FCO Finally Admits I Was Innocent
(You need to click on fcomurray1, and then on the lower smallcase fcomurray1 that will appear again, and then repeat the process with fcomurray2. Hopefully I might find a more elegant way later.)
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has, for the first time, admitted I was cleared on all 19 charges they laid against me, except for the Kafkaesque charge of talking about the charges against me in order to prepare a defence.
However the letter from Lord Howell claims – falsely, as far as I am aware – “that the disciplinary allegations taken by the FCO in Craig Murray’s case related first to complaints made about him by members of his staff”. In the course of a four month investigation under suspension, I was only ever shown a single complaint about me by members of my staff. This consisted of a signed statement by a small group of staff in the visa saction, to the effect that on a named morning I had told them I had a hangover.
This statement was not the source of the allegation, but rather obtained after the allegation that I was an alcoholic had been made by the FCO. Every single member of my staff was called in and asked if they had ever seen me drunk. That statement, that I once said that I had a hangover, was the sole result of this fishing expedition. I was never shown any staff statement on any other allegation, including the astounding allegation of sex for visas, and as these were all dropped for lack of evidence I presume there were no such statements. Lord Howell is telling an untruth, though I fully expect as a result of being lied to by his civil servants.
On the other disciplinary count – that of unauthorised disclosure to the media – relates to my appearance on the Today programme etc AFTER I had told the FCO I was leaving the service, so is hardly germane. Jack Straw added that line to parliament in order to say I had not resolved all charges against me. Straw had fudged this to appear still to refer to the sexual charges.
Of course, what Lord Howell fails completely to mention is, that these eighteen disciplinary charges miraculously appeared from nowhere immediately after I became the only UK civil servant to enter a written objection to our complicity in torture in the War on Terror.
What sickens me most about this in Lord Howell’s letter is the FCO’s claim to have cleared itself in its own investigation of having made the allegations against me “maliciously or in bad faith”.
Do they really expect anybody to believe that you can make eighteen serious allegations against somebody, every one of which turns out to be untrue, in good faith?
I am very grateful indeed to Nigel Jones for his persistence in winning at least this much acknowledgement of my innocence from the FCO, after eight years in which they have systematically blackened my name. I am sorry that Lord Howell can’t tell Nigel Jones from Digby Jones!