Imagine if you had signed up to receive updates from a Government website, and then found your data transferred to the Labour Party? Or, like me, you have an interest in promoting better governance in Africa and sign up to receive updates, but then similarly finding yourself the recipient of emails telling you to vote Labour? Or, even, imagine if you can being a Labour activist, signing up to help Labour win the 2010 General Election, but then finding yourself afterwards sucked into Tony Blair's complex world of unusual companies, which publish no accounts, yet have permissions to operate in offshore locations?
All of these three scenarios have actually happened, or could happen, thanks to Tony Blair and the Labour Party. I have been working closely with Rob Mendick of the Sunday Telegraph in starting to reveal a complex web of links between the Government, Tony Blair, his charities, his businesses and the Labour Party.
Let me explain some of this complex web from my own experience.
On 17th June 2007, a few weeks before Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister, I signed up to receive emails from 10 Downing Street. I used an email address unique for the purpose. It was quite clear these emails were coming from the government - the sender was "@pmo.gov.uk" and the email confirmation to me states "Thank you for your interest in subscribing to the Number 10 email alerts". I still get these emails, generally every Friday, with news of what the Prime Minister has been doing. It is quite clear these are taxpayer-funded, non-party political, e.g. they sometimes have a section from Hansard with elements from PMQs deleted as "party political material". I still get these now, even though the occupant of Number 10 has changed.
So far, so good, but on 12th December 2007 I received an email from "The Office of Tony Blair", at the same unique email address described above. I had never subscribed to emails from this "Office". It became clear to me that my unique email address had been simply transferred from Number 10 to this new Office of Tony Blair, which I had not heard of until that point. I complained, but the "Office of Tony Blair" claimed that I had, in fact, signed up for emails from them directly. I was unable to prove that I hadn't, and the trail lead nowhere, even though I was clear that an unauthorised transfer of data from government to a private individual had occurred.
Over the next two and a half years, I received about another 25 emails from the "Office of Tony Blair", "the Tony Blair Faith Foundation" and other ventures, all still sent to the same email address which had only ever received the weekly bulletin from 10, Downing Street. Some of these emails were strange, promoting all kinds of odd projects, like Blair's "Faith and Globalisation" initiatives, an "historic interfaith summit", and even his move to get solar panels to 1,000 Chinese villages to fight climate change.
Remarkably, the emails included news from his partly taxpayer-funded Quartet mission (to promote peace in the Middle East) and his charitable "Africa Governance Initiative" (AGI), and the promotion of his "Tony Blair Sports Foundation". The "Tony Blair Faith Foundation" is also a charity. Some of the initiatives also seemed rather close to many of his business ventures.
Then, last week, on 30th March, again to the same email address which had only ever signed up to receive the Number 10 bulletin, I received another email entitled "Protect our progress", decked out in Labour colours, with a Labour rose, but again coming from Tony Blair with details of his speech in Sedgefield to back Brown and marketing a new website called www.tonyblair4labour.org. Another email followed the day after, from "Elect2010", checking that I had received the email from Tony Blair the day before.
Now, if I am right, and this email address was transferred from Number 10 to Tony Blair's office in 2007, then that means that it had now been transferred to the Labour Party. Or, returning to Blair's people maintaining that I had separately signed up to receive news of the charities like the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the African Governance Initiative, then my details had been transferred from a charity to the Labour Party.
So, I started to have a dig around this new website. What I discovered was alarming. "TonyBlair4Labour", and by implication the emails from it, had a privacy policy, which stated that the website would take one's data and forward it on to Windrush, one of Blair's mysterious companies. Screengrabs I made at the time (pictured) show that ‘Windrush, AGI and OQR process your data for the following purposes: to provide you with information about services available to you through Windrush, AGI, OQR and third parties connected with us either as directed communications or newsletters'. One would get drawn into his complex business world, as one agreed to allow the site ‘To recommend products and services that we believe will be of interest to you', ‘to transfer to the members of Windrush and any other partnership or company connected with Windrush or its members,' 'to permit third party research organisations to question individuals registered with us in respect of surveys and/or consultations' and finally to allow information to be transferred to the taxpayer funded Office of the Quartet Representative (OQR) - opening up the intriguing possibility that one's data having originated at Number 10 could, via Blair's office and then the Labour Party, arrive back at a partly taxpayer-funded organisation three years later. And here, the plot thickens even more. Between 12 noon and 12.30pm on 1st April, a day or so after "TonyBlair4Labour" went up, it changed its privacy policy to remove any reference to Blair’s charities and the OQR. But interestingly, they still say that your information could be used “to provide you with information about the activities of Tony Blair and his Labour Party activities”.
What do I conclude? I am angry that my data has been transferred from 10, Downing Street on to the Labour Party. I am even more alarmed at the thought of those signing up to a charity to do something about good governance in Africa might have been transferred to Labour, and that the new Blair/ Labour site named as partners both his Africa charity and his taxpayer funded Quartet office. That is why I have written to the Charity Commission and considering also taking up the data transfer issues with the Information Commissioner.
Either way, Tony Blair has some serious questions to answer about his business dealings. I don't think this will be the end of the matter on the issue.
Gordon Brown is probably already regretting bringing back Blair, but he may well find that Downing Street itself has questions to answer too.