Last week Home Office officials released more than 500 pages of internal files detailing some of the most controversial issues that Howard dealt with during his time as home secretary in the 1990s.
However, dozens of requests asking for information about the Home Office under Labour have been refused and only the most anodyne information has been released.
The department has published information in response to a total of 16 requests, but seven directly relate to Howard, prompting fears that the act may have been hijacked for political gain.
Chris Grayling, shadow leader of the house, said a cabinet minister had privately boasted to him that he was “proud” to have dodged potentially embarrassing disclosures by working the system.
“It is very clear that the government is using the act for political purposes,” said Grayling. “The rules are applied in a very lax fashion when it suits them, but are very rigid suddenly when it applies to information about current government policies and ministers.”
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Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, who oversees the system, is to make his first rulings on decisions by central government to block disclosures over the next fortnight. He is expected to criticise the government over some decisions to withhold information.
The latest Home Office releases detail the meltdown in the prison service in the mid- 1990s under Howard that led to the ousting of Derek Lewis, its director-general. Information about passport applications made by Mohamed al-Fayed and involving Howard in the 1990s have also been disclosed.
The Lewis affair became a heated issue in the run-up to 1997 election when Howard, was accused of lying about the extent of his involvement in a decision to remove John Marriott, the governor of Parkhurst prison, from his post.
Lewis wrote a book in which he accused Howard of political interference in the civil service. He said Howard had pressured him to remove Marriott following the escape of several prisoners in 1995. In the fallout Ann Widdecombe, a minister under Howard, claimed her former boss had “something of the night” in his personality.
Howard skirted the issue in parliament over whether he had forced Lewis to remove Marriott. But he was famously pressed on the matter 14 times by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. He conceded during the interview: “I gave him the benefit of my opinion in strong language. I was not entitled to instruct Derek Lewis what to do, and I did not instruct him.”
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The newly released memos shed fresh light on the affair. Richard Wilson, then Howard’s permanent secretary and later head of the civil service, set out his recollection of events to Howard in a memo.
In a section marked “The Facts”, he wrote: “First, you did want Marriott to be suspended . . . You did at one point say some very angry things about Derek (Lewis) to Joan MacNaughton (another Home Office official) and me. These included saying that unless he did as you wanted you were going to sack him and announce that you had done so in your statement. We discouraged you.”
In another memo assessing Howard’s performance in parliament, an official wrote: “My own view is that the home secretary’s answers were incorrect or at least incomplete.”
The Fayed releases reveal that Charles Wardle, a junior Home Office minister, was asked to take “informal soundings” in the City about whether the owner of Harrods and his brother should be granted British passports. But the memos do not document any direct involvement in the decision by Howard, who opted to exclude himself from the application.
During the recent general election campaign the Labour party was accused of using the Freedom of Information Act to dig for dirt on the Conservatives. A leaked memo revealed that Labour activists were urged to apply for information about Howard. A row erupted after confidential papers detailing the devaluation of the pound on Black Monday were released.
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Last week it emerged that the Home Office had responded to only 28% of requests compared with an average of 50% across government. This week, a booklet to be published by the think tank Civitas will accuse the Home Office of suppressing research undermining policy.
The Home Office denied that requests under the act were being politically manipulated.