Top mandarin’s new U-turn as he says: We didn’t tell police Harry killer was above law
After embarrassing climbdown over his evidence to Parliament in Brussels ventilators storm...
THE top civil servant at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office is under mounting pressure after he had to U-turn on evidence he gave to Parliament twice in just one week.
Bungling FCO Permanent Secretary Sir Simon McDonald was forced into a humiliating volte-face after admitting to MPs that his department had held talks with US government lawyers in the days after former CIA spy Anne Sacoolas collided with and killed 19-year-old motorcyclist Harry Dunn.
On Tuesday, Sir Simon repeatedly insisted that the police investigating the accident outside US spy base RAF Croughton last August had no powers to determine whether Ms Sacoolas held diplomatic immunity before she subsequently fled the country.
He was appearing before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and being probed by chairman Tom Tugendhat over last week’s Mail on Sunday revelation that the FCO had told the police Ms Sacoolas was immune from prosecution four days after the fatal accident for which she was later charged with causing death by dangerous driving, and the police failed to investigate the matter further.
But in an astonishing letter to the Committee sent on Friday, Sir Simon changed his claims and insisted that no such talks had taken place. The FCO had not given legal advice to Northamptonshire Police regarding the case, he wrote, and it was for the force to determine if Ms Sacoolas was above the law.
In March, this newspaper also revealed that another senior FCO diplomat, who was later sacked, texted the US government to suggest Ms Sacoolas get ‘on the next flight out’ at the height of the crisis.
The MoS has learnt that the U-turn came about after colleagues at the top of the FCO realised Sir Simon’s astonishing earlier admission to Parliament directly contradicted evidence presented by them to the High Court in the upcoming legal challenge on the circumstances around Ms Sacoolas’s abscondment filed by Harry’s family. A legal source said: ‘He nearly blew the whole defence, and might still have yet.’
The latest climbdown came after a furious row over claims Sir Simon made to the same Commons session about Ministers taking a ‘political’ decision not to join a Brussels scheme to buy ventilators were similarly retracted.
Last night, a senior Government source declared Sir Simon’s evidence ‘a disaster zone’. A Downing Street figure accepted: ‘It is not good enough, and our hearts go out to the family.’ Mr Tugendhat added: ‘Two corrections so quickly raises questions we will be looking at in the coming weeks.’
A spokesman for Harry’s family, Radd Seiger, branded the U-turn ‘astonishing’, saying: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears and the fact that he has been forced to issue this retraction raises serious questions,’ he said.
Barrister Adam Wagner, of Doughty Street Chambers, who is working on Harry’s family’s case against the Government, said the blunder opens up a whole series of fresh questions. ‘The FCO has now accepted the police have operational independence and it was for them to determine what steps to take in the criminal investigation into Harry’s death,’ he said. ‘There are important unanswered questions, particularly why, if the FCO accepts the police had operational independence, they didn’t tell the police three key facts.
‘First, that the position in relation to her immunity was legally unclear – as Sir Simon had to “clarify”, only the courts can determine whether someone has immunity.
‘Secondly, their official had told the Americans that Sacoolas could leave on the next flight. Finally, why the FCO did not tell the police that the Americans had refused to waive Anne Sacoolas’s “immunity” until after she had left the UK.’
Last night, the FCO said: ‘The Permanent Under-Secretary has written to Parliament to clarify the relationship between the FCO and the police on immunity.’