My court fight to expose the government's secret failings

Holly Bancroft on an exhausting two-year legal battle

- Holly Bancroft

It was in the bowels of the Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall that I was handed a piece of paper by a government lawyer, to read in silence, that would put me at the heart of a nearly two-year legal battle in Britain's High Court a battle involving a major data breach, secret government operations, and the most far-reaching legal order ever imposed on the British press.

I had been brought to the MoD building, on Friday 8 December 2023, by a story I was investigating. Since the botched evacuation of Kabul in August 2021, I had extensively covered the government's attempts - and failures - to bring Afghan soldiers who had fought alongside Britain, and were desperately trying to escape the clutches of the Taliban, to the UK.

I had revealed stories about those who had worked for the UK but had been told their links were not strong enough to make them eligible for Arap or ACRS, two resettlement schemes set up by Britain for at-risk Afghans. But now something curious was happening - some of those who had previously been refused sanctuary were receiving emails from the MoD, telling them that they were in fact eligible to be relocated to the UK.

After approaching the government, I was summoned to the MoD main building for a briefing. There, I was put through a security screening and led to a meeting room, where I was promptly served with an order. The order warned that, if I disobeyed it, I could end up in jail.

I was then handed a brief revealing that my story was one piece of a top secret puzzle that no one in the world - not even my editors, at that point - was allowed to know about.

In that moment, the magnitude of what was happening began to dawn on me. The confidential note revealed that a dataset of “a very significant number of names and personal details” of Arap applicants was now in the hands of “at least one unauthorised third party”. Extracts from the dataset had also been published on Facebook.