For more than a year Christopher Galley, a civil servant, had put his job on the line for the man who had become his political mentor, Damian Green, the Shadow Immigration Minister.
Mr Galley, 27, the most prolific Tory mole of modern times, had taken huge risks to smuggle sensitive documents out of the Home Office.
But now he had been caught, threatened with imprisonment and fired from his job. It was time, he thought, to call in a few favours.
During one meeting with Mr Green, Mr Galley remembered the MP telling him: “If you are fired, we will look after you.” So, last month, Mr Galley e-mailed him for help. It took four days for the reply to come and when it did it was as cold as ice.
“Thank you for your e-mail,” Mr Green wrote. “I am delighted that this is now at an end and, as the Director of Public Prosecutions said, ‘The documents leaked undoubtedly touched on matters of legitimate public interest and [my] purpose in using the documents was apparently to hold the Government to account.’ This is exactly the case. All good wishes, Damian.”
It was an astonishing brush-off for a man whose leaks to the Tories on crime and immigration had repeatedly embarrassed the Government. That ended on November 19 last year when Mr Galley was arrested. Eight days later, police also arrested Mr Green and carried out a raid on his Parliamentary office.
In the resulting furore, Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons, was denounced for allowing police into the Palace of Westminster — though he later denied this.
Last month, both Mr Galley and Mr Green were relieved to be told by Keir Starmer, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, that they would not face charges over the leaks.
But for Mr Galley there was little reason to celebrate. In an interview with The Times this week, he said that he now felt betrayed by the Conservatives and claimed that he was cynically cultivated as a mole.
“I think I have been terribly naive,” Mr Galley said. “I feel as though I have been dumped and they are treating me as political poison, as if they don’t want to touch me now that I have done their dirty work.”
On April 24, the day that his brief Civil Service career ended, Mr Galley wrote to all 193 Conservative MPs in the House of Commons explaining his predicament and asking if any might give him some work. To date, none has been offered.
He received no help with the £3,400 legal bill he racked up as a consequence of his arrest and he expects to have to give up his home in Feltham, West London, and move in with his parents. He says his life is in ruins.
“I find it very painful to see the way my leaks have boosted Damian Green’s career while leaving me jobless, broke and with limited prospects,” he said. “Frankly, I feel the Tories have hung me out to dry.”
Mr Galley’s painful foray into the world of political dirty tricks began with an astonishing meeting with David Davis, then the Shadow Home Secretary, and ended unceremoniously with a dawn raid by anti-terror police.
Mr Galley, who was born in Sunderland to parents who were teachers, had been a civil servant for only three months when he was invited to Mr Davis’s office at the Commons in May 2006. Having gained a master’s in public administration from Northumbria University and a degree in military and international history at Salford, Mr Galley was working at the Border and Immigration Agency, now the UK Border Agency, in Hounslow, West London, helping to process applications from asylum seekers.
He had read an article on immigration posted by Mr Davis on the Conservative Party website and left a message on the site agreeing with the article and making a few suggestions. To his amazement, he received an e-mail asking him to meet the Shadow Home Secretary. “The invitation was to Davis’s Commons office,” said Mr Galley, who was then aged 24 and in the lowest rank of the Civil Service.
He is a quietly spoken man who lives alone. On one wall are posters quoting George Bush and David Brent from The Office. On another is a Royal Navy poster, reflecting an attempt to join the Forces that was turned down; he suffers from epilepsy.
“In the invitation it said, ‘Our immigration spokesman wants to be there as well’,” Mr Galley went on. “At the time I didn’t have a clue who he was. So this balding bloke turns up at the meeting. It was Damian Green.
I felt pretty intimidated. You had two senior politicians and a researcher sitting in a room and you have all this imposing architecture around you. And you have one of them sitting at one side and another at the other side and you’ve got questions coming from one and then the other.
“David Davis started off with the introductions and he basically wanted an explanation of what my role actually was. I told him I was only an admin assistant and I explained what I felt was wrong with the reporting centre where I worked. Damian Green then spoke about how he wanted to improve immigration and he said to keep in touch in the future.”
Asked whether he was ever explicitly asked to leak items by Mr Green, Mr Galley said: “He didn’t say that. I said that I could send some ideas in on how things could be improved. He said he would like that.”
In the following months, Mr Galley says, he wrote about seven letters to Mr Green with ideas and suggestions, and the MP wrote back encouragingly. “I got replies throughout the year,” said Mr Galley. “He sent two or three letters saying, ‘Keep up the good work’ and there was a letter at Christmas.”
In July 2007, Mr Galley was promoted to administration officer at the Home Office and told Mr Green of his progress. He was responsible for administration in the private office of Tony McNulty, then the minister responsible for policing and crime, and Vernon Coaker, an under-secretary of state and government whip.
“One day, I was sitting in Vernon's office and . . . a private secretary to Vernon and one of the assistant private secretaries were dealing with a matter relating to the Security Industry Authority [which licenses workers in the security industry],” he said. “They were looking at this document to do with how licences had been granted to asylum seekers to work in the SIA. But rather than trying to put a stop to that, these two people were actually trying to co-ordinate . . . a damage limitation exercise on how to keep it quiet, which I didn’t think was right.
“I got my hands on that document . . . copied it to my hard drive, then saved it and copied it to my Hotmail address and sent it to Damian Green. A day later it was published in a newspaper. I was pretty shocked. Damian telephoned me and said, ‘Well done. This is pretty explosive stuff'’.”
Buoyed by the encouragement, Mr Galley continued to leak. He told Mr Green about a failed asylum seeker working as a cleaner at the House of Commons. And while working in the office of two Labour political advisers at the Home Office, he gained access to whips’ lists on how Labour MPs were likely to vote on the Counter Terrorism Bill, which proposed introducing 42 days’ detention without charge.
These were handed over to Mr Green during meetings at Westminster Tube station. Finally, he leaked details of the anticipated effects of the recession on crime and immigration. All were used to embarrass the Government. Asked whether leaking had given him a thrill, Mr Galley replied: “There was a sense of achievement in getting this information into the public domain. But then I’d think, ‘For God’s sake, what have I done?’ ”
After the leak of the whips’ list, Mr Galley was interviewed as part of a Cabinet Office leak inquiry, but he was not identified as the mole. But when Scotland Yard was called in by Sir David Normington, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, Mr Galley quickly came under suspicion.
He was arrested at his home at 5.30am on November 19 last year. He decided to tell the police everything.“I rang [Mr Green] on the 20th to tell him I had been arrested and he put me in contact with someone from Liberty,” said Mr Galley. “I told him that I had given the police his name so he had plenty of advance warning . . . That was the last time he spoke to me.”
This has left Mr Galley disappointed. He says he was given an impression that the party would find work for him if he was exposed. “I started asking Damian if he would ask about vacancies in the middle [of the relationship] and he said he would,” said Mr Galley. “When I was interviewed by the Cabinet Office for the leak of the first whips’ list I telephoned Damian and told him I had been interviewed and he said, ‘If you are fired, we will look after you’. He did not actually say, ‘We will get you a job’, but I took it to mean that they would find me work. I think that is a pretty reasonable interpretation.”
Mr Galley says that the MP never crossed the line in actively encouraging him to leak documents; that would have been a criminal offence. However, the impression lingers that he was used. Asked if he felt he was groomed, Mr Galley replied: “Groomed? No. But cultivated? Yes.
“I think they were trying to form some kind of relationship at that first meeting. I know that to get two [Shadow] ministers together at the same time to see someone as lowly as I was is pretty difficult. As I wasn’t offering anything it does seem pretty strange.”
A Conservative official said last night that Mr Galley had never been offered employment. “Mr Galley first approached David Davis in 2006, saying that there were serious problems inside the immigration system. This was why a meeting took place. Shadow ministers routinely meet with a wide variety of people, at all levels, relating to their subject area.
“Chris Galley was emphatically not offered a job by Mr Green. Mr Galley sent a letter applying for a job with Mr Green in November 2006 and was not successful.”
Mr Galley is now living on dwindling savings and has had no luck finding a job. “I think people worry that I might not be trustworthy, but I can only assure them that I am,” he said. “I leaked on points of political principle. But the next chance I get, I’ll leave my politics behind.”
