Mugging the truth to spin Blunkett's comeback

Would you buy an audit trail from this Government?

Morphing the truth

David Blunkett's resignation statement began by addressing the matter of the Casalme visa. It noted that on Tuesday Sir Alan Budd had told him that there had been a fax and email exchange between his office and the Immigration and Nationality Directorate "not based on the application form as originally alleged but on the subsequent letter (informing her of a possible 12-month delay) of which I was always aware but did not remember holding a copy. I have no recollection of dealing with this in any way." Blunkett's lack of recollection here is notable, because on Monday of that week the Home Office had categorically stated that Blunkett had had "no contact with the letter at all, at any stage." This letter had not previously been known to have been in Blunkett's possession, but it is difficult to see how else it might have found its way to the Home Office. Tory Home Affairs Spokesman David Davis said that it stretched credulity to believe that everyone at the Home Office has forgotten the exchange, and indeed it did.

Blunkett's memory lapse in the statement however allows him to move swiftly on into martyr territory: "Given I have no recollection of issuing instructions to deal with the application, but only to continuing the elimination of the backlog in general, the easy thing would be to hide behind my officials. I will not do such a thing. In no way is my office or any individual within the department to blame for what happened." That is, it's not his fault, he doesn't need to resign, but someone of his integrity is not going to let an over-zealous official take the blame, no matter how much they might deserve it.

Martyrdom dealt with, Blunkett becomes the wronged father, and it is particularly worth noting that it is he who here introduces his personal life, and uses it to further his political ends: "I believe these issues would never have been raised had I not decided in September that I could not walk away from my youngest son.

"I could not live with myself or believe I had done the best for him in the long term if I had abandoned my relationship with him. I only sought continued access to him through the courts, as I made clear two weeks ago, because all other avenues had been denied me."

Blunkett is probably right to claim that the "issues" wouldn't have come to light if he hadn't commenced legal action to gain access to Kimberly Quinn's son. As far as we can see, however, that simply means he feels that Cabinet Ministers are perfectly free to abuse the system so long as nobody blows the whistle on them, not that it is wrong for them to do so.

We hold no brief for the Quinns, and by preference we do not do personal lives, unless we feel they have been thrust upon us. However, it seems to us that one could sauce this matter two ways - granted, accusing Blunkett of a string (for there was a string) of abuses of office in retaliation to a legal action may have been a low blow, but a decent father concerned over the welfare of his child (if the boy is his child) might equally well have stepped back and allowed the Quinns space to try to rebuild the marriage he'd done so much to wreck. It's also a pretty low blow to fill the papers with quotes depicting the boy's mother as a vindictive harpy: "In future he [my son] will want to know, not just did his father care enough to sacrifice his career but he will want to know, I hope, that his mother has some regret... [and his tormentors should examine] their consciences about what they have done to that little boy's future. I hope they will think about it."

Facts and flexibility

Blunkett's self-proclaimed reputation for straight talking should, one hopes, be a significant casualty of the affair, given that there's been precious little of it about. Responding to the first allegations in the Sunday Telegraph a Blunkett spokesman denied that fast-tracking had taken place, and said that Blunkett had merely checked that the initial application had been in good order. A report in the Daily Mail the following day raised the subject of the letter informing Casalme of a possible delay in the processing of her application, but did not establish that this letter had ever been in Blunkett's possession. That day the 'explanation' was honed somewhat to deal with the latest developments.

The previous line that the application had never been at the Home Office was abandoned, and Blunkett's office instead offered: "David took it with him to the Home Office and said to his principal private secretary (Jonathan Sedgwick) and his deputy (Gareth Redmond), 'I have got a piece of paper in my pocket, what does it say?' One of them may well have read it to him and looked it over. There is nothing unusual in this." The "piece of paper" here became more clearly identified as the initial application over the next few days, as denials that Blunkett had had anything to do with the letter became firmer. On top of these (just in case?), a knowledge of the existence of the letter was conceded, and it was suggested that Blunkett may have used his knowledge of the letter to prove to his officials that they were wrong to claim that immigration processing backlogs were being tackled.

The spin-doctors also essayed the line that the Home Office was cracking down on backlogs at the time, and that it was therefore perfectly rational to expect Casalme's application to have been dealt with speedily, along with the rest. This explanation wouldn't have needed Blunkett to admit bringing up the subject of the particular application, but was undermined by the fact that Casalme had had residency granted before she was actually qualified for it. The Sunday before Blunkett's resignation the letter reappeared, with "an insider" quoted as claiming Blunkett had produced the letter in a Home Office meeting, and that in response a Home Office official had asked immigration for the application to be "sorted". The next day a spokesman for Blunkett denied this, saying he had "no contact with the letter at all, at any stage."

On the Tuesday, however, Sir Alan Budd informed Blunkett had there had been fax and email traffic between the Home Office and IND concerning the letter, and this triggered Blunkett's resignation statement the next day. The statement claimed he had no recollection of having or doing anything with the letter, and implied he had nobly taken the fall rather than blame any official who might have been overzealous. In the days following the resignation Blunkett's memory seems to have revived sufficiently to produce yet another explanation. This time, he was given the letter by Kimberly Quinn, and 'must have' put it into the Red Box used to carry his Cabinet papers. It could then very well have arrived at the Home Office in the Red Box by accident, and have been expedited by an overzealous official, again entirely accidentally. Oddly, according to yesterday's Sunday Times, blaming the overzealous official is precisely what was going to happen until Bill Jeffrey, head of the immigration service, declined to have one of his staff fitted-up, and blew the whistle.

The fax and email traffic seems to have disappeared, so it is difficult to establish whose fault it was, and if everybody can be induced not to notice the way the line has changed over the weeks, and if Budd's report does not put serious blame on Blunkett, then in a few months time he could be back, either entirely innocent or as someone who has paid enough for minor errors.

It matters

In addition to offering 'Shakespearean tragedy' and 'hubris', commentators are now wisely intoning that it was not the small matter of the fixing of an immigration application but the cover-up that did for Blunkett. This is true, as far as it goes, but there are other aspects of the affair that we would do well to bear in mind. The immigration matter was simply the most serious of a number of allegations of misconduct that were made about Blunkett. Some of these have been either admitted, or 'explained', but it seems reasonable to conclude that they suggest a pattern of behaviour, a habit of blurring the boundaries between his public duties and his personal life, and a tendency to show off his mighty powers to his circle of friends.

Conduct of this sort will ultimately have a corrosive effect on government, damaging morale among civil servants who see it happening and encouraging them to grant favours in their turn. And, if everybody in the know can get things done, there's significantly less chance that the system will work properly for everybody else, get fixed if it's broken, or that the people in the know will even notice if it's broken. Small matters produce large matters if they're not dealt with - that is why we have conduct rules governing small matters, and why senior members of the Government should be aware of them.

The cover-up is also important as a symptom of general government behaviour, and is again something that shouldn't be dismissed as a small, isolated matter. Ask yourself if the outfit that's played fast and loose with the Blunkett audit trail (and that just told civil servants to delete their emails after three months) is one you can trust with an ID scheme audit trail. The Government is at the moment trying to sell us a whole range of new laws and measures that we will ultimately pay a high price for, and it's doing this on the basis of presentation, not facts. Today Parliament votes on the flagship of these, the ID card scheme, and new Home Secretary Charles Clarke is telling us that the ID scheme is "a profoundly civil libertarian measure" and no more threatening than "cash and credit cards, driving licences, passports, work security passes and any number of the other current forms of ID that most of us now carry." It's all part of the same, squalid picture. ®

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