The betrayal of Harry Dunn
How can our top diplomat mislead Parliament so badly? They told them to delay so they could get their ducks in a row
Week after week, the MoS’s HARRY COLE has forensically exposed the incompetence and double-dealing of the Foreign Office in letting the teenager’s US killer off scot-free. Here, he tells the full shameful story – and publishes a heart-rending letter to Boris from the dead boy’s twin brother . . .
DURING a fly-on-the-wall TV documentary about life in the Foreign Office, the head of the Diplomatic Service, Sir Simon McDonald, made it clear that he relished his position of power.
‘Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way,’ he mischievously explained, adding that the aim was to make others ‘ feel they’ve been taken into your confidence, but, in the end, without actually telling them anything’.
One reviewer of the BBC series in 2018 described Sir Simon as ‘oozing not just poise but considerable self-satisfaction’. However, that poise suddenly seems to have abandoned the career diplomat in charge of 14,000 public servants whose job it is to smooth Britain’s passage through the world and to look after our citizens’ interests.
For Sir Simon, 59, has become embroiled in controversy over the Government’s failure to get justice for the parents of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn, who was killed in a road crash in Northamptonshire last summer.
The other person involved was Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a US intelligence official. She claimed diplomatic immunity from prosecution and returned to America despite later being charged with causing death by dangerous driving.
Sir Simon is now accused of misleading Parliament. Last month he gave evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, saying that Foreign Office (FO) staff had told police investigating the 19-year-old’s death that they could not arrest the American.
Two days later, he was forced to write to the committee saying no such instruction was given. But today a leaked email reveals that FO staff did inform police that they could not arrest her. This hugely embarrassing U-turn was the latest twist in the tragedy about which The Mail on Sunday has broken a string of exclusive stories.
These have suggested that Harry’s family has been scandalously let down by the FO and they have also questioned the legitimacy of Mrs Sacoolas’s claim to diplomatic immunity.
Sir Simon’s humiliating volteface happened after senior FO colleagues realised that his earlier statement contradicted evidence presented by them to the High Court in an upcoming legal challenge by Harry’s family on the circumstances around Mrs Sacoolas’s abscondment. A legal source said: ‘He nearly blew the whole defence - and might still have yet.’
It also comes as The Mail on Sunday reveals that Harry’s twin brother, Niall, has written to Boris Johnson imploring him to meet the family and take charge of the case. Niall says that watching his parents ‘go through this torture is just awful’. He adds that ‘anyone can see that the Foreign Office has made a mess of this’ and urges the Government to tell the truth.
We can also reveal that an email sent by the FO to Northamptonshire Police six days after the fatal crash outside RAF Croughton last August seemingly contradicts
Sir Simon’s statement and explicitly stated that Mrs Sacoolas was above the law. Having received this advice, the police said they felt obliged to end their investigation into the status of the American mother-of-three.
For their part, Harry’s family complain about ‘interference’ in the case from the highest levels of Government and about confusion on whether Mrs Sacoolas had immunity. This allowed her, they say, ‘with the blessing of the Foreign Office, to get on the next flight out of Britain’. With the subsequent row having damaged relations between the British and US governments, it is clear that politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are desperate to reach a compromise. That is why the clumsy behaviour of the head of the FO has not been at all helpful.
Although the Prime Minister asked the White House for Mrs Sacoolas to return to Britain for questioning, US President Donald Trump has been intransigent. He has simply said he would ‘see what we can come up with, so there can be some healing’. No wonder Harry’s parents described Mr Trump’s attitude as ‘oafish’ and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s handling of the case ‘cold and strange’.
Throughout this whole story, there has been official obfuscation. The Mail on Sunday has discovered several details the authorities have been reluctant to admit.
For example, US government officials were present at the only interview that Mrs Sacoolas had with police, the day after the fatal collision. And that FO staff initially told their American counterparts that she did not have immunity from prosecution, only to change their mind after advice from ‘US State Department lawyers’.
To make matters worse, the FO asked Northamptonshire Police to delay telling Harry’s family that Mrs Sacoolas had absconded to America, so they could ‘get their ducks in a row’. What is now clear is that the FO told Detective Inspector Louise Hemingway in an email on September 2 – six days after the crash – that Mrs Sacoolas, 43, had diplomatic immunity. As a result, police felt hamstrung and didn’t investigate her status further.
The email came three days after Ministers were t old during a phone call with the US Embassy ‘that US State Department lawyers take the view’ that Mrs Sacoolas had immunity.
Last night, Harry’s father Tim said: ‘We still do not have the full picture. But Sir Simon McDonald’s evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee was not the truth. How can the country’s leading diplomat mislead Parliament so badly?’
With little chance of Mrs Sacoolas ever returning to Britain, the family launched a crowd-funded judicial review into the handling of the case by both the FO and the police. Ultimately, they hope to prove Mrs Sacoolas’s claims of immunity to be unlawful.
Undoubtedly, the review will look in detail at all the actions of FO staff immediately after the fatal crash. What is not disputed is that Mrs Sacoolas, who had been in Britain for only three weeks, was driving her Volvo XC90 on the wrong side of the B4031 at 8.21pm on Tuesday, August 27 last year, and was involved in a head-on collision with Harry. She admitted later being at fault.
The teenager died from his injuries. Mrs Sacoolas passed a breathtest that evening and was allowed home. At noon the following day, Det Insp Hemingway visited Mrs Sacoolas and her husband at the couple’s rented home, where she found them with a US Air Force lawyer and two officials from the US State Department.
During their conversation, Det Insp Hemingway noted that Mrs Sacoolas said she had no plans to leave Britain. Nor was there any mention of diplomatic immunity.
However, later that day, Northamptonshire Police were in contact with Scotland Yard’s Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection squad