Nick Cohen has been a great champion of Derek Pasquill, the Foreign Office civil servant accused of leaking documents to the Observer and the New Statesman about government policy on radical Islam. His piece in the Observer today is a very useful summary of the case and a passionate plea for sanity.
This is the crucial passage:
“This is an official secrets case like no other because while he was wondering whether he would end up in jail, New Labour changed its mind. The leaks and protests from liberal-minded British Muslims persuaded Ruth Kelly, David Miliband and Jacqui Smith to stop engaging with Islamists.
Pasquill is accused of leaking against a policy the government admits was wrong. Ministers have told my former colleague Martin Bright, who broke the story, that reading the documents changed their minds. On a second issue, the documents revealed that the FCO didn’t know – and didn’t want to know – whether the Americans were using British airspace for the ‘extraordinary rendition’ of suspects. Ministers again admit that their deliberate ignorance was also a mistake.
The government might defend the prosecution of Pasquill by saying the confidentiality of discussions in Whitehall must be protected and law must take its course. But after the loss of the child benefit records, New Labour is in no position to lecture others on the need to defend confidentiality. It would be the grossest hypocrisy for a government that casually allows junior officials to download the unencrypted confidential details of 25 million people to claim that the full weight of the law must be used to protect its secrets. There cannot be one rule for them and another for the rest of us.”
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