The Department of Education is remarkably unbothered by yesterday’s Guardian splash about free schools. Why? Because they have known for months that the emails
on which it was based had gone missing. Indeed, the only thing that surprised them about the story was that it did not appear three months ago in the Financial Times.
Email security in Whitehall is notoriously bad. Ministers and special advisers often don’t realise that civil servants have access to their email accounts. This access provides ample opportunity for those hostile to the government’s political agenda to leak out stories. (Most ministers in both this and the last government use secret squirrel email addresses to communicate with people to get round this problem).
Gove’s office has been acutely aware of how many people in Whitehall can read their emails since they found out that a secretary to Gove’s advisers with access to their computers was applying for jobs with Labour MPs. As soon as the senior civil servants in the department found out that this secretary was trying to get hired by the Labour party, they instantly moved him out of the job that he was doing — aware of what a conflict of interest it was.
This secretary to Gove’s advisers (we should stress that The Spectator has nothing to link him directly to the free school emails) soon went to work for a member of the shadow Cabinet. He then, foolishly, unlocked his Twitter feed. This revealed that while a civil servant, and supposedly politically impartial, he had sent out a bunch of pro-Labour messages as well as bantering with one of Ed Balls’ special advisers.
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