Burned

by Sam McBride

  In approving the practice, civil servants were allowing the official record to be corrupted. In writing this book, the author submitted a Freedom of Information request to DfE for material about Moy Park in Crawford’s private email account. DfE refused the request, saying “the department does not have direct access to Dr Crawford’s private email account and access is, therefore, a matter for Dr Crawford”. Having allowed a DUP spad to retain control of his government communications, it then pleaded an inability to get control of the information. The problem for the department – and the attraction for political figures – was obvious.

  Whatever the motive, their decision to use private communication systems for government work further lessened scrutiny of their actions in government – even though Stormont was already one of the least scrutinised democratic governments in the world. At one point, there were only two MLAs out of 108 who were not members of governing parties.

  But the practices adopted by many DUP and Sinn Féin ministers and spads had implications which were profounder still. In rejecting secure government communication systems in favour of basic free email accounts or party-run systems, they were leaving Stormont wide open to attack from commercial interests or a foreign power.

  The private secretary to Jonathan Bell told the inquiry how he believed that the only email address the DETI minister ever used for government business was a Hotmail account. Bell was asked how he ensured private departmental information was secured in his Hotmail account. Alluding to an alarmingly simplistic understanding of cyber-security, he responded: ‘My private email account is password protected. Access to my email account can only be made with the knowledge of my password.’ That was the same account to which Bell handed the password to BBC journalists in December 2016.

  The Sinn Féin Finance Minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir routinely used mairtin@newbelfast.com (his personal website) rather than his official departmental email. When asked by the inquiry about its security, he said with a degree of pomposity: ‘In terms of security I was and am confident the email account, the only email attached to a secure and stand-alone domain, is best-in-class.’ Ó Muilleoir’s use of a private email account for government business was in keeping with how most Sinn Féin ministers and spads operated. Yet it was contrary to the standards the party demanded of others. In December 2016, Sinn Féin’s press office issued a statement which described as ‘shocking and extremely concerning’ that the Taoiseach, Tánaiste and other Irish government ministers had been using private unencrypted email accounts for government business. In a statement reeking with hypocrisy, Sinn Féin said at the time: ‘No minister should be using any private unsecured email accounts for any official business whatsoever.’

  First Minister Peter Robinson and many other ministers also used non-departmental email accounts to transact departmental business. Crawford said that his government-issued iPad had ‘no security settings on it’ – a fairly obvious clue as to why it should not be used for confidential material – and he therefore could not access his departmental emails on it. Instead, he forwarded emails from his secure government email account to his personal Hotmail account and read them on the unsecured iPad. He told the inquiry: ‘I would have got the iPad … when I was travelling with the minister to places where there was not a secure network. So there would’ve been places where you’re advised not to use the government phone. And, you know, for that reason I would’ve had the iPad that I could access information …’

  But it was not just Stormont’s political elite that set aside security protocols – civil servants, from the highest grades down, were also doing it. Civil servants got around Stormont’s IT security rules by forwarding information from their secure BlackBerry devices to personal email accounts so they could view them on their home computers. McCormick said that it was common for confidential emails to be sent outside the government system because it was ‘expedient’. He said:

  It’s not good practice. It’s not secure in that sense, and we — It is relatively easy to work without it. I used my personal account at times, simply because it gave me access to a much larger screen at home to work on, so it’s just expedient in a context where nothing was … We weren’t dealing with high state secrets, so it was not regarded as good practice but also not a great harm, either.

  What ministers and officials were doing was contrary to Stormont security protocols, which deliberately locked down access to such information outside the office to secure devices. The civil service’s security policy said that ‘the transfer or storage of data is only permitted on Ironkeys [encrypted USB pens] issued through IT Assist or on encrypted hard drives, and not on any other device.’ It said that ‘any breach of this policy will be viewed as a security incident and dealt with as such, possibly leading to disciplinary action’. Yet, despite the fact that this policy was disregarded across the department, DETI’s 2015–16 resource accounts said that a security risk overview report to the Head of the Civil Service was completed in July 2015 ‘with no significant issues identified’.

  Stormont’s amateurish approach to data security was particularly significant not just because it was handling an annual budget of around £20 billion but because it was increasingly interacting with foreign governments and companies. Ministers and officials regularly travelled to China – a state accused by the British government of being responsible for sophisticated state-sponsored cyberspying – to negotiate lucrative financial investments.

  Professor Anthony Glees, director of the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies and a member of advisory board of the Oxford Intelligence Group, said that what had been going on was ‘totally astonishing’ and that it ‘certainly affects our national security given the important role that Northern Ireland politics and politicians now play in our national life’. He said: ‘Just as we should not allow criminals to make laws – as MPs or peers – so we should not allow people who are careless with the security of official communications to help determine the security boundaries in the UK as a whole.’ Professor Glees said that the ‘reckless way’ in which communications relating to China had been conducted ‘gives rise to the gravest concern’. He said that

  any Northern Ireland links with China, even if they appear to be wholly about the economy and not politics, are always going to have national security implications for the whole of the UK. One can only assume that GCHQ and MI5 either did not know what [Stormont figures] were doing, or, if they did, felt that Northern Ireland was a ‘special case’ and that they ought to be reluctant to interfere in any way. For them, as for all of us I suppose, peace in Northern Ireland is the number one consideration.

  Pointing to Hilary Clinton’s use of a private email server – and the hacking of her emails by Russia – he said that standard private sector electronic communications, whether by email or services such as WhatsApp, do not have the safeguards which are built into government communication systems.

  CHAPTER 26

  MINISTER FOR PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES

  Over 20 years, Arlene Foster crafted an image of competence, likeability and attention to detail. One story – RHI – blew that away, exposing how the woman who rose to become Northern Ireland’s first female First Minister had managed to do so because of a lack of scrutiny of her record. Her response to the scandal was consistently disastrous, escalating a crisis Sinn Féin had been prepared to assist in de-escalating. Yet through the inherent tribalism of Northern Ireland politics and a quirk of electoral arithmetic, the DUP leader would go on to wield more influence on a national stage than any of her predecessors – while at home her power was ebbing away. After the March 2017 Assembly election, whereby unionism was shaken by the scale of the DUP’s losses to Sinn Féin, Foster was under significant internal pressure. But, just six weeks after the Stormont election, Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap general election. Foster was largely kept out of the campaign limelight, with the DUP’s Westminster leader, Nigel Dodds, to the fore.
Unionism responded by voting for the DUP in record numbers, delivering it ten of Northern Ireland’s 18 House of Commons seats. By contrast, May’s disastrous election result saw her dependent on the DUP. From clinging on as DUP leader in March, by June, Foster was triumphantly walking in and out of Downing Street where she was feted by a Prime Minister who was by now clinging to office. It was an astonishing turnaround and in some ways it masked the extent to which Foster’s inadequacies had been exposed over the preceding seven months. But while on the surface it was Foster who was holding inordinate influence over the British Government as it negotiated Brexit, her internally weakened position meant that it was her MPs who increasingly took matters into their own hands.

  Foster had long been a mould-breaker. As a female politician, she had worked hard to break through in a culture antipathetic to women taking leadership roles. As a member of David Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), she had been one of those who had been vocally opposed to the direction of the party after it endorsed the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. She moved to the DUP in 2003, but her move was overshadowed by UUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson also defecting that day. But Foster would quickly leapfrog Donaldson, the man who from a young age had been seen as the future leader of unionism. As an Anglican, Foster stood out somewhat in the DUP, a party still dominated by the Free Presbyterian Church, which viewed the Church of Ireland as dangerously liberal.

  Foster had also suffered more personal trauma than most politicians. Brought up on the Fermanagh border with the Irish Republic, her Protestant family were isolated and vulnerable in an area where the IRA was systematically targeting many rural Protestants. As an eight-year-old girl in 1979, she was in the kitchen when IRA gunshots rang out while her father, an off-duty policeman, was outside closing his few animals in for the night. She later recalled: ‘I didn’t know what they were until my father came in on all fours crawling, with blood coming from his head.’ After distress flares were fired into the air to alert the police, Foster hid in her bedroom for seven minutes, waiting for help. Her father survived that murder attempt but the family had to move further from the border. Then eight years later her school bus was bombed by the IRA. TV footage from the time shows a composed Foster being interviewed afterwards, despite the fact that the girl sitting beside her had been gravely injured.

  On joining the DUP, Foster’s career was fast-tracked by a party keen to promote a female Anglican ex-Ulster Unionist – exactly the sort of person to convince Ulster Unionist voters to similarly make the switch to Ian Paisley’s party. Foster immediately entered the Executive as Environment Minister when devolution was restored in 2007, and then a year later was made DETI minister. It was viewed as a straightforward posting and Foster was seen as one of Stormont’s most successful ministers. Rarely involved in scandal and well-liked by many in the business community, she was the epitome of the modern DUP. Foster was trusted by Robinson to the extent that when he had to step aside as First Minister during a scandal in 2010, she was chosen to be acting First Minister. When Robinson announced his retirement in 2015 and DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds said that he would not be standing, Foster was the obvious alternative. For a year she was wildly popular within unionism. But RHI would cause her entire ministerial career to be reassessed.

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  Although the permanent secretary was the most senior civil servant in DETI, there was at the top of the department another powerful triumvirate: Foster; Andrew Crawford; and Foster’s private secretary, Glynis Aiken. ‘They were very close’, one individual who observed them closely recalls. People would sometimes ask of Foster and Aiken ‘are you sisters?’

  Aiken ran a tight diary for her minister. On a typical day Foster would be collected by her ministerial driver before 7am to attend a business breakfast in Belfast; then driven to a company, which was announcing new jobs for a brief discussion and a photo; then brought to DETI’s Netherleigh House headquarters for meetings with officials; then up to Stormont Castle for an Executive meeting; back to Netherleigh for more meetings; out to a tourism dinner before making the long journey back to Fermanagh late at night – often working on departmental papers in the back of the ministerial Škoda. Foster was doing so many hours that Aiken had to arrange for her driver to be put up in a hotel in Fivemiletown, a few miles from the minister’s Brookeborough bungalow.

  Aiken’s organisational skills were such that despite packing so much into the diary, Foster was known for never being late. At events, Aiken would bustle in with the minister who would work the room. Crawford was a shyer member of the team, always staying in the wings. Aiken had been the gatekeeper to Foster since she first became a minister in 2007, showing what one close observer described as unusual loyalty to her political boss. And that loyalty was reciprocated for years, with Foster bringing her private secretary with her as she moved between three departments over seven and a half years. But when her big move came and Foster was made First Minister, she did not bring either Aiken or Crawford with her to Stormont Castle, instead retaining Robinson’s aides. In what one Stormont source said was a significant disappointment to both Aiken and Crawford, Foster decided that the triumvirate, which had been crucial to her ministerial career, would be broken up and she would slot into Stormont Castle’s existing team.

  But behind the public image of professionalism, Foster had a fierce temper – and hated admitting mistakes. RHI was just one example of where a retrospective assessment of her career showed flaws and a lack of attention to detail, which had been missed at the time because people, including the author, were not looking sufficiently closely. Foster told the inquiry that although she was Energy Minister for almost seven years she did not find renewable heat an interesting topic. She said that she had ‘favoured parts’ of DETI such as tourism. She found energy ‘very complex’ and said of renewable heat: ‘I think it would be unfair to say I found it interesting … I didn’t find it interesting.’

  David Ford, who as leader of the centrist Alliance Party served as Justice Minister, spending six years around the same Executive table as Foster, said that when she was Environment Minister she ‘struck me as a good minister’. However, he added: ‘My impression was that when she went to DETI she did all the glad-handing and the junkets but really there was a sense that there was nothing of substance in DETI – most of its work was done by Invest NI and it seemed that she got into that culture of “there’s nothing to do here”.’ That view was shared by one of those who saw Foster at close quarters over six years. Alan Clarke was the longest-serving chief executive of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB), spending 13 years in the role, during which he worked under direct rule Labour ministers and then the Ulster unionist Sir Reg Empey and the DUP’s Nigel Dodds prior to Foster. Prompted by the RHI scandal to speak publicly for the first time about his experience, Clarke set out multiple concerns about Foster’s role in how Stormont had evolved under devolution.

  Clarke said that working under Dodds was ‘absolutely fine’. But with Foster and Crawford, something changed. Although he did not have a bad relationship with the minister, her spad acted in ways that alarmed him – and he held Foster responsible for what Crawford was doing. Crawford, he said, ‘wouldn’t have liked you going to the minister’ so Clarke asked for a regular ‘issues meeting’ with Foster to ensure that he was getting to brief her in person. The meetings were revealing as to the minister’s priorities, he said. ‘Half that meeting would have been going through next week’s diary “where am I going, PR-wise”, rather than issues.’ Civil servants would have said that she was really difficult to engage on strategy. She had no real interest in strategic direction or strategic thought. It was more ‘where’s the next photograph coming and how can I get in that?’

  Foster had long been lampooned by opponents as the ‘minister for photo opportunities’, such was the volume of PR photos of her which DETI sent to newsdesks. Many of the events Foster attended would not have been considered sufficiently newsworthy for newspap
ers to send a photographer, so DETI used public funds to hire photographers to follow her around at many of her engagements and send the images to the media. The scale of Foster’s photographic spin was such that someone set up a website called Arlene Foster Holding Things on which they mocked photo after photo of her standing holding everything from giant numbers to a gilet.

  While Foster kept her hands clean and did not act inappropriately towards him, Clarke said that ‘Andrew was her shark; she was personable and all the rest of it but Andrew was the one who kicked people and he used her power, if you like, to have his power – and she knew that’.

  Criticism of Crawford’s aggressive manner is common, but little of it is on the record. In a small place like Northern Ireland where the DUP is the dominant party in the Stormont system, business figures or civil servants are reluctant to be publicly critical of someone so close to the party leader. But Clarke, who is retired and now lives in Scotland, has no such concerns – and his claims are backed up by documentation seen by the author. Clarke said that the spad ‘would threaten you’ and although he could not do much to Clarke personally, he could make things very difficult for the tourist board. ‘So what he threatened us with was “if you step out of line, I’ll do an inquiry on you”, which he eventually did just before I left.’ He said that Crawford seemed to have created ‘a culture of fear’ within DETI. Clarke said that he had said to senior civil servants in DETI ‘he’s an employee of you guys, he’s a departmental employee … you guys need to be hauling him in. But I might as well have talked to the wall’. By contrast, Clarke said that senior DUP spad Richard Bullick was ‘always very affable, smiling and no bother’ and Crawford’s predecessor, Wallace Thompson, ‘wouldn’t have been nearly as interfering as Andrew Crawford’.

  In a ‘confidential file note’ Clarke made of a meeting with Foster on 22 July 2013, he recorded how after they discussed the Northern Ireland events strategy, the minister had asked Aiken, DETI official Lorraine Fleming and NITB official Susie McCullough to leave the room. The exclusion of Aiken was particularly significant, because it is the role of the private secretary to record a minute of meetings in which the minister is involved. With Clarke, Foster, Crawford, David Sterling and David Thomson left in the room, ‘the minister raised the Museum of Free Derry project’. Clarke wrote: