My love-match with “Mr E”

Is that Matthew Davis on the line?

Every year I send an FoI request to the BBC to see how many free tickets the Corporation gets for Wimbledon.

Over the years the request has been modified to discriminate between tickets for No.1 and Centre Court and most recently who had received the tickets.

This year after a little bit of misunderstanding with the lovely people in the BBC’s FoI office I was eventually handed the names of the people who got the prize tickets, those for the men’s final on centre court.

Imagine my surprise when I see on the letter that one pair went to F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone. I knew I had a story and as you can see below it made a nice show in the Sun.

But then things took a turn for the worse when my phone rang on the morning the story was published. The conversation went a bit like this.

Caller: Is that Matthew Davis?

Me: Yes.

Caller: Mr Ecclestone here.

Me (in high voice): What Mr Bernie Ecclestone?

Caller: Yes, that’s me. Listen, I don’t like people who write lies about me. I didn’t get any freebie tickets for Wimbledon. Why would I have to accept freebies?

As you can imagine at this point I was getting a little concerned. Images of my bankruptcy, being forced to live in the street with my children foraging in dustbins flashed before my eyes.

I told him that I hadn’t made it up but had been provided with the information by the BBC, and seeing as it was a FoI response I was happy to forward it on to him. You can see a copy here Beeb’s FoI reply.

Later that day I got another personal call from Mr Ecclesstone, where he admitted being reminded by one of his staff that he did accept a pair of tickets from the BBC, but handed them on to the President of Valencia.

It all ended quite amicably and I had quite a nice chat with ‘Mr E’.

As a part-time media law lecturer one of the things that has always appealed to me about FoI is how the answer should always act as a justification against any potential legal problems, as long as your interpretation of it is correct. Hence the need to make your question as crystal clear as possible.

What is the “public interest”?

Look into my eyes...look into my eyes

What is in the public interest has always been something of a thorny issue, especially when it comes to its use in Freedom of Information.

Personally I say thank the Lords (because apparently it was the House of Lords which decided to put the public interest test into FoI) that we have this weapon to set about the Qualified exemptions.

At the moment I’m involved in two disputes over information at opposite ends of the spectrum, but both hinge on the public interest test.

The first involves the Cabinet Office and its refusal to reveal documents written by our ex Prime Minister Tony Blair that were sent to George Bush.

These notes are central to the Iraq inquiry, whose head Sir John Chilcot asked to make the documents public, and when this was refused said the decision was “disappointing”.

The crux of these documents is whether they confirm the belief among many people that Tony Blair gave his word to the US President that British troops would join the war, before Parliament voted on the issue.

You can see the history of this request at WhatDoTheyKnow [here], and I’ve blogged about this in the past [here]. The information has been denied me on the basis S.35 (formulation of Government policy), S.36 (prejudice to the effective conduct of public affairs) and S.27 (international relations).

Were our troops sent to war just because Blair had “promised”? Could there be a clearer public interest? The case is now in the hands of the Information Commissioner.

Headmaster Vic Goddard flicks the Vs at his deputy head. Mr Chips he is not.

At the other end of the scale some of you may have been watching #EducatingEssex, a horrific fly-on-the-wall documentary about a school in Harlow.

I watch the show goggle-eyed at the way the show profiteers from seeing children taken into care, getting involved in scrapes with the police, getting pregnant, abusing teachers.

We are at the end of the series next week and ironically we have seen precious little educating of the Essex populous.

As a journalist I have to tread incredibly carefully if I do a story that identifies a child, particularly if it is something to do with their schooling – but this programme seems to have side-swerved the regulations in exchange for children grabbing their five minutes of fame. Responsible journalism? I think not.

So I wanted to know how much the documentary company paid the school for the privilege of being allowed into the school.

Surprise, surprise, they will not tell me. You can see the full response to my questions [Passmores1]. But they have applied the S.43 (commercial interests) exemption, and yes you’ve guessed it the public interest is not to disclose the amount.

Amazing that the public interest is in knowing which of his students are pregnant at 15, which of them get taken into care, which of them run away from home – but not how much the school got paid for selling off the pupils’ private lives for the amusement of viewers.

I’ve appealed this back to the headmaster Vic Goddard – a man who on the show seems to insist in empathising with errant schoolchildren by calling them “mate”. I suspect this case will run and run.

NOTE: Apologies for being away for so long.