peter Wright from publishing his memoirs.

Between 1985 and 1991, the British Government fought a succession of vastly expensive, hugely damaging and ultimately unsuccessful battles in courts across the world to ban Wright’s book, Spycatcher. They failed: the book quickly became a global blockbuster, selling more than 4 million copies, and the Government’s frequently farcical actions were denounced as both a disturbing assault on the public’s right to know what its intelligence services had been doing, and an absurdist charade that could have stepped from the libretto of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, or the pages of Alice in Wonderland.

I began research for the book – To Catch A Spy ­– in 2019.  I obtained transcripts of the main trial proceedings in Australia, together with portions of Wright’s testimony which had been held in camera.  I interviewed many of the surviving major players in the drama, and secured copies of related official files which had only recently been released to the National Archives.

But those ‘declassified’ files were only the tip of a rather larger iceberg.  Beneath them – more accurately, in basement vaults below Downing Street – 32 further Cabinet Office files on Wright and the Spycatcher trials – remain locked behind a wall of official secrecy.

By law – the Freedom of Information Act 2000 – all of these files should have been made available to the public (which paid for their creation) by December 2019. None had been. And so I set about making a series of FOIA requests for their release.

Over the next four years, the Cabinet Office – which is the gatekeeper for all government FOIA policy – resolutely blocked these perfectly routine requests.  It obfuscated, obstructed and, ultimately, told direct lies – not just to me, but to the Information Commissioner’s Office – the statutory regulator tasked with making public bodies adhere to freedom of information law.

I pointed this out to ICO; it wrung its hands, lamented the Cabinet Office’s repeated failures and mendacity … but did nothing to enforce compliance with the law.

I became curious about why Thatcher’s successors in Number 10 were so determined to deny access to 40 year old files on a globally-infamous saga which cost British taxpayers the equivalent of at least £8 million today (and dragged the country’s reputation through the international mud).

The Data Protection Act 2018 gives individuals the right to know what information public bodies keep on them in their capacious filing cabinets.  I duly applied for a Subject Access Review (SAR), asking to see what the Cabinet Office held on me, including internal communications about my FOIA requests.  What ensued was as farcical – and as alarming – as the Thatcher Government’s conduct in the Spycatcher Affair.

I was initially sent a threadbare document listing the existence of a handful of internal Downing Street communications relating to me: none were more than headlines, and contained precisely no information about the Cabinet Office’s deliberations on my FOIA requests.  I duly appealed.

This – after a substantial delay – produced a meagre haul of additional snippets (again, no actual information) … and an admission that the Government held a great deal more, but would not, under any circumstances, divulge it.

The reason cited was section 26 of the Data Protection Act.  This provides an ‘exemption’ to the general right for a person to discover official information held about them: the grounds ?  “For the purposes of safeguarding national security”.

I appealed to the Information Commissioner’s Office – the official ‘policeman’ for Subject Access Requests.  Surely, I argued, I have a right to know exactly why the Government believes that disclosing its information about me would prejudice national security ?

Apparently, this was naïve.  ICO’s considered opinion was that while its own guidance advised that this should be disclosed, it now believed that it didn’t “need to obtain this evidence in every case” – and that although it had not made any effort to discover the basis for the Cabinet Office’s invocation of national security, this was nonetheless “legitimate”.

Which is why – apparently – Her Majesty’s Government is permitted to tar me with the brush of danger, simply for the ‘offence’ of asking it to obey the law of the land.

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Tim Tate