LEAKS targeting government ministers are illegal and are undermining the impartiality of the Civil Service, according to a prominent barrister.
Steven Barrett told GB News: “Leaking is wrong and it’s been going on since 2019. We’ve been losing a succession of ministers to leaking and we don’t appear to have a grip on it.
“Now, that is a wrong, it is a legal wrong. But whether you care about any specific legal wrong is a matter of your own personal political opinion.
“There does seem to be a great push to sort of weaponise any sort of technical legal breach and to get people very upset about it.”
In a discussion with Patrick Christys, he continued: “It does seem to me that a lengthy legal wrong is occurring within the civil service itself. We have leaking and we have its record of impartiality, which is becoming very questionable.
“When that’s been thrown into very serious doubt recently, we’ve had former very high-level civil servants publicly bragging that they felt they had a role in bringing down a Prime Minister. Now that’s a grotesque breach of impartiality.
“We we’ve had the ongoing situation with Sue Grey, there are an awful lot of questions to be asked about the Civil Service itself, and nobody seems particularly interested in asking them.”
He added: “There are checks and balances on our judiciary, and they keep us with the healthiest and best judges that we have in the world. There are no obvious checks and balances on the Civil Service.
“And there’s no obvious appeal system. We don’t really know what’s going on inside it at any time.”
