Gould-Werritty – the Dodgy Diaries and Deleted Documents

Diary entry 27 Sep 2010

Diary entry 8 Sep 2009

Diary entry 6 Feb 2011

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has finally, this evening, released the Gould/Werritty diary entries under the Freedom of Information Act. The three links above are the diary entries for their meetings on 8 September 2009, 27 September 2010 and 6 February 2011. You may have to click a few times to get the full size image. The lines across the page usually run right across the main right centre column. The entire column, with all the details on the Adam Werritty meeting, has been redacted – literally cut out.

The same is true of all eight of the diary pages I have been sent for Gould's meetings with Adam Werritty – all information has simply been censored. We can only speculate what is there, who else was present and the subject of the meetings.

If anyone doubts there is a cover-up of massive proportions on what Werritty was actually doing, doubt no more.

But there is one item the very existence of which is entirely damning of the FCO. An email exchange between Gould and Werritty. The emails themselves are bland and avoid mentioning the subject under discussion. But the email exchange was with Matthew Gould's official email address on the FCO system. My initial Freedom of Information request received the reply that there was no material relating to Adam Werritty on the FCO system. These emails had therefore been deleted off it.

Fortunately, whoever deleted them had forgotten something – the FCO system allows you to attach relevant documents to your electronic diary entries. That created a copy which survived after the correspondence was deleted everywhere else on the system.

That opens up a massive question – who deleted the correspondence, and why, and how much other Gould-Werritty correspondence has been deleted from the FCO system which did not survive by chance attachment to a diary entry?

There is a further question – did the deletions happen after my Freedom of Information inquiry – which would have been a criminal offence?

I have always held it to be impossible, for example, that not one of the eight Gould-Werritty meetings was minuted. If an FCO official has a substantive meeting with somebody outside government, it is standard procedure to record it. One of those meetings even included Mossad officials. The email correspondence which survived on the diary entry but had been deleted everywhere else, shows at least some Werritty material was deleted from the FCO system. Is this what happened to the minutes and records of meetings?

The surviving email exchange is bland, but it still tells us quite a lot. It shows that Gould and Werritty were on first name terms in June 2010, when Gould was Hague's Private Secretary, that Werritty had Gould's mobile phone number and that Werritty was sufficiently established to be able to phone up the Secretary of State's Principal Private Secretary – an extremely busy man – and book him for coffee and a chat on his own recognisances, without feeling the need to reference any organisation or subject of discussion:

From: Matthew Gould (Restricted)

sent: 11 June 2010 14:51

To: Adam Werritty

Subject: RE: Hi

Adam -yes, I did get the message, and asked [my PA -name redacted] to set something up for us. She will eb in touch this afternoon.

Looking forward to seeing you,

Matthew

Matthew Gould

Principal Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

King Charles Street

London SW1A 2AH

I2J email: Matthew.Gould@fco.gov.uk til telephone: +44 20 7008 2059 ()) ft.n: 8008 2059

Q uri: MailFilterGateway has detected a possible fraud attempt from "blocked::http:" claiming to be www.fco.gOY.uk

From: Adam Werritty [mailto:adam@werritty.comj

sent: 11 June 2010 14:48

To: Matthew Gould (Restricted)

Subject: Hi

Hi Matthew

I trust that you're keeping well. I texted you yesterday on a mobile number I had for you but I'm guessing that you're no longer on that number. I wanted to check if we could arrange for a chat next week over coffee as I'm keen to pick your mind on something. Could you let me know if you're going to be around and when would suit?

As ever

Adam

Adam Werrity

M: +447921577884

Diary entry 16 Jun 2010 – email exchange