The Blairs and their use of the security services for private purposes


On 10 November 1999 Sir Richard Body MP put down this Early
Day Motion (EDM):

CONDUCT OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE MEMBER FOR
SEDGEFIELD 10:11:99

Sir Richard Body

That this House regrets that the Right honourable
Member for Sedgefield [Tony Blair] attempted to
persuade the Metropolitan Police to bring criminal
charges against Robert Henderson, concerning the
Right honourable Member's complaints to the police
of an offence against the person, malicious
letters and racial insult arising from letters
Robert Henderson had written to the Right
honourable Member complaining about various
instances of publicly-reported racism involving the
Labour Party; and that, after the Crown Prosecution
Service rejected the complaints of the Right
honourable Member and the Right honourable Member
failed to take any civil action against Robert
Henderson, Special Branch were employed to spy upon
Robert Henderson, notwithstanding that Robert
Henderson had been officially cleared of any
illegal action.

This motion is now part of the official House of Commons
record.

The EDM gives the bare details of a story which would seem
fantastic if it was not true. Since March 1997 I have been
under surveillance by Special Branch and quite possibly by
M15. Why? On the 13 March 1997 Tony and Cherie Blair tried
to have me put in prison. They attempted but
comprehensively failed to have me prosecuted for three
separate and utterly disparate criminal offences, namely
common assault and breaches of the Malicious Communications
and Race Relations Acts. The attempt was immediately and
unceremoniously rejected by the Crown Prosecution Service,
After the Blairs' humiliating failure to have me
prosecuted, I was quite illegally placed under
surveillance by the state, a state of affairs which
continues to this day, (Those wishing to get a
fuller account of the affair should visit the Blair Scandal
website at  http://members.dencity.com/delenda/)

The background to the affair

I had written to Tony and Cherie Blair (as a last
resort) seeking (1) help for my mistreatment by
the media and (2) action against a number of
members of the Labour Party including my own MP, Frank
Dobson, Before approaching Tony Blair I had literally
exhausted every other avenue open to me, including the
Press Complaints Commission (PCC), the
Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC) and my MP.

My letters to the Blairs

As might be imagined from Richard Body's willingness to
put down the EDM, my letters to the Blairs contained no
threat, gross abuse or obscenity. They were short in length
and reasonable in number. (I sent Tony Blair 9 letters over
ten months, his wife 4. The combined text of my letters to
Tony Blair totalled 2675 words: to Cherie Blair 755 words.)
The only racial references the letters contained concerned
instances of publicly reported racism within the Labour
Party. Moreover, I only raised those matters after (1) my
MP, Frank Dobson, gratuitously called me a racist and (2)
the black Labour MP Diane Abbott had sent me an
unsolicited and abusive letter. I sent 13 letters
only because I persistently failed to obtain any
meaningful reply to my complaints.

My letters to the Blairs have also been viewed by the Crown
Prosecution Service, three editors of political magazines who
have published articles in support of me and a charity,
Presswise, which supported me. Perhaps most tellingly, the
police never approached me about the matter at any time

My discovery of the use of the security services

The first I knew of the matter was when the Mirror
newspaper on 25 March 1997 published a story which
alerted me to the Blairs' complaints to the
police and the fact that Special Branch had become involved
I used the Data Protection Act to obtain data relating
to the Blairs' complaints held by the Metropolitan Police.
This produced the following printout from the Belgravia
police database:

MET DETS S/COMMON ASSAULT- HILLINGDON

Following entered by: DC .... .... ....
This allegation relates to a series of letters
received at the Palace of Westminster. On 13th
March a request was received from that police
attend the Palace of Westminster to discuss letters
received on that date.

DS [Connor] attended and met [Tony Blair] and
[Cherie Blair] who handed over a quantity of
letters received by the office, from the suspect,
Mr Henderson. He is a part time journalist who
regularly writes to left wing MP's, and who holds
extreme right wing views.

The letters were examined and taken to the Crown
Prosecution Service, where a consultation took
place with .... all lawyers from the Horseferry
Road Magistrates Court Section.

It was decided that the letters fell short of an
offence under the Malicious Communications Act
1988, or the Race Relations Act. At that stage the
allegation was in fact 'NO CRIME'.

Advice was given should the letters continue, that
the sheer volume of them may constitute a nuisance.

[Tony Blair] did not wish, with an election
campaign looming, to start collecting evidence from
an irritant like Henderson was advised re civil
remedies, especially an injunction, against
Henderson.

In view of the personalities involved, DS ....
attended Islington Police Station and spoke to DCI
.... and DI .... Their details were passed to ....
staff, who were advised to deal with them in the
future, as .... home address was on their division,
and it was that venue that they were most concerned
about.

DCI....is believed to have appointed
Inspector....to liaise with the.... re security.

In summary, the allegation of Malicious
Communication is 'NO CRIME', however the security
of the .... has been put in the hands of the right
people. There is no further action to take at
present by officers from Belgravia.

The missing names were omitted by the Metropolitan Police,
because the Data Protection Act permits this. I have added
them where I know the names. The CPS has confirmed in writing
to me that the Blairs made the complaints.

The printout shows that the Blairs attempted (on 13
March 1997) to have me prosecuted on no less than
three separate charges, that the Crown Prosecution
Service rejected all the complaints in short order,
that the Blairs considered and rejected civil
action to gag me and that the security services were
appointed to spy on me. The rather coy "the security of the
[Blairs] has been put in the hands of the right people"
suggests that M15 may have been involved. If the "security of
the Blairs" had been placed solely in the hands of Special
Branch, it would make no sense not to state the fact because
Special Branch is part of the Metropolitan Police, the body
holding the data.

Why did the Blairs try to have me prosecuted?

Tony Blair knew that I was circulating copies of my various
correspondence with him, Frank Dobson and Diane Abbott to the
British media. This correspondence showed Blair to be both
arrogant and unwilling to discipline his own MPs, Dobson to
be straightforwardly refusing to do his duty as my MP for
party and ideological reasons and Abbott to be both abusive
and a hypocrite, a very different picture to that of New
Moral Labour Party which Blair had assiduously built.

The fact that Blair was willing to become involved in
criminal prosecutions one week before the start of the
election campaign shows vividly how much he feared the
consequences of the circulation of my letters.

The bogus nature of the charges

The Blairs are both experienced lawyers. Mrs Blair has
experience as a QC in the field of Malicious Communications.

Both the Blairs must have realised that my letters
constituted no offence. The failure of the police to
interview me and the amazingly fast refusal of a prosecution
by the Crown Prosecution Service show this. Thus the Blairs'
can only have hoped that Blair's political celebrity would
override the lack of evidence. That constitutes the criminal
offence of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

It is also highly significant that Blair did not go to the
police until six weeks after my last letter to him. Moreover,
he did this only after I had begun to send my copies of my
letters to Blair to the media. In addition, the Blairs have
failed to take any civil action against me.

The surveillance

Three years after the Blairs went to the police, my post is
still being intercepted. I know this because of (1) the
physical evidence that it has been interfered with and (2)
the delay in receiving post. As my post is being
intercepted, it is reasonable to assume that my phone has
been tapped.

As far as the surveillance is concerned, there is no
legitimate reason for this. I have never threatened the
Blairs. I have not even tried to get into their physical
presence. The Crown Prosecution Service has declared that I
have committed no crime. I have never been connected with any
organisation suspected of illegal action. The fact that I am
being kept under surveillance is simply for Blair's private
purposes.


Article reproduced from Lobster magazine 45

Harassment by the state

Robin Ramsey

Here are two articles about the ongoing harassment of individuals by
unidentified forces within the state. Malcolm Kennedy (see Lobsters 37
and 39) is being harassed by having his attempts to create a business
sabotaged because some policemen are afraid of what he experienced. In
another society he would be killed or disappear. In ours he is simply
being kept down. Robert Henderson is being harassed now because he
made a fuss at being harassed in 1997 by Tony Blair and his circle. In
effect, he is now being harassed because he is being a bloody nuisance
to the powers-that-be. Happily, as a retired Inland Revenue inspector,
Mr Henderson has a pretty good idea of how to be a bloody nuisance to
the powers-that-be.

There are forms of harassment other than those experienced by Henderson
and Kennedy. A couple of years ago an Israeli woman came to Hull from
London to see me. We talked in the Station Hotel for several hours. She
was a political exile with refugee status from the Home Office. An
architect, she had stumbled across some big scam being run in Israel
and had been forced to leave. The story was long and complicated. I've
now forgotten most of it. She had piles of documents. She claimed that
her flat in London was being repeatedly broken into and articles left,
taken or rearranged. No matter how often she changed the locks the
break-ins continued. She had been to the police and MI5 - large
amounts of documentation on this - with no result . She assumed she was
being harassed by MOSSAD. For reasons that I now cannot recall, we
didn't really get on. But having come across similar stories before I
said I would write someðthing about her. She wanted to see it first,
didn't like it when she did, and insisted I not print it. I complied
and forgot about it.

I recalled my afternoon in the Station Hotel reading the account in
Corinne Souza's book Baghdad's Spy (reviewed below) of the harassment
her family suffered at the hands of SIS. There it was again: break-ins,
pranks, things left in the house, nuisance calls - the familiar
repertoire.

Which is to say: we still have a secret state whose legal, intelligence
and security wings are virtually unregulated. There are now elaborate
procedures mimicking regulation -both Kennedy and Henderson are
exploring these - but the state can still wreck our lives and there is
virtually nothing we can do about it except make as much fuss as
possible.

Harassing Robert Henderson

In 1997 Robert Henderson, a retired civil servant, wrote to the then
leader of the Opposition Tony Blair to ask for his help. Eventually he
wrote a dozen or so letters to Blair and Cherie Booth. Blair then tried
to have him prosecuted but the legal authorities refused to act. Blair
or someone close to him then set the tabloids on him and he was smeared
in the Daily Mirror (also used to smear the journalist Greg Palast )
and Daily Record as a stalker and a racist. (This was discussed in
Lobsters 37 and 39 and Henderson's detailed account of the affair,
including the text of the letters which started it, is at
 http://www.geocities.com/blair scandal/). Here he describes some of the
recent harassment he has experienced and his responses to it.

How the story developed
Since the Blairs' failure to have me prosecuted I have been
subjected to a campaign of harassment which continues to this day. My
post has been regularly delayed and opened, every now and then opened
so ostentatiously that I can only conclude that it is being done
deliberately in an attempt to intimidate me. I also believe that my
telephone and e-mail traffic is being routinely interrupted. Modern
tapping methods do not give telltale clicks and whirrs, but I do get
an extraordinary number of failures to disconnect lines at the ends of
calls and phantom ring-backs which occur when the receiver is replaced
at the end of a call, the phone rings and no one is there when the
receiver is lifted. Most tellingly, on one occasion, an act of
exceptional harassment occurred in apparent response to a telephone
conversation I had which was unknown to anyone but myself and the
other person.

The Internet attacks
In 2002 the story took a new turn. On 12 April a post was made to a
number of the larger UK newsgroups which accused me falsely of being a
paedophile. The post contained my full name and address and incited
people to attack me. The poster had also set up a paedophile web site
which he or she falsely claimed was mine. 1 had no idea who had made
the post. On the ]6 April 1 received an anonymous phone call from a
man which I taped. The caller gave me the name of the password,
Fyfield, for the account of the person who had done the posting about
me to the newsgroups.

On 7 May 2002 I received the following unsolicited e-mail purporting to
come from a Detective Constable in the Metropolitan Police named Liz
Wright:

'Mr Henderson, the Fyfield you are concerned with is Frances Fyfield,
real name Frances Hegarty; check your TV listings for last night. She
is a senior CPS prosecutor and works at the CPS HQ. She deals mostly
with alleged police corruption. She did me a big favour a couple of
years ago and if she finds out that I've been in touch with you that is
the end of my career so please what ever you do destroy this E-mail
after you've read it. I've made exhaustive enquiries and it is true
that she was the main lawyer Cherie Blair consulted. She wanted to
drag you into court. Hegarty lives not far from you in Petherton Road.
You will have to deal with her personally, either by force or by the
civil law but don't mention me and try not to drag in the Blairs or you
will get nowhere.' Frances Fyfield, is a crime writer and Crown
Prosecutor still working with the Crown Prosecution Service. According
to the police, DC Liz Wright denies knowing anything of the e-mail. I
have spoken with Hegarty/Fyfield and she has denied any knowledge of
the newsgroup post, being a friend of the Blairs, or having been
involved in the Blairs' attempt to have me prosecuted in 1997.

On 31 December 2002 a further newsgroup post was made which again
falsely represented me as a paedophile, gave my full address and
incited people to attack me. On this occasion an e-mail was sent to me
which threatened me if I did not take down the Blair Scandal web site.
On 20 March 2003 the third attack on me occurred. This time it took the
form of a post to newsgroups falsely purporting to be from me. The
post gave the name of Francis Fyfield and an address which purported to
be hers. The post claimed she was responsible for the prosecution of
Muslims recently and incited violence against her.

Coincidences?
The newsgroup post in April 2002 was made two days after l had
submitted a complaint to the Chairman of the Inland Revenue.

The 31 December 2002 post and e-mail were sent eight hours after I had
spoken on the phone with the countryside campaigner Robin Page. Quite
absurdly in my view, Mr Page was under investigation at the time for
'inciting racial hatred' at a countryside rally. During our telephone
conversation I offered to appear as a witness for him to demonstrate
that the application of the law on racial incitement was only applied
when politically expedient, something I could prove conclusively. The
charges against Mr Page were dropped shortly afterwards. No one but Mr
Page and I knew the phone call had taken place at the time the
newsgroup post and e-mail were sent. If our conversation and the
newsgroup post and e-mail are linked the only rational explanation for
that would be that my phone is being tapped.

The 20 March 2003 attack occurred 4 days after 1 had made a complaint
to the police about the bribing of police officers to give information
by The Sun editor Rebekah Wade - who had admitted to the Culture Media
and Sport Select Committee that she had done this - and The Mirror
editor, Piers Morgan - who had admitted receiving information from the
police in a letter to the PCC in 1997.

The police
I reported the first newsgroup post to the police shortly after I
discovered it. I made the report to the Metropolitan Police
Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, because my previous complaints had
been either not investigated at all by my local police or investigated
only in the sense of going through the motions. I contacted Sir John
Stevens' office after a week to find out what action had been taken.

The answer was none. I then wrote to the Director of Public
Prosecutions (DPP), David Calvert-Smith, asking him to intervene.
Eventually, after the intervention of his office, an investigation was
begun in mid-July 2002, three months after my original notification of
the complaint. By that time the computer audit trail was cold and any
possible evidence from the CCTV at the Internet Cafe from which the
post was made had been lost.

I have reported the two subsequent newsgroup posts attacks and the
threatening e-mail to the police and investigations are supposedly
underway. However, the police refuse to interview the Blairs or to
investigate properly the Frances Fyfield avenue.

The Data Protection Act (DPA)
The original Mirror story mentioned that Special Branch had been asked
to investigate me despite the fact that the Crown Prosecution Service
had declared unequivocally that I had committed no crime. Using the
Data Protection Act (DPA) I have confirmed that Special Branch did
take an interest in me. It took three years before they would reveal
it, but eventually the Metropolitan Police admitted that Special
Branch had a file on me. Use of the DPA has also resulted (after years
of trying) in confirmation from MI5 that they have had a file on me
since 1997.

The Data Protection Tribunal (DPT)
I made a subject access request to MI5 under the 1998 DPA act when it
became 'live' in 2000. I received a reply which took the regulation
Security Service 'We can neither confirm nor deny' line. This
appeared to be in direct contradiction of the 1998 DPA and the Human
Rights Act (HRA). Accordingly I appealed to the DPT (now the
Information Tribunal), challenging MI5's right to neither confirm nor
deny whether any data was held. (Under the DPA MI5 have the right to
withhold data on security grounds but use of that power would confirm
that data was held.)

My appeal was scheduled to be heard by a panel of three. One was a
retired Appeal Court judge, Sir Anthony Evans. The other two members
were Michael Beloff QC and James Goudie QC. Beloff and Goudie were not
only closely connected with the Blairs but also the Labour Patty.
These relationships were of prime importance because my appeal
concerned data which, if it existed, could only have related to the
Blairs' attempt to have me prosecuted and the aftermath of that failed
attempt.

Mr Beloff was joint head of Cherie Blair's old chambers at 4/5 Gray's
Inn, Gray's Inn Sq, where Mrs Blair was a member from 1991 until 2000
when she left to join a new chambers, Matrix. Mr .Beloff originally
intended to join Matrix but withdrew at the last moment. He is also a
personal friend of the Blairs and was the lawyer called in to sort out
Geoffrey Robinson's problems with his offshore trust. He is a former
chairman of the Society of Labour Lawyers.

Goudie is also a personal friend of the Blairs and the Lord Chancellor,
Lord lrvine; so is his wife, Lady Goudie, who was made a baroness by
Mr Blair in 1998. Goudie is a former Labour leader of Brent Council and
was once a prospective Labour parliamentary candidate. He has done
legal work for the Labour party. Lady Goudie is a major fund raiser for
the Labour Party and acted as chief fund raiser for Frank Dobson when
he ran for the post of mayor of London. Lady Goudie is , friend of
Gordon Brown's wife, Sarah Macaulay, and has done work for her PR
agency Hobsbawn Macaulay. The Goudies attended the Macauley-Brown
wedding.

That such a panel was allocated to my case is unsurprising because the
Lord Chancellor appoints the members of DPT panels. The present Lord
Chancellor, Derry Irving, is a very close friend of both the Blairs who
were once pupils in his chambers. Tony Blair also practised in
lrvine's chambers until he entered Parliament. Cherie Blair's move to
Beloff's Chambers was initiated by lrvine, lrvine is also a personal
friend of Goudie and Beloff and has had a professional relationship
with Mr Goudie dating back over a quarter of century. Goudie is
currently joint-head of Lord lrvine's old Chambers.

Despite the links between Blair, Goudie and Beloff, the President of
the panel, Anthony Evans, refused to disbar them from sitting.
Consequently, I made a complaint to the Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens, accusing Evans and Irving of
conspiring to pervert the course of justice in the most blatant fashion
by deliberately packing a judicial panel. Stevens refused to begin an
investigation. I then submitted a complaint against Sir John Stevens to
the Met. That complaint is still under investigation by the Met's
Department of Professional Standards.

In the end my appeal never came before the DPT because the Lib-Dem MP,
Norman Baker, had an appeal on the same issue of neither confirming
or denying upheld by the DPT which meant that my appeal fell as the
precedent was established. 1 then made a new appeal to MI5 and got an
admission that they held data on me. However, the full data was not
revealed. I am still fighting to get the data released.

As things stand, l am effectively without the protection of the law
because the police simply refuse to meaningfully investigate any
complaint 1 put forward. As the person who is making the newsgroups
posts is giving my name and address, I may be attacked. There is also
the danger that I will be 'set up' for prosecution on bogus charges. My
first thought when I saw the first newsgroup post 4th April 2002 was
that someone was trying to set me up.


--
Robert Henderson
Blair Scandal website:  http://www.geocities.com/blairscandal/
Personal website:  http://www.anywhere.demon.co.uk