There remain a great many questions to be answered — especially to whom the charity’s assets have been demised — and without a proper inquiry we will probably never know. I wrote to David Cameron in January 2010, when he was still leader of the opposition, so I can understand why he didn’t want Liam Fox to be properly investigated: he knows just how bad things really are.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

Watch this video on YouTube.

But regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that it was her defence of Liam Fox raised my eyebrow, although not that much as I’d seen this coming.

Fox supporters, and there are many in the Conservative Party, would have us believe that Liam Fox was forced to resign because of some unseemly gossip of a nature that, if true, would only offend right-wing Conservatives. We know that after Fox resigned Conservative MPs lined up to shake his hand and a Cameron aide gave him a bear hug. Chancellor George Osborne, an Atlantic Bridge advisory council member, treated Fox to a curry night.

This flags a problem former Guardian editor Peter Preston discussed at the weekend; there is a lack of due process. But I don’t agree with Preston that Fox had a ‘raw deal’. Just the opposite. A resignation is not necessarily a political death, after all Peter Mandleson resigned twice from the last Labour government, but it is a cleansing act.

If the Conservatives succeed in convincing enough of us that Fox resigned over a relatively minor personal indiscretion – an infatuation with a Walter Mitty character – he will return, while those of us who blew the whistle on the bigger issues will be told he paid for all that stuff. This is why it remains important that all accusations around Liam Fox, the Atlantic Bridge, the running of a parallel foreign policy, who funded him and how are fully investigated. His resignation should draw a line under nothing.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

Perhaps if the Charity Commission had chosen to investigate this aspect of my 2009 complaint, they would have identified the shell game for sure. The commission insists the charity’s trustees were co-operative, but handicapped by their ignorance of the law (poor fools). I would imagine that successful confidence tricksters come across as something they are not, almost by definition. And it certainly suited these trustees to play dumb.

But this piece is concerned mainly with role of Tory minister Lord Astor of Hever, an Atlantic Bridge trustee and so personally responsible for ensuring its operations stayed within the law. It’s about time this hereditary peer faced closer scrutiny.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

Earlier this week Sir George Young, the leader of the Commons, claimed that Ursula Brennan had been aware of concerns about Dr Fox’s behaviour in the summer but ‘did not take further action’ and went on to tell MPs: ‘It should have been escalated to the cabinet secretary who would then have notified the prime minister. Had that happened in this case, this probably would have been addressed at a much earlier stage.’ This was a cowardly act by Young, who knows Brennan cannot defend herself.

If it is the case that Ursula Brennan should have rung the alarm bell over Liam Fox’s activities in the summer, then it must also be the case that David Cameron’s own office should have taken action in January 2010, when I wrote to the then leader of the opposition. I made Cameron aware of the three concurrent investigations that I had triggered into Atlantic Bridge; with the Charity Commission, HM Revenue and Customs and, in the USA, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

With no less than four members of the cabinet closely associated with the Atlantic Bridge — George Osborne, William Hague, Michael Gove and Fox — Downing Street could and should have been keeping a close eye on developments. It is hard to believe the prime minister was not aware that Fox’s charity had been ordered to cease its unlawful activities and Cameron should have known that it had had to be bailed out by Michael Hintze after the HMRC investigation led to Atlantic Bridge being presented with a tax bill it could not pay.

Had Cameron made himself fully aware of Atlantic Bridge activities in January 2010, his office would inevitably have come across its executive director, Adam Werritty. They would also have become aware of Atlantic Bridge Inc. and through that links to ALEC. In short, Fox’s shadow foreign policy network would have been uncovered; assuming, of course, that Cameron does not secretly endorse neoconservatism himself.

But with so many of the then shadow cabinet members – five including then shadow home secretary Chris Grayling – Cameron was simply not strong enough to take Fox on just a few months before an election. Even in disgrace Fox enjoys such wide and open support that the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts has counselled that their defiance may be ill-judged with Fox’s resignation speech sounding like an Oscar acceptance.

Even if Cameron has the will, this secret society of US style neocons and Tea Party fanatics is too powerful to take on and is as big a problem for Britain’s Conservatives as the Tea Party Movement has become for America’s Republicans.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

Now that oppressed and brutalised people is tasked with creating democratic institutions from scratch, a process that must take years. Not only must the institutions be created and empowered, new political parties must be formed and the people must learn what each stands for. In the meantime, the country will still need to be governed somehow. A more daunting task is hard to imagine and things could easily go wrong, with political parties coalescing around the tribes and religious groups that divide rather than the secular ideologies that unite.

If true, it seems my two year campaign to see tax foregone in favour of the charity clawed back may have been successful after all. The FT story, which quotes an anonymous trustee who should know, implies the Atlantic Bridge was rendered insolvent by this tax bill. In this case trustees – which included Liam Fox and Lord Astor of Hever (still a defence minister) at the time the money was misspent – may have been personally liable.

But this account appears to be contradicted by briefings to other journalists including Jason Beattie, the Daily Mirror’s political editor, who told me: ‘Charity commission tell me they got assurances from Trustees that the surplus was handed to another charity but refuse/cannot say what these assurances were!’

Having been rendered insolvent by an unexpected tax bill, one would think there were no assets to hand over. In addition, the Charity Commission asserted, in its response to my proposed judicial review of its handling of the case, that action to recover misspent charity money would be disproportionate. The FT report implies it made this assertion after HMRC presented the tax bill.

Geraldine Peacock, who chaired the Charity Commission from 2002 to 2006, explains: ‘The commission chose not to use its statutory powers in this case and, when it does that, it ends up skimming across the top of the issues. Atlantic Bridge is an example of when the Charity Commission doesn’t do itself any favours. It should have done what it is supposed to do, which is to investigate all aspects of a complaint. It didn’t do that.’

Had the Werritty scandal not broken when it did, it is unlikely that we would have discovered that Liam Fox and Lord Astor’s charity had been forced to return money to the taxpayer that they should never have claimed. It is clear that the commission worked with the trustees to keep the story out of the public eye. It is also clear that authorities were happy to give these most senior Conservative politicians the benefit of the doubt when found to be on the wrong side of the law; lesser mortals should not expect to be so lightly treated.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

Watch this video on YouTube.

For clarity, it is important to point out that Dr Liam Fox is unlikely to have benefitted from Atlantic Bridge personally, but as I explain here to Sky News, he certainly benefitted. This Telegraph front page is good example of a typical Atlantic Bridge event; ‘Liam Fox and Adam Werritty were both guests at the [Atlantic Bridge] fund-raising dinner at the Mandarin Oriental hotel [Washington] where they mingled with American-based lobbyists for the defence industry and leading US military officials.’

There should be little doubt that the Atlantic Bridge significantly benefitted Fox’s career and while this event appears to have been for the US non-profit, Atlantic Bridge Inc, the UK charity organised similar bashes. No misspent charity money has been recovered. None of the tax foregone to subsidise the Atlantic Bridge has been clawed back. The charity’s assets have been demised to an organisation the Charity Commission cannot or will not name.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

Regulatory case reports were the commission’s informal mechanism for dealing with charities that had broken the rules. They were supposed to be cheaper than full on statutory inquiries (which makes a nonsense of the official reason for scrapping them; to save money). And importantly they were supposed to happen under-the-radar. So when journalists contacted the commission to ask about the Atlantic Bridge, the commission denied it was investigating and instead told people that it was merely ‘engaging’ with the charity and providing friendly advice. As time has gone on the commission found this facade impossible to maintain and now reluctantly admits that these are indeed investigations.

But these semantics were one reason why the Atlantic Bridge story has been buried on my blog for two years. Had the commission opened a statutory inquiry in 2009 (as, presumably it would now do), we might have broken this story just a few months before the 2010 general election. Instead Liam Fox and company have enjoyed two years of regulatory advice and guidance, plenty of time a cynic might say, to tidy up the place.

In a further twist, readers of Civil Society will note that the commission revealed that regulatory case reports are to be scrapped to an audience of charity lawyers in response to the question: ‘Can we assume we have seen the back of regulatory investigations, which many of us thought were unlawful anyway?’

Wow. Many charity lawyers believe the mechanism by which the commission investigated Atlantic Bridge was unlawful.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

In a further development the Charity Commission has announced that it is to scrap regulatory compliance cases. This was the informal process by which Atlantic Bridge was originally investigated. The announcement was made by Kenneth Dibble, the commission’s head of legal services, at a Charity Law Association conference in response to suggestions regulatory compliance cases were unlawful. However, the commission plans to ignore those – including its former chair Geraldine Peacock – who have called for its investigation into the Atlantic Bridge to be re-opened.

Clarification: It’s been suggested that this letter from the MoD refers to an investigation separate from that conducted by Gus O’Donnell. However, I would point out that in this case GO’D is ‘work[ing] with the Permanent Secretary [Ursula Brennan] to complete the [MoD] report addressing all the remaining questions that have been raised publically and privately by this issue’. Mr Reynolds’ letter, shared with you here, is dated Friday 14 October, several days after GO’D was drafted in to help Ms Brennan complete the MoD report, so I’m confident this letter refers to what has become the GO’D report. However, we now expect this report to be published tomorrow, so it remains possible that, given the weekend’s revelations, the final report will indeed refer to Atlantic Bridge.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

Predictably Joe DeM attempts to draw parallels between the Atlantic Bridge and ‘the network of Trade Unions and left wing charities that fund left wing politicians’. My advice to Joe DeM, and anybody else who believes they have discovered a charity funding politicians, is to report them to the Charity Commission regardless of their political affiliation. In fact, I’d go further: Joe DeM and company have a duty to disclose what they know to the commission and their failure to do so makes them a party to the crimes they allege. The Labour Party’s links to trade unions, on the other hand, are something in which to take pride. Taken together the Labour Party and the unions are the democratic Labour Movement. It is no secret that the unions founded the Labour Party in 1900 to secure political representation for people who work for a living. It is right and proper that unions continue to openly — an important point — support the party and take part in its policy making processes.

The Conservative Party, meanwhile, has a long tradition of sticking up those who are already rich and powerful. Nothing’s changed very much.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

I suggested that Cameron would resign Fox on Monday, to save William Hague and have been proved wrong. Cameron has a tendency to be indecisive in these matters – remember how he held on to Andy Coulson – and has done his best to insist on a fortnight’s civil service investigation. He failed to understand that he was effectively commissioning a fortnight’s journalistic investigation too.

But even with Fox gone, too many questions remain unanswered. Today, Geraldine Peacock, who was chair of the Charity Commission from 2002 to 2006, backed this blogger’s call for the commission to re-open its investigation of the Atlantic Bridge, and more specifically to consider whether misspent charity money should be repaid. Peacock would also like the commission to look at the level of benefit received by Liam Fox, who was a trustee. I would like that investigation to also ask whether others involved in running the charity – including advisory board members George Osborne, William Hague, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Eleanor Laing and John Whittingdale – benefited in anyway.

The Atlantic Bridge’s UK charity was required to cease all its activities in July 2010 as none served any charitable purpose. It was given until September 2011 to clean-up its act, but instead opted to wind-up. Its assets were demised to another charity that neither the commission nor the Atlantic Bridge itself will reveal. Last night Newsnight revealed that senior Atlantic Bridge personnel have established a new organisation, Transatlantic Bridge, and have confirmed that the Atlantic Bridge will live on despite the winding up of its UK charity; it has always consisted of multiple legal entities and the US charity continues to trade despite questions from the IRS.

The Fox saga continued for so long, and was so overwhelming, in large part because it was at least three scandals rolled into one. The Guardian’s interest was peaked when by a disgruntled Harvey Boulter, chief executive of Porton Capital, which worked with the MoD to develop innovative technology in the battle against MRSA. A deal with US conglomerate 3M had gone sour and Boulter might have lost his shirt. He wanted government backing to take on 3M in the courts and claimed that Liam Fox was involved in placing a question mark over a knighthood for 3M’s CEO. This was scandal number one; it was complex and could have fallen either way. But it when Boulter found himself negotiating with Adam Werritty it led directly to scandal number two; Werritty turned out to be an off-the-books advisor to Fox, who had had bypassed protocol, security screening and was funded by a small group of Tory party donors and a private intelligence group. If scandal number one wasn’t enough to bring down Fox, scandal number two certainly looked the business.

Remarkably the best Fox’s friends could do in his defence was claim that he’d been taken by a Walter Mitty character. This was nonsense, which even if true would place a serious question mark over any minister who had been shown to be so gullible. And Fox had at least one other off-the-books advisor; Lieutenant-Colonel Graham Livesey.

As the media has dug deeper, so it has discovered that Werritty was in the pay by the Atlantic Bridge, that was wound-up just last month. This brings us the scandal number three, which is only just getting traction in the media. Those of us who have been blogging this story since 2009 have always been told it was too complex to go big. But now, thanks to Cameron’s dithering, investigative journalists from every major UK news outlet are working to get their heads around it. Not only is this third blow likely to take Fox down, if Cameron continues to dither it may well spread to his cabinet colleagues and beyond. The question post-resignation is whether Fox’s departure is enough to kill off interest in his, and others, wrongdoing.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

The problem with this year’s Celebrity Big Brother is not so much that it is full of nobodies (Paddy Doherty?) but that there is no big beast. It needs a Stephen Baldwin or a Micheal Barrymore or a Vinnie Jones or a George Galloway. I reckon that if Richard Desmond wants this to work, he’s going to have to get in the Big Brother house himself.

I reckon you should vote People’s History Museum because the history we are familiar with is often the history of the elites; the kings, emperors, politicians and dictators who made the big decisions that have shaped our world. Important those people were, and while we feel their influence still, the lives of the people who lived as we might have lived are often even more fascinating. Few of us can easily identify with ancient royalty; those who did ordinary jobs were more like us and closer to who we might have been. And it is wrong to underestimate more everyday people’s influence on the world. So many trends have not been dictated by elites, but set by more anonymous, more ordinary people, who rose up. These are the lives captured by the People’s History Museum.

So vote People’s History Museum.

Now that the News International is reported to have set aside £20m to cover compensation claims and, not so long ago, the prime minister’s communications director, Andy Coulson, was forced to resign.

The last time Lewis crossed swords with Baroness ‘Bungler’ Buscombe and the PCC, the PCC was forced to pay out £20,000 in libel damages. Yet remarkably Bungler used an interview on Radio 4’s Media Show to deny the apology that had been forced out of her (about 22mins in) and, apparently, that damages had been paid. This remarkable denial of reality may yet see her dragged before the courts again. Mark Lewis says he’s reserving his position on that one; readers of this blog will know that he has his hands full suing the Metropolitan Police over the same incident.

While Mark Lewis doesn’t quite call for Baroness ‘Bungler’ Buscombe to resign, it is hard to see how the battered Press Complaints Commission can afford to leave the Tory peer in charge. Being headed up by a bungling chair so closely associated not just with excusing illegal activities at the News of the World, but with attacking those who have exposed those activities, can only help those who would replace the PCC with an effective regulator.
Download Mark Lewis’s letter to Baroness Buscombe

The Press Complaints Commission and its chair, Baroness Buscombe, were also named in the action but have since settled, agreeing to pay Lewis £20,000 in damages. Buscombe and the PCC had relied on information supplied by the police.

Today the High Court threw out an attempt to block the action, paving the way for an embarrassing public trial. The Metropolitan Police attempted to persuade the court that Lewis’s action was an abuse of process and that, in any case, they were protected by qualified privilege (that is, they were obliged to respond to the PCC in the way that they did). Mr Justice Tugendhat disagreed on both counts. Further he agreed that the police statement to the PCC could be taken to mean that Lewis had lied to parliament and that any trial would also be able to consider whether the statement was made with malice. Should Lewis’s action succeed, the clear implication would be that elements within the Metropolitan Police have been attempting to cover up the true extent of illegal phone hacking conducted by News International newspapers.

Coincidently, the ruling came on the same day that it emerged that Rebecca Brooks, chief executive of News International, is to appear before parliament to provide further information regarding the bribing of police officers. She had previously admitted paying police officers for stories, which is always illegal, while editor of the Sun.

Mark Lewis has indicated to this blogger that a settlement would be very hard to achieve as the Metropolitan Police would be required to admit that a police officer had lied.
Download the judgement of the High Court