Untouchables by Michael Gillard

Author:Michael Gillard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

16

The Electricians

Plug A Leak

On 21 February 1999, Tom Baldwin, political editor of the Sunday Telegraph, produced a mother of a scoop. Five days earlier, in utmost secrecy, a source had shown him a copy of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report. The home secretary, Jack Straw, had only just received it himself under tight security.

Straw had planned to extract maximum credit and impact during a carefully planned speech to Parliament on 24 February. The home secretary was also going to announce some police reforms off the back of the stinging report’s 70 recommendations.

Back at his office in Canary Wharf, Baldwin laid out the story to his editors: commissioner Condon’s job was on the line if he failed to accept the report’s withering personal criticisms of his leadership and of his force’s “institutional racism”. Baldwin assumed the newspaper wanted the story. But because of the Telegraph Group’s right-wing views, he set some rather unusual conditions. The newspaper, which he knew was close to the Yard, could not simply use his scoop to rubbish the Lawrence report. He must be free to write the lead stories as he saw fit or he’d take the scoop with him to The Times, who had recently poached him.

No sooner had the first edition hit the streets than a furious Jack Straw sought an injunction. The next day the media rounded on Straw’s heavy-handedness. The home secretary backed down and allowed reprinting by other media of what was already published.

Straw appointed a retired civil servant, John Simon, to conduct the mole hunt. Twenty copies of the report had arrived at the Home Office two days before Baldwin was shown it. So the leak inquiry assumed the mole was someone inside the Home Office or possibly a member of the Lawrence Inquiry.

Dozens of Straw’s civil servants were aggressively questioned about any contact they may have had with the journalist. But according to a well-placed source there was an unusually tight focus on the tiny handful of black officials in the Home Office, and in particular on Straw’s deputy, Paul Boateng MP. This was a rich irony given the Lawrence report’s wide-reaching conclusion of “institutional racism”. The focus, says the source, was convenient for those reactionary elements in the Home Office and the wider political Establishment, including the Tory Party, who wanted to protect Scotland Yard and would later be at the forefront of the Lawrence backlash.

Straw and Boateng were thought to be in favour of letting Condon go early, but it is believed Tony Blair overruled them. It was therefore handy for spin-doctors representing the ancien régime in the Met to be able to blame Boateng for something someone else had done for quite different reasons.

The leak inquiry was unpleasant in another respect, our source told us. A number of civil servants were pointedly asked whether they had ever taken drugs with Baldwin or been given any by him. The idea of government officials sharing a bong with the Sunday Torygraph’s political editor is hilarious, but sadly typical of the grubby pressures that can so badly misfire.

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