The man given the task of compiling government documents supporting the case for remaining in the EU is a close and long-time friend of George Osborne.
The chancellor plucked Matthew Gould from his former role in charge of protecting Britain against cyberwarfare and persuaded David Cameron to put him in charge of a cabinet office “referendum unit”. The two men have known each other since both were members of their school’s chess club.
Mr Gould has no record of strongly pro-EU roles and served largely outside the bloc during his previous career as a diplomat.
The unit, expected to oversee a series of dossiers warning voters of the consequences of leaving the EU, is regarded by Brexit campaigners as the “HQ of Project Fear”.
Yesterday’s 23-page report detailing the complexities of disentangling trade arrangements will be followed by further dossiers on the alternatives to EU membership, how the rights and obligations of membership would change and a Treasury cost-benefit analysis. However, friends insist that it is unfair to call Mr Gould the “Scaremonger General”.
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He studied divinity at Peterhouse, Cambridge, after attending St Paul’s at the same time as the chancellor. The two remain close — Mr Gould and his wife, Celia, a fashion designer, recently attended a Downing Street social function at which Mr Osborne lavished praise on the intellectual brilliance of his friend.
The chancellor recommended Mr Gould after a Whitehall shake-up in which GCHQ took over responsibility for cyberdefence after TalkTalk, the internet provider, was breached last autumn. Mr Gould was initially reluctant to take the job but has since come to regard it as a professional challenge, according to his friends.
He became Britain’s first Jewish ambassador to Israel after serving under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in No 10 and has a reputation for being a forward-thinking, business-minded innovator among his peers.
He was drawn into the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s private emails when a note he sent on behalf of David Miliband, his boss from 2007 until May 2010, surfaced in Washington detailing the former foreign secretary’s secret assessment of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president at the time.
The contents of the email were redacted by the US state department and Mr Gould escaped formal censure, with the foreign office insisting that he had sent the email “in confidence” rather than “confidential” information.
