Civil servant who lost secret files was set for NATO ambassadorial role
The senior civil servant who lost 50 pages of classified and secret Ministry of Defense (MoD) documents was due to be promoted to the role of UK ambassador to NATO.
According to The Guardian (August 03), Angus Lapsley’s promotion is now highly unlikely as he has forfeited his security clearance because of his grave carelessness.
Quoting two government sources, The Guardian reports that Lapsley’s security clearance has been suspended pending a full review and he has been redeployed from the MoD to the Foreign Office, from where he was on secondment.
Lapsley is a veteran civil servant who entered government service in 1991 and reportedly acted as a private secretary for Tony Blair in the early years of his premiership before joining the Foreign Office (now officially called the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office).
The secret documents that Lapsley lost – and were later found by a member of the public at a bus stop in Kent – were focused on the UK military and Special Forces’ future role in Afghanistan and provocative naval maneuvers in the Black Sea designed to irritate Russia.
There is growing consternation that Lapsley has not been sufficiently punished for losing secret and classified material which could have potentially fallen into the hands of foreign intelligence services.
Last month, James Sunderland, who is Tory MP for the Bracknell constituency and previously served in the armed forces, said the individual who removed the documents from a government building “must be held fully to account” as “the incident must have involved the deliberate removal of pink (secret) documents from the MoD secure area”.
For its part, the MoD said in a written statement to the House of Commons last week that “there was no evidence of espionage” and furthermore there “has been no compromise of the papers by our adversaries”.
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