‘It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up’
Did the government abuse FOI law to bury Liz Truss’s boozy airplane flights?
A story about Liz Truss spending more than £15,000 on in-flight catering briefly caught fire last week.
The anger on social media was hardly surprising. On a single trip to Australia as foreign secretary - flying by private jet, no less - Truss blew more on food and booze than most Britons earn in six months.
The government defence - that the bill was for a dozen people and included logistical costs - didn’t get far in the court of public opinion.
But behind the story lies a potentially much bigger scandal. And it’s one that has been almost completely ignored, until now.
As with every would-be cover-up, the timeline is crucial. So bear with me.
News about Truss’s mammoth in-flight bills broke last Thursday afternoon, when a piece appeared on the news site Politico.
The Politico story said that the figures “were revealed in a Freedom of Information response to the opposition Labour Party”.
This is not unusual. Opposition parties often use FOI, and they often give the responses they get to journalists.
But the FOI that formed the basis of Politico’s Truss story was unusual. Very unusual.
Freedom of Information law allows anyone to request information from a public body. Normally the person who puts in the FOI request is sent the information before it goes to anyone else. Sometimes it’s also published on the public body’s ‘disclosure log’, but that’s vanishingly rare.
Anyway, back to our Truss story. The FOI the story was based on was sent by Labour’s Emily Thornberry over a year ago. (Public bodies are supposed to respond to requests within 20 working days but in reality it takes far, far longer.)
Then, last Wednesday, the Cabinet Office replied.
But rather than send the FOI response to Thornberry first, the Labour shadow minister says that the embarrassing figures were instead sent first to Politico - along with the suggestion that the story would make a good fit for that afternoon’s Playbook newsletter.
The Cabinet Office denies this, but won’t comment publicly. One thing we do know for certain is that last Wednesday was Budget day. Which is a very good day to bury bad news.
The Cabinet Office isn’t any old government department. It’s responsible for FOI policy and compliance - and it has a history of “managing” FOI responses for political ends. Requests from Thornberry have ended up in the Cabinet Office ‘Clearing House’ before.
But if the government was trying to bury Truss’s in-flight spending in the post-Budget scrum, the plan backfired.
Rather than rushing out the story in an already packed PM newsletter, Politico contacted Thornberry. Based on the phrasing of the FOI request, they asked if the shadow attorney general had sent the FOI request and whether she wanted to comment on the story.
At this point, Thornberry says she realised that Politico had been given the FOI response at least half an hour before she had received it, at 5.01pm on Wednesday - which would have left her almost no time to respond if the story had broken in Politico's Budget afternoon email, which went out at 5.13pm.
In any event, Politico published the following day, on Thursday. Other outlets followed the story up.
But the government’s seeming attempt to abuse the FOI process for political ends went unreported.
The next day, I heard Thornberry speak at a conference on FOI organised by my former openDemocracy colleague, the indefatigable Jenna Corderoy. Thornberry explained that she had started using FOI as she, like many other MPs, found her parliamentary questions were increasingly being rebuffed - then she gave an example of her FOI “given straight to the news team at Politico.”
I tweeted out Thornberry’s claims in real time and was talking about it on James O’Brien’s LBC show within the hour. I thought my work was done then. This obvious abuse of power would be picked up by other media who would push the story on.
But then nothing happened.
On Friday evening, a Labour source fleshed out Thornberry’s account. “Definitely no cock-up from the Cabinet Office,” the source said, adding that they thought it was a deliberate attempt to bury the story on Budget day
I tweeted an update on the story. My tweets on this have had 200,000 impressions and counting - but still nobody else in the media paid much attention.
On Monday, Thornberry wrote to the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case asking whether it is now standard practice for the Cabinet Office to share FOI responses with media before they are sent to the requester and whether any SpAds had been involved in the decision to send her FOI to Politico. [A copy of Thornberry’s letter, which was also sent to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and her original FOI are below.]
Thornberry has yet to receive a response.
I contacted the Cabinet Office with a series of questions. The department declined to comment, saying only that Thornberry’s FOI was handled in the usual way, which would always be for a response to be issued to the requester first.
So whose account is correct? The Cabinet Office or Thornberry’s? If the former, why not say so on the record?
Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, said that if the Cabinet Office deliberately sent Thornberry’s FOI to Politico first it would be “inconsistent” with the Act’s ‘applicant blind’ principle “which implies that authorities will not discriminate in the release of information under FOIA based on whether they approve or disapprove of someone’s purpose.”
This may all sound like a storm in a teacup, but it’s actually pretty core to the functioning of our democracy. FOI is a law - and a key tool for the public to hold the government to account. As such, it should be administered without fear or favour. But unfortunately this government has a track record of manipulating FOI for its own ends.
When Jenna Corderoy, Lucas Amin and I revealed in 2020 that the Cabinet Office Clearing House was vetting ‘sensitive’ FOI requests, Michael Gove dismissed our reporting as “ridiculous and tendentious”.
But we didn’t give up. We won battles at the Information Tribunal, revealed more about the dodgy Clearing House operation and coaxed editors and top journalists across Fleet Street into supporting our campaign. Within 18 months the Clearing House was shut down - following a parliamentary inquiry triggered by our reporting.
That was an important win. But the FOI system remains badly compromised. Response rates are at rock bottom. Basic requests are refused (like this).
Anyone who cares about accountable government should be deeply concerned by this sorry state of affairs. We all pay a high price when government secrecy goes unchallenged.
Democracy for Sale is working on some fresh ideas to defend FOI… watch this space. But in the meantime, the public needs to know whether a sensitive FOI request was sent straight to a news outlet last week - and if so, why.
As the old Watergate adage goes, “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” Liz Truss’s boozy flight on the public purse was not criminal - but it was a disgrace. Abusing FOI in an attempt to bury the story on Budget day? Now that would be a scandal.
The SCUM will do anything to avoid being honest and transparent in all of its dealings.