Dear Attorney General's Office,

The following 24 Sep 2021 email from the Cabinet Office (CO) to the GLD, provides prima facie evidence of a conspiracy involving the CO and the ATG to protect the Treasury Solicitor, and enable her to attempt to obstruct the course of justice:
'Dear Colleagues,
Please see the attached correspondence, which has been received by the Cabinet Office (CO). However, we believe that the subject area falls within the responsibilities of your government department. We understand the AGO have already been in touch regarding this case and have confirmed that you will respond. We are sending over as a formality – grateful if you could confirm your acceptance.

Subject: Treasury Solicitor’s handling of complaint
Kind regards'
*** ***********

The following questions relate to the CO's comment above that the AGO 'had ALREADY been in touch' with the GLD about my letter of complaint about the Treasury Solicitor which was addressed to the 'Parliamentary Commissioner .. I wish to complain about the Treasury Solicitor'.
1) What was the date of an email sent to the AGO by Theresa May MP’s office regarding Dudley Jones’ official Complaint about the Treasury Solicitor beginning ‘Dear Parliamentary Commissioner’?
2) How many email communications (with dates of emails) were sent from the Treasury Solicitor’s office to the AGO between the 10 Sep 2021 and the 10 Oct 2021 regarding a letter of complaint about the Treasury Solicitor from Dudley Jones beginning ‘Dear Parliamentary Commissioner… I wish to complain about the Treasury Solicitor’s handling of my complaint about the GLD Director of Litigation?
4 How many email communications (with dates of emails) were sent from the AGO to the Treasury Solicitor’s office (or directly to the Treasury Solicitor) regarding a letter of complaint about the Treasury Solicitor from Dudley Jones beginning ‘Dear Parliamentary Commissioner… I wish to complain about the Treasury Solicitor’s handling..’. Could you please provide me with copies of these emails. I am entitled to a copy, or copies if more than one) because the action of the AGO (and the CO) involves a prima facie breach of my Data Privacy rights.
5) Who did the AGO think the intended recipient of a letter addressed to ‘the Parliamentary Commissioner’ and beginning ‘I wish to complain about the Treasury Solicitor', was?
6) Was the AGO’s involvement in this “case” (?) authorised by the Attorney General herself? If not, was the official who ‘had already been in touch regarding this case’ someone at managerial level? Names of individuals can be redacted.
7) How does the AGO justify this egregious breach of my Data Privacy rights? Do they consider themselves above the law? Did they check out the legitimacy of their “involvement” in this “case” with any GLD lawyer? If so, was that a senior lawyer or the Director of Litigation, and could I see a copy of the email/letter to a GLD lawyer? If not, why? [names can be redacted]
8) Do the ATG consider I'm entitled to an apology?

Yours faithfully,

Dudley Jones

Dear Correspondence (AGO),

Given you say 'The AGO will respond to your request within the deadline requirement of the FOIA legislation', can I assume that since you1st acknowledged my FOI Request on the !8 March, I c an expect your Response within 20 working days of your 1st acknowledgement?

Yours sincerely,

Dudley Jones

Dear Attorney General's Office,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Attorney General's Office's handling of my FOI request 'details of the AGO's involvement in a conspiracy to protect the Treasury Solicitor'.

Can I begin by looking at my question 6) which the AGO refuses to provide information on:
'6) Was the AGO’s involvement in this “case” (?) authorised by the Attorney General herself?
If not, was the official who ‘had already been in touch regarding this case’ someone at managerial level? Names of individuals can be redacted.'
Your response?
'In relation to questions 5 to 8 of your request, we cannot provide answers to these under the FOIA as these questions do not relate to recorded information for the purposes of disclosure under the FOIA'.

I would like to challenge your refusal to provide me with any information about who authorised what was clearly an illegal operation: the AGO were conspiring with the GLD to find a way of legitimising the diverting of a letter from me that was a formal letter of complaint to the PHSO Ombudsman into the hands of Susanna McGibbon, the Treasury Solicitor.
The AGO must have known the GLD and the Treasury Solicitor were going to make an attempt to pervert the course of justice, and that is exactly what happened: the Treasury Solicitor illegally usurped the role of the Ombudsman, responded to my complaint about herself, summarily dismissed it, and returned it to my local MP, Theresa May (the instigator of this conspiracy) saying it was ‘up to her whether she forwarded it to the Ombudsman'.

The AGO is guilty of very serious misconduct, and it’s important that they say who authorised this ‘behaviour’. In light of all the recent government scandals, with the Cabinet Office ‘Ethics’ Chief being convicted for breaking the law, it’s essential for public trust in the Attorney General, Suella Braverman, that they know whether she personally authorised this illicit behaviour.

If it was not her, then was it simply a low-level, rogue official at the AGO or was it a senior manager, or someone at managerial level (as I say, ‘names can be redacted’, I just want to know the level of seniority of the person who ‘okayed’ this “behaviour”/action. The flurry of emails over a period of just SIX days in September 2021 demonstrates a mounting desperation about how the 2 parties can legitimise what they knew was an illegal operation. Basically, AGO and GLD officials are clearly talking to each other about how they can possibly ‘get away with it', knowing that the clock is ticking.

It is highly significant, of course, that you have not challenged the short description of my request on the WhatDoTheyKnow website: ‘details of the AGO's involvement in a conspiracy to protect the Treasury Solicitor’

Can I therefore ask you to reconsider your refusal to respond to my question 6).

I would also challenge your refusal to answer question 7) in my FOI Request. This was '7) How does the AGO justify this egregious breach of my Data Privacy rights? Do they consider themselves above the law? Did they check out the legitimacy of their “involvement” in this “case” with any GLD lawyer? If so, was that a senior lawyer or the Director of Litigation, and could I see a copy of the email/letter to a GLD lawyer? If not, why? [names can be redacted]'

If I voluntarily withdraw the first 2 sentences of 7) I feel I have a legitimate right to know whether the AGO : ‘checked with a GLD lawyer, or the GLD Director of Litigation on the legitimacy of their “involvement” in this ‘case', and could I see a copy of the email/letter to a GLD lawyer? As I said in my original FOI Request, if you are not prepared to provide a copy of the said email/letter, I feel I have a right to know why you refuse to do so.

Finally, you say my 'concerns raised amount to an allegation of a breach of Data Protection, and I would like to take the opportunity to answer some of your concerns’.

I wondered how you reached this conclusion? Could it be the opening sentence of my question 7) namely, ‘How does the AGO justify this egregious breach of my Data Privacy rights?’

You then devote 113 words to providing information that is quite irrelevant to my FOI Request. How does this bureaucratic splurge of information have any relevance to the fact that you have colluded with Theresa May and the GLD to persuade Theresa May that she should divert my Official Complaint about the Treasury Solicitor clearly intended for the PHSO Ombudsman to the Cabinet Office who have immediately sent it to you. The Cabinet Office received it – as you point out – on the 10 September 2021 but in their email to the GLD of the 21 September, the CO says: ‘We understand the AGO have already been in touch regarding this case and have confirmed that you will respond’.

This clearly establishes that the AGO rather than the Cabinet Office have been energetically involved in behind-the-scenes negotiations with the GLD to see how they could protect the Treasury Solicitor.

And one last question: did you request advice from the Cabinet Office or their Clearing House unit on how you should respond to my FOI Request of the 18 March 2022? I say this because (up to last year) it was a frequent practice of government departments to send FOI Requests submitted to them on to the CO Clearing House unit for advice on how to ‘best’ respond to them. The Cabinet Office’s behaviour was condemned by Judge Hughes and David Davis, MP, the Judge found the CO guilty of abuse of the FOIA and fined them £500,000 (a fine which will, of course, be paid by the tax payer). Presumably, the CO were represented – unsuccessfully – by GLD lawyers.

That is why I ask the question.

I look forward to the findings of your internal review of my challenges to your FOI Response.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/d...

Yours faithfully,

Dudley Jones

Dear Kelby Harmes, AGO Director and Deputy Head of Office,
I wonder if you could clarify some points raised in your internal review of the AGO’s response to my FOI Request, 'details of the AGO's involvement in a conspiracy to protect the Treasury Solicitor'?

You say ‘For the record I reject your suggestion that the way your correspondence was dealt with was “illegal” or “rogue”, amounted to “serious misconduct”, or was IN ANY WAY “improper.

You support this claim by suggesting the AGO ‘sought to transfer your [my] correspondence to the GLD’ because it concerned a ‘complaint about the Treasury Solicitor’s handling of your [my] ‘complaint’. Put like that, Mr Harmes, it sounds so innocuous and innocent, which makes it all the more curious that these routine, admin matters were discussed in such a furtive cloak-an-dagger email correspondence between you, the Cabinet Office (or was it the now notorious Cabinet Office Clearing House unit) a correspondence that - as it progresses - takes on an increasingly desperate tone. (I can back up this with verbatim quotes from those emails which you were forced to include in your attachments.

I applaud your desire to put things on ‘public record’. ‘For the record’, you claim ‘the AGO’s has not been involved in behaviour that was in any way ‘Improper’. I’m sure most people reading the facts would disagree with this claim.
But in the interests of statin g things ‘for the record’, could I ask you to confirm that the following summary of what you and the Cabinet Office said took place between Theresa May, MP, the Cabinet Office, and the GLD is a truthful and accurate one:

On September 10 2021, Mrs May, my local MP, was either extraordinarily confused, or thoroughly corrupt. She diverted a letter that was officially required to be forwarded by her office to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration (the Ombudsman) to the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office clearly regarded this as entirely legitimate and ‘proper’ and passed it on to you and the Government Legal Department (the GLD). You evidently saw nothing ‘improper’ about that. The letter was an official complaint about the Treasury Solicitor, Susanna McGibbon. It began ‘Dear Parliamentary Solicitor.. I wish to complain about the Treasury Solicitor’s handling of my complaint about…’.

The AGO’s defence of their behaviour is as follows (there can be no dispute about this, I am quoting verbatim from the AGO’ FOI Response and, of course, anything said by an AGO official that was found to be untruthful or deceptive would be an abuse of the FOI Act):

As set out in that email, the AGO “sought to transfer your correspondence to GLD” because it concerned “a complaint about the TSol’s handling of [your] complaint” and, as such, AGO officials were “of the view that [it] should be transferred over to GLD to be deal with as a complaint.”
Can you confirm that this is an accurate summary, Mr Harmes – just for the record? And that you stand by your stated ‘justification’ for passing on a letter of complaint addressed to the Ombudsman to the GLD which was because they were the department who naturally ‘dealt with such matters'? I think this gives readers a true estimate of how far standards of behaviour in public life have fallen. I’d describe it as a conspiracy to protect the Treasury Solicitor, Susanna McGibbon. I’ll leave others to judge.

It is clear from your review, Mr Harmes, that you completely endorse the view of your AGO colleagues – I say that because you assure me that the AGO has not acted in an ‘improper way’. You therefore would have responded in exactly the same way. Confronted by an official complaint forwarded to you by Theresa May (and let’s not forget that government procedures drawn up by the CABINET OFFICE compel anyone wanting to make a complaint about the Treasury Solicitor to have it forwarded by their local MP) that begins ‘Dear Parliamentary Commissioner.. I wish to complain about the Treasury Solicitor..’, you are seriously maintaining you would have had no idea that the intended recipient was not the GLD or TS but the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration?

Is that – for the record – what you are saying, Mr Harmes? You maintain you felt quite justified in sending it to the GLD because it concerned a ‘complaint about the GLD’. That was therefore the obvious department to transfer it to. That’s your honest opinion, is it? And that’s why you assure me in your review that there was nothing ‘improper’ about this behaviour? That it was appropriate, and fully justified.

Let’s not forget the outcome of your honest behaviour: the GLD felt it only proper that since my complaint was about the Treasury Solicitor, the person they should naturally transfer it to was their boss, the Treasury Solicitor. The conspiracy to protect the Treasury Solicitor had succeeded. She responded in a manner that seemed perfectly proper and appropriate to her: she took on the role of the Ombudsman, wrote to Mrs May, dismissed my complaint, and concluded ‘it was up to her whether she decided to forward my complaint to the Ombudsman’!
As our PM keeps reminding us some people are above the rules, above the law. I’m sure the TS did nothing ‘improper’.

There’s one other point about your review that I’d like you to clarify:

Your response to my question 6 (Was the AGO’s involvement in this “case” (?) authorised by the Attorney General herself? If not, was the official who ‘had already been in touch regarding this case’ someone at managerial level? Names of individuals can be redacted.') was ‘we could not provide an answer under the FOIA as your question did not relate to recorded information for the purposes of disclosure under the FOIA’.

This is quite extraordinary; you are maintaining that you have no record of who liaised with the GLD in the routine discussions about the transference of a document or who authorised that contact. You have no idea whether the routine admin discussion (because, obviously, that’s what it was) about who the document should be sent to, was authorised /’signed off’ by a junior clerk, a manager, a senior manager, or even a Director. There’s no record of who decided it was ‘appropriate’ and ‘proper’ to act in this way. It’s simply a lacunae in the AGO records. Although, curiously, almost in the same breath, you can assure me that your records show it was NOT authorised by Suella Braverman, the Attorney General.

Of course, I didn’t ask you for the name of the official in question, I asked you for their level of seniority. But you have no record of who decided it was appropriate to get involved. I notice you ignored my question about whether you got your decision to ‘get involved’ checked out by a lawyer. If you did, then the GLD has 1142 lawyers at your disposal.

You conclude your review by saying:
‘Finally, you have asked whether we requested advice from Cabinet Office or the Clearing House on how we should respond to your FOIA request. I can confirm that, given that we were proposing to disclose emails from Cabinet Office in response to your request, we did consult Clearing House on our draft response, in line with the Government’s published policy: https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio.... Clearing House confirmed that they were content with our draft response and provided no other comment. I have attached copies of our correspondence with them at Annex A (with junior officials’ names redacted, in line with normal practice) for information’.

Can I focus on something that puzzled me here. You say: ‘given that we were proposing to disclose emails from Cabinet Office in response to your request, we did consult Clearing House on our draft response, in line with the Government’s published policy: https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio.... Clearing House confirmed that they were content with our draft response’

What do you mean by ‘draft response’? Do you mean this review letter? Because there are no emails revealed in this review (which one assumes was drafted first, the checked/edited etc). Can you confirm ‘draft response doesn’t refer to this review letter? In which case, it must be the emails you’ve included in the attachment. But why would you need to have the Clearing House unit check on what YOU have assured me are innocuous admin emails to colleagues in other department about whether they’d like to have documents that were obviously intended for them, that were ‘naturally the responsibility of their department’, that ‘came within their remit’ (I’ve seen this justification frequently). You presumably would redact names as a matter of course, so you wouldn’t need instruction or advice from the CH ‘unit’ on how to do that, would you?

And the policy document you refer me to: gov.uk/government/publications/cabinet-office-and-freedom-of-information. I’ve looked at it but I couldn’t see anything that had any relevance to your draft response or anything else in your review letter. Could I tell me what paragraph(s) or points in that policy document relate to your ‘response’ here or in the attachments – given what I’ve said in the paragraph above.

Yours sincerely,

Dudley Jones

Dear Kelby Harmes, AGO Director and Deputy Head of Office,

I was disappointed by your refusal to answer questions related to your internal review, and by your cowardly delegation of an un-named FOI official to convey that refusal in a classic FO response.

However, then I reflected you are obviously a very sensitive man and I'd hurt your feelings when I said that 'the way my correspondence was dealt with by you and your colleagues was “illegal” or “rogue”, and that it amounted to “serious misconduct" '. You indignantly rejected these accusations.

You said you wanted to register your rejection of these claims 'for the record.' This makes it all the more surprising you didn't respond when I offered you the opportunity of explaining and justifying what many would regard as corrupt behaviour by AGO officials.

Let me remind you of what I asked you to confirm as a correct summary of AGO's involvement in this conspiracy to 'protect the Treasury Solicitor - a conspiracy laid bare by the emails YOU supplied me with, and that I quoted in my original FOI Request.

Here's what I asked you to confirm ('for the record') as a truthful and accurate summary of events:

"On September 10 2021, Mrs May, my local MP, was either extraordinarily confused, or thoroughly corrupt. She diverted a letter that she was officially required to be forwarded by her office to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration (the Ombudsman) to the Cabinet Office". I've questioned her about this "mistake" - why send my letter to the Cabinet Office and not to the Ombudsman who you must have known was the intended recipient - but she remains surprisingly tight-lipped.

"The Cabinet Office clearly regarded this as entirely legitimate and ‘proper’ manoeuvre, and passed it on to you and the Government Legal Department (the GLD). You evidently saw nothing ‘improper’ about that 'behaviour'. The letter was an official complaint about the Treasury Solicitor, Susanna McGibbon. It began ‘Dear Parliamentary Solicitor.. I wish to complain about the Treasury Solicitor’s handling of my complaint about…’."

What you are saying, Mr Harmes, AGO Director and Deputy Head of Office, is that when you saw a letter beginning 'Dear Parliamentary Commissioner, I wish to complain about the Treasury Solicitor', you naturally assumed the intended recipient of this letter was the Treasury Solicitor (TS) and that, accordingly, my complaint letter should logically be passed on to the Treasury Solicitor - the woman I was complaining about - and not to the Parliamentary Commissioner, the Ombudsman.

As you say, you 'were of the view that [it] should be transferred over to GLD to be deal with as a complaint', because they were the natural department to handle complaints about the TS.

Oh Kelby, I'm so sorry. How could I have doubted you? You are clearly as honest and trustworthy as our Prime Minister, (a man who I revere for his probity and moral principles). You were understandably upset.

Still, now you have the consolation of people seeing you for what you truly are ... now that I've put the record straight.

Yours sincerely,

Dudley Jones