This weeks Private Eye reports:Cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell’s “inquiry” into the Fox–Werritty affair identified two meetings between the former defence secretary Liam Fox, his chum Adam Werritty and Matthew Gould, the UK ambassador to Israel. But a former diplomat has been able to uncover at least six meetings between Gould and Werritty.
According to O’Donnell, Fox and Werrity met Gould in Tel Aviv at “a private dinner with senior Israelis” and before Gould took up the ambassador’s post in Tel Aviv for “a general discussion of international defence and security matters”. O’Donnell says Werritty was invited “as an individual with some experience in these matters”.
While O’Donnell did at least say it was “not appropriate” for Werritty to be briefing British ambassadors or meeting “senior Israelis” at dinners with the defence secretary, ex-diplomat Craig Murray has established that there were at least four other Werritty-Fox-Gould get-togethers that O’Donnell did not consider.
Outfoxed?
The Foreign Office (FCO) admits that the three men had a formal meeting and a “private social engagement” when Dr Fox was still shadow defence secretary in 2010. Murray spotted two more meetings at conferences in 2011; but the FCO won’t even discuss whether there were meetings between Werritty and Gould without Fox.
Murray, who lost his job as ambassador to Uzbekistan after complaining about torture, speculates on his website that the meetings involved talks about attacking Iran. Given Gould’s experience in British embassies in Washington and Tehran, Werritty’s interest in Iran and his Atlantic Bridge charity linking US neo-cons and UK Conservatives, Murray might be right. But the cabinet secretary seems to have avoided the question entirely – surely not because he was trying to put a lid on the affair as quickly and cleanly as possible?
Evading the questions
More recently O’Donnell has been busy mimicking senior HM Revenue & Customs officials’ economy with the truth when discussing the dodgy Vodafone and Goldman Sachs tax settlements in parliament (see last Eye).
Defending tax boss Dave Hartnett’s legendary lunching (and coincidental sharing of his corporate schmoozers’ view of the tax world), O’Donnell scoffed at any link: “The fundamental flaw with that argument,” he told MPs, “is that, if you discovered that Dave was secretly having these lunches and had not told anybody, it is a fairly weird conspiracy when it is all published, and we took the initiative to publish all these things.”
Er, not quite. “These things” – ie details of Hartnett’s and top mandarins’ hospitality – were published only after a two-year freedom of information battle fought by the Eye, which O’Donnell’s Cabinet Office resisted at every turn. His officials even instructed other Whitehall departments to block requests for information on grounds they knew to be false, and they were eventually forced to apologise by the Information Commissioner (see Eye 1279). Only then did O’Donnell make a virtue of the “transparency” that had been foist upon him and start publishing limited details (omitting names of restaurants etc to spare embarrassment).
This knee-jerk porkie is part of a “defend Dave” mission across HMRC, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. Losing one civil servant, in Brodie Clark, is unfortunate. If Hartnett had to go it would make the government (and Sir Gus) look distinctly careless.
