A leaked government document at the heart of an Official Secrets Act trial contained a “stinking fish” that had the potential to cause political embarrassment to President Bush, a defence barrister told the Old Bailey yesterday.

Rex Tedd, QC, acting for David Keogh, a 50-year-old civil servant who read the document and took a copy of it out of his office, said that his client had handed it over to a friend because its contents had preyed on his conscience.

The document was a recorded minute, in the form of a letter, of a two-hour meeting about Iraq between Tony Blair and Mr Bush, at the White House, on April 16, 2004.

The letter, written by Mr Blair’s private secretary for foreign affairs, was faxed to 10 Downing Street from Washington and then relayed to a Cabinet Office communications centre, where Mr Keogh was on duty.

Mr Tedd was not allowed to disclose the contents of the document in open court.

The jury has seen it, but all questions relating to the document have been restricted to in camera sessions, from which the press and the public are barred.

However, in summing up the defence case, Mr Tedd quoted a poem that refers to a “stinking fish that sits in the sun”. He said that this was how Mr Keogh felt when he read the document.

What he read he found “utterly wrong”, Mr Tedd said, and he took the risk of losing his job, his pension and even his liberty by disclosing it.

Mr Keogh and Leo O’Connor, 44, a researcher for a Labour MP, are charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act 1989 by making an unauthorised disclosure of a secret document likely to cause damage to Britain’s defence and international relations. They have pleaded not guilty, but have admitted being in possession of a copy of the document.

Mr Tedd focused his summing-up on whether disclosure of the document could have caused real damage, at a time when revelations were emerging about the ill-treatment by American military personnel of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

A copy of the fax that Mr Keogh received at the “Pindar” communications centre in Whitehall was handed to Mr O’Connor in Northampton, where they both lived.

The original intention, the court was told, was for Mr O’Connor to send it to John Kerry, the Democrat candidate for the 2004 US presidential election. However, Mr O’Connor slipped the document into a pile of parliamentary papers on the desk of Anthony Clarke, Labour MP for Northampton, for whom he worked as a researcher. Special Branch was called in.

Mr Tedd said that there was nothing in the document that related to British troop action in Iraq, and denied that there was anything in it that could have led to an increased risk to British soldiers.

He said: “On May 1 [2003] President Bush proclaimed the end of major combat operations and a banner behind him said, ‘Mission accomplished’. By April 2004, the period concerned, you might think a fair description would be ‘Mission in trouble’.”

The trial continues.

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