The Tories dump their mole

By Brian Barder

Unlike most media commentators, with their vested interest in encouraging leaks by civil servants who betray their duty of confidentiality and loyalty to the elected ministers for whom they work, I have very little time for Mr Damian Green, the Conservative MP and shadow minister. Over a period of about two years Mr Green received more than 20 official documents stolen by the home office mole whom he encouraged, at best implicitly, in this nefarious and probably criminal activity. (In deciding not to prosecute either Mr Green or his mole, the Director of Public Prosecutions made it clear that the decision did not imply that no offence had been committed – only that there was insufficient prospect of getting convictions.)

I have written before about this case (e.g. here, here and here) and responded to others’ comments, so I shan’t go over all that ground again. My excuse for returning to the subject now is a remarkable, and little noticed, interview with the mole, Christopher Galley, published in The Times on 19 May under the heading, “‘I did their dirty work and then Tories dumped me'” (heading slightly changed in the online version).

The article starts:

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For more than a year Christopher Galley, a civil servant, had put his job on the line for the man who had become his political mentor, Damian Green, the Shadow Immigration Minister. Mr Galley, 27, the most prolific Tory mole of modern times, had taken huge risks to smuggle sensitive documents out of the Home Office. But now he had been caught, threatened with imprisonment and fired from his job. It was time, he thought, to call in a few favours.

“I find it very painful to see the way my leaks have boosted Damian Green’s career while leaving me jobless, broke and with limited prospects,” he said. “Frankly, I feel the Tories have hung me out to dry.”

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Remember that the hapless Mr Galley was not a classic whistle-blower in the sense of an insider so angered by knowledge of government wrong-doing that he thought it should be exposed, and risked his career to expose it. For such often worthy people there’s anyway a confidential procedure to be followed within the civil servant’s department, and ultimately in an approach to the head of the civil service, to bring to the attention of the highest official authority the evidence of alleged wrong-doing, before resorting to the ultimate sanction of passing the information to the media, directly or indirectly, without authority. Galley followed no such procedure and it seems quite clear that as a Conservative Party supporter he was mainly concerned to give political ammunition to a front-bench Tory shadow minister for use in embarrassing the government, not primarily publicly to expose wrong-doing.

A key question in assessing the possible criminality of both Mr Galley’s and Mr Green’s activities is whether Damian Green actually asked or encouraged Galley to steal and pass over official home office documents, or whether Galley acted spontaneously, without encouragement, with Damian Green purely a passive recipient.

The Times interview casts valuable new light on this:

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“Mr Galley’s painful foray into the world of political dirty tricks began with an astonishing meeting with David Davis, then the Shadow Home Secretary, and ended unceremoniously with a dawn raid by anti-terror police. Mr Galley … had been a civil servant for only three months when he was invited to Mr Davis’s office at the Commons in May 2006. … Mr Galley was working at the Border and Immigration Agency, now the UK Border Agency, in Hounslow, West London, helping to process applications from asylum seekers. He had read an article on immigration posted by Mr Davis on the Conservative Party website and left a message on the site agreeing with the article and making a few suggestions. To his amazement, he received an e-mail asking him to meet the Shadow Home Secretary. “The invitation was to Davis’s Commons office,” said Mr Galley, who was then aged 24 and in the lowest rank of the Civil Service. […]

“In the invitation it said, ‘Our immigration spokesman wants to be there as well’,” Mr Galley went on. “At the time I didn’t have a clue who he was. So this balding bloke turns up at the meeting. It was Damian Green. I felt pretty intimidated. You had two senior politicians and a researcher sitting in a room and you have all this imposing architecture around you. And you have one of them sitting at one side and another at the other side and you’ve got questions coming from one and then the other.

In July 2007, Mr Galley was promoted to administration officer at the Home Office and told Mr Green of his progress. He was responsible for administration in the private office of Tony McNulty, then the minister responsible for policing and crime, and Vernon Coaker, an under-secretary of state and government whip. “One day, I was sitting in Vernon’s office and…a private secretary to Vernon and one of the assistant private secretaries were dealing with a matter relating to the Security Industry Authority [which licenses workers in the security industry],” he said. “They were looking at this document to do with how licences had been granted to asylum seekers to work in the SIA. But rather than trying to put a stop to that, these two people were actually trying to co-ordinate . . . a damage limitation exercise on how to keep it quiet, which I didn’t think was right. I got my hands on that document . . . copied it to my hard drive, then saved it and copied it to my Hotmail address and sent it to Damian Green. A day later it was published in a newspaper. I was pretty shocked. Damian telephoned me and said, ‘Well done. This is pretty explosive stuff”.”

Buoyed by the encouragement, Mr Galley continued to leak.”

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This is only one side’s version of events: Damian Green denies parts of it. But the general pattern seems clear enough.

Some conclusions can be drawn, I think, from all this.

First, good and coherent government, which depends among other things on a relationship of mutual trust between ministers and their officials, would be impossible if all, or a significant number of, civil servants felt free to steal official information and pass it to opposition MPs for party political purposes, claiming the right to substitute their own political opinions for the judgement of elected ministers as to what information should be released and when.

Secondly, Mr Galley doesn’t seem to have initiated the relationship with David Davis and Damian Green, who began it with their surprise invitation to Galley to go and meet them. The two Tory MPs seem to have been careful not to ask Galley explicitly to send them documents without authority, presumably knowing that to do so would risk laying them open to criminal charges. But the distinction between an explicit request and implicit encouragement is surely rather blurred – as the DPP implied by stressing that the decision not to prosecute didn’t necessarily mean that no offence had been committed.

Thirdly, against the background of systematic leaking from a minister’s private office in the home office to an opposition MP and thence into the public domain, a police investigation was absolutely inevitable – as the DPP himself also said. A police investigation into the possibility of an offence by Damian Green was bound to involve questioning him and searching his computers and papers in a way which denied him or his staff any opportunity to hide or destroy potentially incriminating evidence beforehand, as any other questioning of a possible suspect must do. Criticism of the Speaker and other House of Commons authorities for permitting this (one of the charges laid against Mr Speaker Martin) is seriously misplaced. They would have been open to the charge of obstructing the police in their enquiries, or obstructing the course of justice, had they sought to prevent the police from doing their duty. It’s true that the police didn’t have an ordinary search warrant, but explicit permission to conduct the search given by a high parliamentary official responsible for security, probably given after consulting the Speaker, was surely even better than a magistrate’s search warrant.

Fourthly, Mr Green is a lucky man to have got away with acting as he did, systematically and over a period of at least two years, with complete impunity, indeed emerging at the end of the process with the wholly undeserved status of both hero and victim of allegedly improper treatment at the hands of the police, when the police self-evidently couldn’t have acted otherwise than as they did.

Fifthly, Mr Galley, who took such personal risks on behalf of the party which he supported, with what sounds like encouragement from two of its senior leaders, has turned out to be a lot less lucky than Mr Green, his mentor. He obviously behaved badly vis-à-vis his employers over an extended period, inevitably thereby damaging his chances of finding another job after being dismissed from the civil service; but it’s impossible not to feel just a tiny bit sorry for him.

And lastly, if and when Mr Green and perhaps Mr Davis are appointed ministers in a Conservative government under David Cameron, probably some time next year, it will be extremely interesting to see whether they take the same relaxed view if one of their trusted civil servants turns out to be a committed Labour Party supporter who starts leaking official documents to the Labour opposition front bench, for use against them.

Brian Barder is a former diplomat. He also blogs at barder.com/ephems.