Burned

by Sam McBride

On the afternoon of Thursday, 19 January 2017, I was late arriving in the newsroom. Writing about RHI had gone late into the previous night and that morning there had been another Stormont committee hearing.

  On my desk was a large brown envelope, inside which were printouts of several emails. The communication, which was addressed to me by hand and delivered by Royal Mail, was anonymous, but its contents were extraordinary. After skimming through the emails, I walked a few feet to the deputy editor’s office and told him that we had a huge story that had to run the following day. The emails showed that some renewable energy firms had been given detailed inside information about the plan to rein in cash for ash four months before the subsidy was cut – and that the information had come from the two officials running the scheme: Stuart Wightman and Seamus Hughes.

  It added a new layer of complexity to the story. Aside from Jonathan Bell’s allegations of political skulduggery in delaying closure of RHI, here was firm proof that civil servants had been alerting the industry to the looming changes – and evidence that those firms immediately acted to pile into the scheme.

  After quickly establishing that the emails were genuine, I asked the Department for the Economy for a comment and the story ran on the News Letter’s front page the following morning under the headline ‘RHI firms given inside track on end of scheme’.

  Although I had no clue as to where the emails had originated, it struck me that they were uniquely helpful to the DUP, diverting focus from a party which for five weeks had been unable to shift the spotlight from itself. But whoever was helped by the information was not my concern.

  The story had been turned around rapidly – within about six hours from the emails arriving on my desk to being on the front page – partly due to an expectation that they may have been sent to other media outlets. In order to act so quickly, we had not published the names of any of those involved in the correspondence. There was insufficient time to give them a reasonable period of time in which to respond.

  But the following morning I went back to the department with a series of questions for Wightman and Hughes, informing them that we would be naming them. Meanwhile, I set about trying to track down the various industry individuals involved in the exchanges – Paula Keelagher at pellet manufacturer Balcas (who replied through a PR firm), Fergal Hegarty at Alternative Heat (who never responded) and others, one of whom had worked for a company no longer operating in Northern Ireland.

  The department’s immediate response was to warn that it may go to the High Court to seek an emergency injunction preventing publication of the names – an exceptionally rare move, particularly for a government department. It then said that Andrew McCormick wanted to brief me in person, but that was cancelled after McCormick’s minister, Simon Hamilton, said he was unhappy with it.

  Over several days, the department argued vigorously against the officials being named – something it said would undermine their right to a fair disciplinary process. There was one difficulty in advancing that argument. The day before the brown envelope arrived, McCormick had named – based on hearsay – Andrew Crawford as the individual who he had been told delayed cost controls in 2015. Having been prepared to name a spad based on uncorroborated second-hand accounts, the civil service was now threatening to use public money to block the naming of civil servants – not based on hearsay, but based on documentary evidence that they had contributed to the spike.

  The only way in which the emergence of the names could be prejudicial to the officials’ right to a fair disciplinary hearing would be if the department was open to being influenced by the News Letter’s coverage, something which in itself would be alarming.

  By the following Wednesday, having taken legal advice and given everyone in the emails ample opportunity to explain their position, the News Letter told the department that we would be publishing the names the following morning. At about 7pm that night I was on my way home from the office, stuck in heavy traffic, when the department’s senior press officer phoned to say that McCormick wanted to speak to me. ‘I know you are probably going to publish now, but he wants to make a final appeal not to name them,’ she said. Some minutes later, on speakerphone as I drove home along Belfast’s Ormeau Road, he appealed for Wightman and Hughes not to be named. Although he made a firm appeal not to name the officials, it was along strikingly different lines to those advanced by the department in the official statements and made clear that the contact between officials and the industry had been unknown to him until very recently.

  The following morning, the News Letter’s front page named the officials, making clear that we were not alleging corruption – or even necessarily wrongdoing of any sort – by Wightman or Hughes. The minister, Hamilton, had approved the department’s response to the News Letter, which had argued for the officials not to be named, something it said would cause an ‘irreversible … interference with their rights to privacy’. And his department had spent public money on legal advice around seeking an injunction against the newspaper.

  What neither McCormick nor I understood at that point was that Hamilton himself had authorised his spad, John Robinson, to leak the emails. Many weeks earlier, Crawford had been sent the emails by David Robinson – the major boiler installer who had installed his brother’s boilers. Then, the day after Bell’s explosive interview – which named Crawford as a spad who delayed cost controls – he forwarded the emails to John Robinson.

  Robinson, who had been the DUP’s chief spin doctor before becoming a spad, had initially made no mention to the inquiry of his role in leaking the emails. Both in writing and then when appearing before the inquiry, he was asked if there was any other relevant information and he did not mention his role. But after Hamilton admitted to the situation, Robinson told the inquiry that there was a desire to use the emails to take the focus off the DUP. On 23 December, Foster’s senior spad Richard Bullick asked Robinson why he had not yet sent the emails to the media. Bullick volunteered to bring envelopes to Robinson to facilitate the leak. Robinson said he ‘wasn’t convinced’ that they should be leaked, and ‘as a means of delaying this course of action further, I did not print the emails’. He then sent the emails anonymously to McCormick. But, despite being paid a spad salary of about £85,000 a year, he did not pay for sufficient postage, meaning that the envelope did not get to him until 5 January. McCormick, unaware of the source, informed Robinson and Hamilton of the troubling new information.

  But, having done so, Robinson then did not follow through on sending them to journalists as Bullick had instructed. Robinson claimed that the emails ‘were almost forgotten about’ – remarkable, given how desperate the DUP was in this period for anything which would distract from its role in the scandal.

  Bullick recalled waiting over Christmas for the story to appear, and by early January he was surprised at the lack of media coverage. He said that it was only during the inquiry that it became clear to him that Robinson had not sent the material to the media until far later. So why had he delayed? His reasons may have been far more about protecting himself than protecting the DUP – or even Crawford.

  Two days before the emails arrived with me and with the BBC, the Press Association had outed Robinson’s father-in-law as an RHI beneficiary. There was no suggestion that there was anything improper in this, but it was still front page news for two reasons. First, Robinson was the key adviser in the department seeking to cut the RHI bill – yet he had a conflict of interest which he had not declared to the department. After the revelation, he accepted that and recused himself from any role in RHI, the key issue with which the department was grappling – but still retained his full salary. The second problem for Robinson was that the day before his father-in-law’s claim was revealed he had faced an accusation from Bell that he had an inappropriate role in RHI. Speaking under Assembly privilege, Bell, who by now had been suspended by the DUP, said he had been told that he would not be allowed to rein in RHI because of Robinson and his brother-in-law
Timothy Johnston’s ‘extensive interests in the poultry industry’.

  The DUP branded that ‘outrageous, untrue and unfounded’, adding that ‘John Robinson has no personal interest in the poultry industry. His family home farm have chicken houses but are not part of the RHI scheme and never have been recipients or applicants’.

  DUP members who had defended Robinson on the basis of what was – at best – a misleading statement were livid when they read about his father-in-law’s status as an RHI beneficiary, and he was under acute internal pressure. In that context, having decided not to leak the emails to the media when it suited the party or Crawford, he now sent them to the media at the point where he was in peril.

  There may have been another reason for his timing. The day before the envelope arrived on my desk, McCormick had alluded to the emails during a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee. Robinson might have hoped that the mandarin would say more about the emails in public, but McCormick was circumspect and there was little coverage of what he had said on the issue.

  Bullick, who said that from December he had believed that the DUP’s media response was ‘inadequate’, told the inquiry that the emails had ‘in due course’ secured significant coverage but added:

  This however was too late to save the Assembly from an election in which the DUP would lose 10 seats and since which 20 months later no Executive has been re-established. With the benefit of hindsight I regret not speaking to Sam McBride directly myself in December 2016 about matters in relation to the RHI as I believe that a proper understanding of what occurred would have led to more favourable coverage for the DUP.

  Hamilton told the inquiry that when Robinson showed him the emails in December he could see that ‘this is pretty explosive’, but he feared that handing them to McCormick would see the issue ‘get bogged down in a process’. Under pressure to explain why he had acted surreptitiously with his own chief official, Hamilton said: ‘I accept that this is highly unorthodox.’ But he argued that his actions needed to be seen in a context ‘where we … the party – are being assailed on all sides … and there isn’t much to fire back, there isn’t much to combat some of these allegations with’. Hamilton said that it was ‘not my proudest moment’ and was ‘one of many things that I regret around this period’. McCormick told the inquiry that what had happened was ‘self-evidently astonishing’.

  Several weeks later, a second anonymous brown envelope containing printouts of emails arrived on my desk. This time, the emails showed how the Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU) had lobbied to delay cost controls. Remarkably, given how the emails obviously shifted the focus from the DUP to the UFU, it had been the UFU’s chief executive, Wesley Aston, who had forwarded the emails to Crawford at the start of January. Crawford had done favours for the UFU in government, and the UFU could generally rely on him to argue farmers’ case within Stormont. Robinson and Hamilton had also – almost certainly knowingly – played a part in shifting the focus from themselves to farmers. Journalists and others had made multiple Freedom of Information (FoI) requests for RHI material. The DUP, a party which routinely flouted FoI legislation, simply ignored many of the requests, which were never answered until Hamilton left office. But one of my FoI requests was answered. It showed that the UFU had been lobbying to delay cost controls and also showed that civil servants had shown the organisation how lucrative RHI was for poultry farmers. The DUP now seemed willing to even push its friends under in an attempt to deflect blame for what had happened.

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  On the day that the first set of leaked emails arrived at the News Letter, Crawford resigned as a spad. The previous day, McCormick had appeared before the Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee where he publicly confirmed that DETI had faced ‘political pressure’ against cost controls in 2015 – and then named Crawford as the individual he had been told was behind that pressure.

  With Bell sitting in the public gallery behind him, the mandarin said that it was a ‘not unreasonable inference’ that some in ‘political class’ urged RHI claimants to pile in, although he stressed he had no evidence of this. Facing intense criticism, the following day Crawford announced his resignation as spad. In a statement published by the DUP press office, he said: ‘In light of the allegations made at the Public Accounts Committee yesterday I believe it is appropriate that I step back from my position in government and resign as a special adviser. I am conscious I have become the focus of the story.’ But although he gave the public the impression that he was resigning because of the RHI allegations, Crawford cleverly told the civil service something slightly different – that he was resigning to campaign for the DUP in the forthcoming election. That made him eligible for a £34,000 golden handshake, which would not have been payable if he had quit over RHI. The day before McCormick named Crawford, the spad enquired as to how much he would be paid if he resigned. On the day that he was named by McCormick, Crawford texted his friend who worked in the biomass industry, Mark Anderson, to say: ‘I’ve been destroyed’. Anderson replied: ‘Time to leak an email?’

  Hours after McCormick named him, Crawford met Johnston and Foster in the DUP leader’s Fermanagh home and he offered his resignation which she accepted. He said that Foster told him ‘it was possible or likely that John Robinson was also going to resign from his role as adviser’. In the end, Robinson, who was Johnston’s brother-in-law, did not resign and went on to return to his old job as the DUP’s chief spin doctor. Crawford would later form the view that senior party figures sacrificed him to protect others in the party by quietly acquiescing in McCormick naming him. Although there seemed an element of self-pity in his view and a failure to face up to the damage which his behaviour would do to the party if it was to all have emerged, Crawford’s paranoia may have been at least partially justified. He drew particular attention to how when allegations were aimed at the powerful Johnston, senior DUP figures were ‘quick to defend him … in a way that they did not defend me … It may have been the case that I was viewed as expendable whereas Timothy Johnston was not’.

  Johnston – who had been close to Crawford – had taken a particular interest in Crawfords’s relatives’ RHI applications. Just three days after Spotlight, he had got a copy of the list of claimants through Robinson. That day, Robinson asked McCormick to bring the list of names to Parliament Buildings, justifying the request on the grounds that Hamilton was considering releasing the names – even though the night before Hamilton had been on TV saying that he was not planning to do so.

  McCormick brought the list to Stormont and left it in the minister’s room and moved next door with Robinson. McCormick later said that leaving the list unattended was part of a deliberate ‘charade’ to ‘create a fig leaf of respectability’ for him as a civil servant that he was not openly handing such sensitive information to a DUP figure outside his department – even though he knew that Johnston was looking at the names next door.

  Three days later, Foster was asked by the BBC’s Mark Devenport if she was aware that Crawford’s brother James was a claimant. Although Crawford had been her spad for many years and although her key adviser had viewed the entire list, she said of Crawford’s brother: ‘I wasn’t aware of that because of course I wasn’t privy to who had applied into the scheme.’ That same day, Johnston spoke to McCormick about the list, telling him that he should look up details of a Richard Crawford and a John Crawford. Pressed around that, Johnston told the inquiry: ‘I certainly don’t recall asking particularly for that gentleman.’ But, asked why McCormick would invent such a claim, he then said it was ‘very possible’ that he asked McCormick to check out several DUP-linked individuals, including Crawford.

  Inquiry barrister Donal Lunny asked him whether his actions that day were part of a strategy to direct McCormick towards material which he knew would be damaging for Crawford because he realised that McCormick was soon going to be giving evidence in public.

  Johnston said: ‘Certainly not. Andrew Crawford has been a l
ong-standing friend of mine for many years, and I think in the way that his name came out was very difficult for him.’ McCormick privately discussed with the Executive’s Press Secretary, David Gordon, the fact that John Crawford got into RHI on the final day of ‘burn to earn’ left the DUP dangerously exposed to criticism.

  After Foster’s speech to the Assembly, Crawford became increasingly concerned that he was being set up to be the DUP’s sacrificial lamb. On 28 December, Robinson texted Bullick to say: ‘Andrew Crawford called. He’s very angry. Can’t leave the house. Family being treated as thieves. Says AF [Arlene Foster] statement to the Assembly hung him out to dry. Says he told Cairns in an email in July to close on 1 October.’ But a sceptical Bullick responded by saying that he had not been aware of the email, ‘but, if true, why did TC [Timothy Cairns] want it kept open? Makes no sense’. But even after publicly quitting as a spad, the DUP did not sever ties with Crawford. Instead, it gave him a post advising on its most critical policy area – Brexit.

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  Although the DUP, Sinn Féin and the civil service had known for a year that there was a vast overspend, it was only after Spotlight that ministers pledged to halve RHI’s losses. Then, as the public fury intensified, Foster pledged to bring forward changes, which would mean slashing payments to a level that there would be no overspend at all. The shift from initial inaction to fevered attempts at clawing back money was a demonstration of how public anger was driving politicians who feared the electoral consequences.

  In December, the DUP and Sinn Féin had discussed ideas for dealing with the huge RHI overspend – from shutting the scheme entirely and buying out claimants’ contracts to the more legally challenging option of retrospectively slashing the subsidy. As the scandal intensified and Stormont lurched towards collapse, the DUP settled on the retrospective cuts. But time was running out. The Assembly would have to use emergency powers to rush through legislation with limited scrutiny before devolution collapsed.