This blog is work in progress, more later...

On 6 December the Information Tribunal heard the Foreign Office's appeal against the Information Commissioner's decision that it should release the secret draft of the dossier by former Foreign Office (FCO) spin doctor John Williams.

The case was between the FCO and the Commissioner and the Tribunal had refused my request to be attached to the proceedings on the grounds that I could not add anything evidentially. This was a slightly misplaced assumption and at the hearing I found the parties groping around in the dark.

Early in the proceedings I experienced what structuralists would call the death of the author. I listened to everyone speculating about my original request for the Williams draft, which identified the document by reference to Daniel Pruce's email of 10 September 2002 but also pointed out that John Scarlett had identified "John's draft of 9th September" as the work of Williams, not himself. The Foreign Office witness Stephen Pattison generated enough confusion to suggest that the document that the draft to which Pruce referred might be by Scarlett after all. Anyone with any knowledge of the Hutton Inquiry would know that it was established that Pruce, who sent his email at lunchtime on 10 September, could not have been referring to Scarlett's draft as that was sent to Downing Street after 6pm that evening. Nobody thought to ask me - a non-person - what I had meant. If they had, I could have pointed this out.

Timothy Pitt-Payne, Counsel for the Commissioner, did however force Pattison into an early admission that he did not have written knowledge of the matters in his written evidence, particularly his account of the drafting of the dossier. Pattison had prepared the FCO's submission to the Hutton Inquiry and his account was essentially a regurgitation of what was - or was not - given to Lord Hutton. Essentially, it was Pattison who failed to disclose the Williams draft. For the most part, the Foreign Office's case was, this is what we said at Hutton, so it must be true.