Morphed

ROBIN COOK: DEAD MAN, SEALED FILE Robin Cook quit the government over a war he said was built on a lie. 2 years later he was dead on a Scottish hillside, and the case was shut before anyone finished their tea. In March 2003 Robin Cook stood up in the House of Commons @HouseofCommons and resigned as Leader of the House rather than back the Iraq War. MPs from every party gave him a standing ovation. That had never happened in that chamber before, and it has not happened since. For the next two years Robin Cook told anyone who would listen that Tony Blair had walked Britain into a war built on nothing. History eventually agreed with him. It did not save him. On 6 August 2005 Robin Cook was hillwalking with his wife Gaynor Cook on Ben Stack, a mountain in Sutherland. He collapsed with a heart attack, fell around 8 feet down a ridge, and was airlifted to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. He was pronounced dead minutes after arriving. Days later a post mortem gave the cause as hypertensive heart disease. The Northern Constabulary treated it as a routine medical death and left it there. No inquest reopening. No criminal inquiry. A former Foreign Secretary who had spent two years humiliating the government over an illegal war dropped dead on one of the most remote hillsides in the country, and the file closed almost as fast as it opened. Here is the detail that rarely makes the story. Ben Stack sits inside the Reay Forest Estate, owned by the Grosvenor family. At the time Robin Cook died on that hill, Gerald Grosvenor, the 6th Duke of Westminster, was serving as assistant chief of the defence staff at the Ministry of Defence. Robin Cook died on land connected to a senior Ministry of Defence figure, two years after resigning over that same ministry's war. Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP who later became a Home Office minister and spent years investigating the death of weapons inspector David Kelly, said in 2007 that Robin Cook had been on Ministry of Defence linked land when he died and that he had real doubts about the official account. Columnist David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) called him a conspiracy theorist for saying it. That label has a habit of landing on the people asking questions, never on the people refusing to answer them. Then there is the part almost nobody covers. From 2020 onward, requests were filed with Police Scotland (@PoliceScotland) under Freedom of Information law for the basic facts of that day. What time officers were alerted. Whether witnesses were interviewed. Whether the hillwalker who helped Gaynor Cook down the mountain was ever identified. Police Scotland refused, arguing the requests repeated an earlier one. The Scottish Information Commissioner (@FOIScotland) told them that reasoning did not hold up. So Police Scotland switched tactics and refused the actual content instead, citing legal exemptions. The Commissioner upheld that refusal in Decision 074/2021 and again in Decision 011/2022. 20 years on, the basic facts of how a former Foreign Secretary died on a Scottish hillside remain sealed. Nobody had to cover anything up. They just had to outlast the people asking. SOURCES @HeraldScotland @thetimes @FOIScotland @PoliceScotland @BBC

UK GOVERNMENT SACKED ITS OWN BORDER WATCHDOG David Neal was the man the government hired to inspect UK borders and make sure they actually worked. He did exactly that. What he found was not good. He wrote it all up in official reports. The Home Office locked those reports in a drawer. When he finally went to a newspaper to warn the public that private planes were landing in the UK with almost nobody checking who was on them, the Home Secretary James Cleverly @JamesCleverly fired him. Here is what Neal actually found. At London City Airport, only 21% of flights flagged as high risk were checked by immigration officers. Not some of the time. As a yearly average. He said it was a scandal and dangerous for the country. The Home Office said he had the numbers wrong. Then they fired him. At the moment he was sacked, the @HomeOffice was holding back 15 of his finished inspection reports. Some had been sitting there for 18 months without being shown to the public. The agreed deadline for publishing them was eight weeks. Not one report met that deadline across his entire three years in the job. When they finally released 13 of the reports, they chose to do it on the same afternoon that a separate major inquiry published its findings... Draw your own conclusions. What was actually in those reports? Border control posts left with nobody manning them. Officers at e-passport gates described as distracted and without basic radios. The whole airport border operation rated as neither effective nor efficient. Neal told MPs directly: I have been sacked for doing my job. He also told @BBC the Home Office is dysfunctional and described senior officials rolling their eyes when he brought them his findings. He said the government contacted him three separate times warning him not to speak publicly about the unpublished reports. He had almost no other way to get the information out. The people who fired him for raising border security concerns were the same people who spent years promising the public they had taken back control of the borders. Sources: @BBCNews @guardian @DailyMail @CommonsHomeAffs