During a fly-on-the-wall TV documentary about life in the Foreign Office, the head of the Diplomatic Service, Sir Simon McDonald, made it clear that he relished his position of power.
‘Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way,’ he mischievously explained, adding that the aim was to make others ‘feel they’ve been taken into your confidence, but, in the end, without actually telling them anything’.
One reviewer of the BBC series in 2018 described Sir Simon as ‘oozing not just poise but considerable self-satisfaction’. However, that poise suddenly seems to have abandoned the career diplomat in charge of 14,000 public servants whose job it is to smooth Britain’s passage through the world and to look after our citizens’ interests.
For Sir Simon, 59, has become embroiled in controversy over the Government’s failure to get justice for the parents of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn, who was killed in a road crash in Northamptonshire last summer.
Harry Dunn, 19, who died in a motorbike crash outside the RAF Croughton Airforce base in Northamptonshire on August 27th 2019
The other person involved was Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a US intelligence official. She claimed diplomatic immunity from prosecution and returned to America despite later being charged with causing death by dangerous driving.
Sir Simon is now accused of misleading Parliament. Last month he gave evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, saying that Foreign Office (FO) staff had told police investigating the 19-year-old’s death that they could not arrest the American.
Two days later, he was forced to write to the committee saying no such instruction was given. But today a leaked email reveals that FO staff did inform police that they could not arrest her.
This hugely embarrassing U-turn was the latest twist in the tragedy about which The Mail on Sunday has broken a string of exclusive stories. These have suggested that Harry’s family has been scandalously let down by the FO and they have also questioned the legitimacy of Mrs Sacoolas’s claim to diplomatic immunity.
American Anne Sacoolas, pictured in Virginia where she and her family returned after she killed British teenager Harry Dunn near the American base Croughton, Northamptonshire
Sir Simon’s humiliating volte-face happened after senior FO colleagues realised that his earlier statement contradicted evidence presented by them to the High Court in an upcoming legal challenge by Harry’s family on the circumstances around Mrs Sacoolas’s abscondment.
A legal source said: ‘He nearly blew the whole defence – and might still have yet.’ It also comes as The Mail on Sunday reveals that Harry’s twin brother, Niall, has written to Boris Johnson imploring him to meet the family and take charge of the case. Niall says that watching his parents ‘go through this torture is just awful’.
He adds that ‘anyone can see that the Foreign Office has made a mess of this’ and urges the Government to tell the truth. We can also reveal that an email sent by the FO to Northamptonshire Police six days after the fatal crash outside RAF Croughton last August seemingly contradicts Sir Simon’s statement and explicitly stated that Mrs Sacoolas was above the law.
Having received this advice, the police said they felt obliged to end their investigation into the status of the American mother-of-three. For their part, Harry’s family complain about ‘interference’ in the case from the highest levels of Government and about confusion on whether Mrs Sacoolas had immunity.
This allowed her, they say, ‘with the blessing of the Foreign Office, to get on the next flight out of Britain’. With the subsequent row having damaged relations between the British and US governments, it is clear that politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are desperate to reach a compromise.
That is why the clumsy behaviour of the head of the FO has not been at all helpful. Although the Prime Minister asked the White House for Mrs Sacoolas to return to Britain for questioning, US President Donald Trump has been intransigent.
He has simply said he would ‘see what we can come up with, so there can be some healing’. No wonder Harry’s parents described Mr Trump’s attitude as ‘oafish’ and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s handling of the case ‘cold and strange’.
Throughout this whole story, there has been official obfuscation. The Mail on Sunday has discovered several details the authorities have been reluctant to admit. For example, US government officials were present at the only interview that Mrs Sacoolas had with police, the day after the fatal collision.
And that FO staff initially told their American counterparts that she did not have immunity from prosecution, only to change their mind after advice from ‘US State Department lawyers’.
To make matters worse, the FO asked Northamptonshire Police to delay telling Harry’s family that Mrs Sacoolas had absconded to America, so they could ‘get their ducks in a row’.
Harry Dunn’s mother, Charlotte at her home in Charleton near Banbury
What is now clear is that the FO told Detective Inspector Louise Hemingway in an email on September 2 – six days after the crash – that Mrs Sacoolas, 43, had diplomatic immunity.
As a result, police felt hamstrung and didn’t investigate her status further. The email came three days after Ministers were told during a phone call with the US Embassy ‘that US State Department lawyers take the view’ that Mrs Sacoolas had immunity.
Last night, Harry’s father Tim said: ‘We still do not have the full picture. But Sir Simon McDonald’s evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee was not the truth. How can the country’s leading diplomat mislead Parliament so badly?’
With little chance of Mrs Sacoolas ever returning to Britain, the family launched a crowd-funded judicial review into the handling of the case by both the FO and the police.
Ultimately, they hope to prove Mrs Sacoolas’s claims of immunity to be unlawful. Undoubtedly, the review will look in detail at all the actions of FO staff immediately after the fatal crash.
What is not disputed is that Mrs Sacoolas, who had been in Britain for only three weeks, was driving her Volvo XC90 on the wrong side of the B4031 at 8.21pm on Tuesday, August 27 last year, and was involved in a head-on collision with Harry.
She admitted later being at fault. The teenager died from his injuries. Mrs Sacoolas passed a breathtest that evening and was allowed home. At noon the following day, Det Insp Hemingway visited Mrs Sacoolas and her husband at the couple’s rented home, where she found them with a US Air Force lawyer and two officials from the US State Department.
During their conversation, Det Insp Hemingway noted that Mrs Sacoolas said she had no plans to leave Britain. Nor was there any mention of diplomatic immunity. However, later that day, Northamptonshire Police were in contact with Scotland Yard’s Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection squad and were told Mrs Sacoolas had ‘diplomatic status’.
The convention of diplomatic immunity dates back centuries – there are about 23,000 people in the UK with the status under the 1961 Vienna Convention. It means foreign diplomats and their families cannot be prosecuted for a crime. But they are expected to obey their host country’s laws and the FO can ask a foreign government to waive immunity if it is appropriate.
With regard RAF Croughton, there is an intriguing history concerning diplomatic immunity. In the 1990s, Washington requested permission – which was granted by London – for 200 of its agents and officials to be allowed diplomatic immunity while posted to the US listening station.
There was one caveat: the Americans would not be beyond British criminal liability for anything outside of their official duties. However, no mention was made of spouses – something, in respect of the Harry Dunn case, that Dominic Raab has called an ‘anomaly’.
Against this background, two days after the crash, the FO told their American counterparts that they did not believe Mrs Sacoolas had immunity. Yet, on August 30, Ministers were told that while State Department lawyers believed there were limits to the immunity for workers at RAF Croughton, these did not extend to their dependants.
Understandably, Whitehall officials regarded this as against the spirit of the agreements and warned Mr Raab’s office of ‘unpalatable headlines’ should Mrs Sacoolas leave the country.
Washington then sent a formal diplomatic note to London demanding that Mrs Sacoolas should not be arrested. Meanwhile, in Northamptonshire, Det Insp Hemingway received an email on September 2 from the FO Protocol Office.
It said: ‘Following consultation with the US Embassy, we are going to proceed with a formal request to the US government to seek a waiver of the immunity held by Anne Sacoolas.’ The note arrived just before the detective’s first meeting with Harry’s grieving family.
Despite Harry’s mother Charlotte asking ‘She [Mrs Sacoolas] won’t be allowed to leave the country, will she?’, the police officer made no mention of the diplomatic wrangling that had been going on between London and Washington.
There was only a vague reference to ‘complications’, as DI Hemingway told them: ‘I have been to see the driver and there are no plans for her to leave the country.’ But she also admitted that police were powerless to stop her if she tried.
Presciently, Harry’s father commented: ‘I am concerned that it is an American citizen.’ He was right to be concerned. Officials from the US and UK governments met three days later.
On the British side, there was a belief that Mrs Sacoolas would face justice as the UK had never turned down a waiver request from America for the 13 Britons with diplomatic immunity who had been arrested in the US since 1999.
But according to documents seen by The Mail on Sunday, such optimism – or naivety – turned to ‘disappointment’. On September 13, the British authorities were told that Washington would not waive Mrs Sacoolas’s immunity.
A deeply embarrassed Mr Raab told MPs that Britain had ‘objected in clear and strong terms’ and sought a fresh waiver. But the veracity of that claim was challenged after The Mail on Sunday revealed that the FO’s director of protocol, Neil Holland, sent a text message on September 14 to his US counterpart, saying: ‘Now the decision has been taken not to waive, there’s not much mileage in us asking you to keep the [Sacoolas] family here.
‘It’s obviously not us approving of their departure but I think you should feel able to put them on the next flight out.’ The next day – unknown to Harry’s family and Northamptonshire Police – the Sacoolas family left Britain on a commercial flight.
Twenty-four hours later, Det Insp Hemingway was told by the FO that the waiver request had been rejected, and, worse, the Sacoolas family were back in America. She was advised not to inform the family.
She says she was told this would help the FO ‘get its ducks in a row’. She agreed as Harry’s funeral was just hours away and she did not want to distress the family further.
A few days later, the FO expressed its ‘grave disappointment’ and Mr Raab called the US ambassador. But all this was too late. Shamefully, the family were not told that Mrs Sacoolas had left Britain until 11 days after she had fled.
Having felt abandoned by the FO, Harry’s family looked for support from the media. Within a few weeks, they flew to Washington and met Mr Trump in the White House. It was claimed that, characteristically, he offered to write the family a cheque to drop their campaign for justice.
To make matters worse, the family felt ‘ambushed’ when Mr Trump told them that Mrs Sacoolas was in a neighbouring room and that he wanted them to meet her. Radd Seiger, the family’s spokesman, says they refused.
‘We were there to find a resolution and we only wanted to meet her on UK soil once she had been appeared in court.’ Despite Mr Trump telling Harry’s family he would ‘take another look at the case’, the US authorities rejected an extradition request.
In February, this newspaper revealed what might have been the reason: Mrs Sacoolas’s career in the CIA. Harry’s mother Charlotte said afterwards: ‘I can’t work out what is worse.
How the Foreign Office caved in to the US and let Anne Sacoolas leave, or how it continues to treat us by covering things up and not telling us the truth.’ A FO spokesman told the MoS: ‘We have done, and will continue to do, everything we properly can to ensure that justice is done.’
With the truth due to be disentangled in the High Court, this a very awkward time for Sir Simon McDonald. How ironic that during that TV documentary he said with just a little conceitedness: ‘It’s not difficult to interest a dinner party in what I am doing at work!’