Extracts from government memoranda and emails
Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street
From:
Peter Maxwell
To:
Herbert Berkshire, Foreign & Commonwealth Office
Subject:
Yemensalmon project
Date:
14 October
Herbert,
The PM was asked about the Yemen salmon project in the House yesterday. It is not an issue he wants to take up any parliamentary time. Our concern is that the involvement of a government agency (NCFE) may be wrongly construed as suggesting that this project has official government backing.
You will, I am sure, understand that our posture has always been supportive with respect to the Yemen salmon project. If it works, then I am sure the PM will be happy to endorse it, and perhaps make a personal visit as a private guest of the sheikh to see the salmon running. Meanwhile we need more deniability.
I suggest that the scientist Jones, who is doing all the work at NCFE, is disemployed from the agency with immediate effect. If you think this can be done by a word in the right ear, he could perhaps be re-employed by Fitzharris, the consultants who are project managers for the sheikh. That is a matter for them. The important thing is that no civil servant or government official should be directly connected with this project. NCFE should, in my view, be discouraged from being so close to the project. Whilst NCFE is part of DEFRA, this essentially is a matter of foreign policy and that is why I am airing the matter with you.
This memo is only a suggestion, of course. I leave it to you in your wisdom to decide the right course events should take.
Peter
Memo
From:
Herbert Berkshire
To:
Peter Maxwell
Subject:
Salmon⁄Yemen
Date:
14 October
Peter,
Thank you for your suggestion of today’s date. I think it is wise that the Yemen salmon project should be perceived as a wholly private-sector project, and I will make appropriate noises in appropriate ears in due course.
Herbert
From:
Date:
14 October
To:
Subject:
Yemen salmon project
David,
There is a degree of concern in (senior) government circles with respect to current NCFE management issues. There is a view developing at ministerial level that NCFE may have embraced the Yemen salmon project a little too enthusiastically. I think you need to be aware that Foreign Office policy is to maintain a neutral stance with respect to the Yemen, which is in a politically sensitive region of the world. Policy is not to, or be perceived to, do anything that might be interpreted as religious, political or cultural interference with that country by the UK government. I recall speaking to you about NCFE giving some limited technical support to the Yemen salmon project as a goodwill gesture, but I cannot imagine that your own department or mine ever envisaged at that time the level of involvement NCFE now has. However, I think you should know my own department has advised, and will continue to advise, government that it is important there are no grounds for a perception being formed by the media and others that the project in any way has official backing. Some ministers, I know, feel a concern that NCFE is now overdependent on the income stream from the Yemen salmon project, and might be said by uninformed observers to be somewhat in the pocket of a private Yemeni individual.
Whilst no one (as far as I know) wants the project to be stopped, it might be a creative and responsible course of action if you were to put a little more distance between your agency and the project and its sponsor.
Herbert
From:
Date:
14 October
To:
Subject:
(no subject)
Fred, please come to my office asap.
From:
Date:
14 October
To:
Subject:
New job
Dear Mary,
I have lost my job.
There were, apparently, some awkward questions in the House of Commons about the Yemen salmon project last week. As a result of that someone called Herbert Berkshire from the Foreign Office rang my boss to say it might be better if I ceased to be on the Civil Service payroll. Apparently Peter Maxwell wants ‘clear blue water’ between the government and the Yemen salmon project.
So, the bad news is, I have had my employment contract with NCFE terminated. David called me into the office and explained that it was ‘no longer appropriate in all of the circumstances’ for me to continue. ‘There was concern in the department at imbalances in workload and priorities caused by the growing demands of the project.’ I have received an appallingly small redundancy cheque and a month’s pay in lieu of notice. David Sugden handed me both yesterday, and explained I had the right to go to an employment tribunal if I did not like the circumstances in which my contract had been terminated.
Needless to say, there was a bit more to it than this. At almost the same time the lady who manages most of the sheikh’s affairs in the UK (a Ms Chetwode-Talbot, I can’t remember if I have mentioned her name before) sent me an offer of employment. The contract will run for an initial three years and my salary will be-wait for it-£120,000 a year!!! On top of that I will receive a car allowance, plus pension, plus health insurance, plus special hardship allowances for travelling and time spent working in the Yemen. The bottom line is, the project will continue, but now I will be working for Fitzharris & Price, the firm that manages the sheikh’s UK affairs, and the government will be able to say there is no official UK involvement in this project.
I don’t know what to think about it all. On the one hand I am sad to leave the NCFE, where I have spent most of my working life, and I feel sure that once I am out I will never get back in, at least not in the same position. On the other hand, now I am working for the sheikh I am no longer bound by all our departmental procedures-I can just get on with the project, and to be honest that is what I most want to do.
So, Mary, I am now a very well paid and independent fisheries scientist. Well paid enough that you could afford to give up your job in Geneva and come back home to me. I know it isn’t just the money, but maybe you could think about it?
I miss you.
Come back home.
With much love
Your Fred
XXX
From:
Date:
16 October
To:
Subject:
New employment
Fred,
I don’t know what to say. It appears you have been forced out of a respectable if not overpaid position which you have worked hard to get in order to make some politician or other feel more comfortable. What will happen about your pension? It was a final salary scheme, wasn’t it? What are your new pension arrangements? I doubt the private sector will give you anything as generous as you got as a civil servant. Now you tell me you are working for Fitzharris & Price. I looked them up on their website. They appear to be estate agents. What is a (once) eminent fisheries scientist doing working for people whose main business appears to be managing and selling property?
I feel very sorry for you. I suppose the money is some compensation while it lasts, but how long will it last? What happens to you when the project is complete or, more likely, stopped? As for me coming back, I am amazed you think so little of my career and what I might want to do. I am afraid I am not as whimsical about career changes as you have become. I have plans for my own career which now depend on me doing at least two years in the Geneva office, and I am afraid I am not coming home just so that you get the washing and ironing and cooking done for you. Life doesn’t work like that, not in modern marriages between professional people. Anyway, won’t you be spending half your time in the Yemen? Your project can’t all be managed from behind a desk, can it?
So, I am sorry, but your abrupt job change, far from making me feel more secure about our joint income, suggests to me that it is more important than ever that I consolidate my position as the main breadwinner, notwithstanding the (I am afraid, probably temporary) elevation in your salary. No, you did not mention ‘Ms Chetwode-Talbot’ to me before. Who is she? Is she your new boss? I looked her up when I checked out the website. Her photograph is shown there. She does not look much like a businesswoman, does she? Is she qualified in anything?
Love,
Mary
PS: I am conscious I have been a little brief with respect to personal matters. I appreciate your saying you miss me. I have been too busy of late to reflect as deeply on personal issues as I should. I recognise that a work-life balance has to be sustained, and that to wholly subordinate one’s personal life to one’s career is self-defeating and just as likely to damage one’s career path as the other way round. Therefore you might like to make a diary note that I have some leave coming up next June, which is only eight months away. Perhaps it would be appropriate to spend a few days together to reassess our lives, jointly and individually.
From:
Date:
16 October
To:
Subject:
Re: New employment
Mary,
Are we married or aren’t we?
Fred
PS: What are you implying about Harriet Chetwode-Talbot? She is an extremely able manager running a project whose budget runs into millions.
From:
Date:
17 October
To:
Subject:
Re: Re: New employment
Fred,
I suggest we resume communications when you are in a more temperate frame of mind.
Mary
PS: I am not implying anything about Ms Chetwode-Talbot. Or Harriet, as you referred to her just now. I know my own personal life is free from blame or complication. I trust you can say the same.
Article in the Daily Telegraph, 1 November
Prime minister has other fish to fry
Following the reported assassination attempt on a Yemen sheikh in the Scottish Highlands, in a statement today a spokesman for the prime minister distanced his office from the Yemen salmon project. The spokesman denied there had been any such incident and cited the absence of any involvement by local police forces.
The Yemen salmon project was officially launched in June this year. It initially received technical support from the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence. Now NCFE has announced it has ceased advising the salmon project team. David Sugden, director of NCFE, stated: ‘It is not a priority for the centre. We did carry out some advisory work in the early stages of the project, but the centre’s mandate has always been, and will continue to be, scientific work to support the Environment Agency and others in their task of looking after fisheries in English and Welsh rivers. Getting salmon to run up watercourses in the Yemen has never been high on our agenda, and although we were delighted to make an initial technical contribution, the project falls well outside the mainstream of our work.’
In July this year Prime Minister Jay Vent indicated his support for the Yemen salmon project, although the project never achieved official inter-governmental status. Sensitivities about other British and US initiatives in the region have resulted in the prime minister’s office backing away from a closer association with salmon fishing in the Yemen.
The spokesman from Number 10 Downing Street added, ‘The prime minister is always supportive of sporting and cultural initiatives such as this one, but at the moment he has other fish to fry.’
Editorial, the Rannoch & Tulloch Reporter, 3 November
Prime minister casts doubt upon the veracity of our reporter
Last week we published a detailed account of an alleged attempt on the life of an eminent local resident, the Laird of Glen Tulloch, Sheikh Muhammad.
Eyewitness reports which reached us suggested that the individual concerned in this attempt was wearing a Campbell tartan which we feel sure he was not entitled to wear but no doubt was intended to help him avoid detection until he was close enough to make the attempt. We understand that this individual may have been of Arab extraction and that his attempt to pass himself off as a native of this glen was not notably successful. We are given to understand that the alleged would-be murderer was only restrained at the last moment by the intervention of one of the sheikh’s employees, the respected and enterprising Colin McPherson.
We understand Mr McPherson detained him with a size 8 Ally Shrimp treble hook on a 15-pound line, and took less than five minutes to play him. After that achievement, it is unclear what the subsequent fate of the individual was. We make no allegations, but merely speculate that if he is not in Glen Tulloch, then he is somewhere else, possibly somewhere with more sand than Glen Tulloch.
No doubt events in remote Scottish glens are of little interest to the London or even the Edinburgh press these days, but we were surprised that no other paper saw fit to reproduce our scoop. Indeed the first notice that anyone outside of our regular readers took of this event was when an official from the prime minister’s office rang up and asked us what our source for the story was. It is not this newspaper’s policy, and never has been, to identify a journalistic source without consent. In this case we have no such consent. We also note from the national press the day after we broke the story, that it was labelled a ‘hoax’, by a spokesman from the prime minister’s office. We are not given to hoaxes in this paper. We are here to report the facts, and we are appalled and alarmed by the casual slur by the prime minister’s spokesman on the integrity and competence of the Rannoch and Tulloch Reporter, which has been faithfully reporting on events up and down the length of Glen Tulloch for the last hundred years.
Editorial , Trout & Salmon
Traditional British common sense
We are pleased, even delighted, to record a rare victory for common sense in the world of British fisheries science. Readers will recall our dismay earlier this year at the way the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence had been drawn into supporting the Yemen salmon project. We commented that there were enough unsolved problems in our own rivers without diverting scarce resources to what sounded like a scientifically impossible project to introduce salmon into non-existent watercourses in the Middle East.
It is therefore with some pleasure that we saw David Sugden (the director of NCFE) quoted in the national press as saying that NCFE was no longer involved in this project. We might all speculate as to the reasons behind this apparent change of heart by the government, whose interest, we suspect, led to the involvement of NCFE in the first place.
Now NCFE has freed up the considerable resources it was devoting to the Yemen salmon project, could we, through these pages, urge Director David Sugden to allocate time to some scientific issues in the real world? We desperately need more research into the effects of rapid changes in water temperature on the hatching of dace eggs.
Article in the Yemen Daily News
Translated from the Arabic by tarjim.ajeeb.com
(Arabic Internet-based translation site).
Fish project is spawning new initiatives
The piscatorial initiative of Sheikh Muhammad ibn Zaidi bani Tihama is reaching new levels today. Work has now started on the construction of artificial lakes in which salmon from UK will swim around until summer rains are coming. When the rains are coming, the salmon will leave the lakes and swim up the Wadi Aleyn.
Considerable sporting interest is already arousing amongst the peoples in the Wilayat Aleyn. Well known and famous local businessman, Ali Husseyn, is already importing through his extremely notorious and excellent business Global Import Export LLP, the finest fishing rods manufactured by his family interests in Mumbai, India.
Also interesting tourism possibilities are occurring, with the promised opening after Ramadan of two new guest bedrooms in the Aleyn Rest House, with inside washing room facilities in the European style.
Soon a team of top scientists and engineers is coming with the sheikh to stay at his palace and make scientific observations and deductions, in order to have the best possibility for the future survival and sporting value of the introduced fish.
The Yemen Daily News is gladly announcing such initiative by Sheikh Muhammad, who is also a personal friend of the British Prime Minister Mr Vent.