Answer from Lord Goldsmith

In response to our message of 25 June 2008, Lord Goldsmith has gracefully sent us his reply.

"As I am no longer Attorney General those matters are more properly for the present Attorney General and I therefore send a copy of your letter onto her."

(The present Attorney General will be looking forward to its receipt, I'm sure. We already contacted her office, a year ago, and that proved to be an unsuccessful enterprise.)

In truth being said, we did not address Lord Goldsmith in his present official role, but in his role as the leading party in the 2004 Gaul RFI.
We did not call upon his current employment duties as much as upon his remanent responsibility for an investigation conducted under his baton, and we did not count much on the requisites of formal routine, but on the munificence of lordship.

And we would have been very much interested to learn more about the rationale behind his past decisions.

A message to Lord Goldsmith

In order to gain more knowledge on the internal workings of the 2004 Gaul RFI, we thought it would be a good idea to contact the ex-Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, on whose behalf the inquiry was held.
A message has therefore been delivered to his Lordship, the contents of which can now be scrutinised at:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddpkgjpm_27fxg936cp
or at: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/User:Gadfly3D

Out of sight, out of mind

Earlier this year, we published (HERE) a list with the main protagonists in the 2004 Re-opened Formal Investigation into the sinking of the trawler Gaul.

Today we can advise that some of those who were involved in the RFI, on the side of the government, have now moved to other positions, way away from their original milieu.

Lord Goldsmith, the ex-Attorney General on whose behalf the Gaul RFI was held, after ‘three months gardening leave’, has joined Debevoise & Plimpton’s, a US firm where his lordship will re-qualify as a solicitor.

Mr Nigel Meeson, the ex-Counsel for the Attorney General, is now in the Cayman Islands, employed as solicitor by Conyers Dill & Pearman.

Jo Cuningham who, alongside Mr Meeson, represented the Attorney General during the 2004 Gaul RFI has gone to the British Virgin Islands, employed by the law firm Maples and Calder.

And, finally, Mr Laurance O’Dea, solicitor for the ex-Attorney General, is deserting the Treasury Solicitors Office to take early retirement, leaving us to deal with his somewhat less voluble successors.

As far as our government is concerned, these prominent actors as well as the Gaul RFI are now out sight and out of mind.

We will, however, try to keep them all in our thoughts.

Seen from above

‘Insufficient evidence’ is a common response these days to claims for due and proper investigation of high-profile misdemeanours, two magic words that have the power to open the doors to impunity.
We heard them in the cash-for-honours fiasco; we heard them used in several other affairs and now we hear them again with reference to the Gaul case.

Recently, the Treasury Solicitor himself made use of this ‘get-out’ formula when he advised the Department for Transport on the possibility of re-examining the shameful outcome of the 2004 Gaul Investigation.
The Treasury Solicitor, who, during the 2004 RFI, prepared and presented the case under directions from Lord Goldsmith, is now charged with assessing our criticisms of that investigation (published online for all to see).
When asked to justify his pronouncement, he simply told us that our evidence ‘as seen’ did not provide grounds for re-opening the investigation. Fullstop.

Evidence ‘as seen’…?! What could the meaning of this be? Why so inexplicit? Did he think that, if understood, his words would loose their mystical power; or was it just his way of reminding us that the government is too far above the law to have a clear vision of their tasks?

At the centre of the web

Following on from our previous post, regarding our request for the two RFI papers kept in the DfT vaults, we can now inform you that we eventually had to go back to the Treasury Solicitor to find out whether he was ready to provide the DfT with the coordinates of the documents in question.

“All roads lead to Rome”, a proverb says; similarly, in the Gaul RFI case, all roads lead to the TSol - to the Attorney General, in fact, as the Treasury Solicitor is just the front desk of that milliarium aureum to which all related questions are referred and from which all governmental responses seem to radiate.
As the Romans designed their radial network of roads with the purpose of preventing provinces getting together and organising resistance against the Empire, so has the Attorney General’s office placed itself at the centre of things in the Gaul inquiry. No request for information or inspection of the government’s chronicles is therefore possible without going through his nodal office first.
As a result, the TSol is now in the position to decree that not all documents in a public inquiry are public, and that these cannot be released without the agreement of the wreck commissioner, of the RFI retained experts[1] (all of whom cannot be contacted directly) and, ultimately, of the Attorney General, himself.

This “all roads lead to Rome” approach seems beneficial and expedient for the moment; however, the downside of this is, as it was for the Romans, that retaliating forces can also take these direct routes and reach the centre - just as quickly.
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[1] The RFI retained experts were paid significant sums of money from the public purse; whatever they produced should therefore be available for public scrutiny.

Investigation on behalf of the Attorney General

Body language

While waiting for an answer to our question about the ‘missing evidence’ (which, between us being said, was somewhat rhetorical), we decided to address another query to justice David Steel:

What recommendations, advice or expression of expectations regarding the Gaul case did the Attorney General and the DPM, John Prescott, offer you before and during the 2004 Formal Investigation?

© Crown copyright 2004