To the Ministry of Defence leak, which has created a flurry of news this week after journalists were eventually allowed to report on the scandal following the lifting of a super-injunction on Tuesday. A number of politicians have found themselves in the firing line over the issue, with former defence secretary Grant Shapps the latest to be criticised. After the ex-Tory MP told the BBC’s Today programme that he was ‘surprised [the super-injunction] lasted quite so long’, a Whitehall source remarked to the Times that the politician was ‘trying to rewrite history’, adding: ‘Everyone knows he was the one personally demanding to keep the super-injunction in place after the election was called last summer.’ Shots fired!
The order, which prevented the British public from discovering a soldier has leaked a list of 33,000 Afghan applications for sanctuary in the UK, was upgraded the then-government’s request for an injunction over the matter to a super-injunction. The change meant that no one would be aware that the order even existed, in the first time a government had used this mechanism. Shapps – who became the Conservative defence secretary in September 2023 – told the Beeb this morning that:
My expectation was, as the risks start to lessen over time and people are removed from Afghanistan and measures are taken to protect the Brits on the list… I’d thought that it was probably going to come to an end last summer, the autumn perhaps at maximum.
Yet it transpires that it was Shapps himself who had appealed against a decision to lift the super-injunction as the 2024 election approached – while the UK media opposed the order. In May 2024, a judge lifted the order, remarking that: ‘The one thing that can be said with confidence is that affected persons would be better off learning of the data breach by notification from the UK government than from a knock on the door by the Taliban.’ However the Ministry of Defence appealed the decision and the Court of Appeal ruled just days before last July’s national poll that the super-injunction should stay in place.
Shapps isn’t the first former Conservative that has been hauled into the limelight over the scandal. Reform UK has taken aim at shadow justice secretary and onetime Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick. And former Conservative home secretary Suella Braverman hasn’t managed to escape scrutiny – with her husband Rael quitting the party after head of DOGE, Zia Yusuf, attacked his wife. Mr S is sure Nigel Farage’s lot are just getting started…
Comments