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Ministers should have been made aware of inflammatory tweets by the UK-Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah before his arrival in Britain last week, according to the former head of the UK Foreign Office.
Lord Peter Ricketts said that with hindsight ministers should have been told by officials about the historic social media comments by Abdel Fattah before they welcomed him to Britain with open arms, a move that has sparked a fierce political row.
Sir Keir Starmer said on Friday that he was “delighted” that the activist had come to Britain, only to discover later the tweets Abdel Fattah had posted, which the prime minister described on Monday as “absolutely abhorrent”.
Yvette Cooper, foreign secretary, has ordered an official inquiry at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office into the “serious information failures” that the case had unearthed.
Ricketts, former FCDO permanent secretary, said on Tuesday that while the department had to deal with many consular cases, the inquiry should establish that those involving direct ministerial interventions had to be treated differently.
“Where officials are going to ask ministers to lobby on behalf of dual nationals, then probably there should be background checks, due diligence to try and avoid some of the problems that have cropped up in the last few days,” he told the BBC.
Cooper told the Commons foreign affairs committee this week that previous foreign secretaries and prime ministers had made public statements on Abdel Fattah’s case “without all relevant information”.
The Conservatives and Reform UK have called for Abdel Fattah’s citizenship to be revoked and for him to be deported, following the disclosure of a tweet in 2012 appearing to call for the killing of “Zionists”. He had separately appeared to call for the killing of police in 2011. He has apologised “unequivocally” for the tweets.
Starmer has apologised to Britain’s Jewish community for initially enthusiastically embracing the return of Abdel Fattah, but Downing Street has insisted that the activist was welcome in the UK.
“We welcome the return of a British citizen unfairly detained abroad, as we would in all cases and as we have done in the past,” Number 10 said on Monday.
Earlier this year Egypt pardoned Abdel Fattah, seen as the country’s most prominent political prisoner, after he was jailed over his opposition to authoritarianism.
The blogger and software developer has spent most of the past 11 years in prison with a six-month break in 2019 during which he still had to sleep every night in a police station.
The row comes at a sensitive time for Starmer’s Labour government, which is facing pressure from the right on immigration, with Reform UK calling for mass deportations of people deemed to be living in the country illegally.
A new poll has found shifting attitudes over what makes someone “British”, with a growing number of people (36 per cent) saying a person must be born in the UK to be truly British, up from 19 per cent in 2023.
The YouGov poll for the Institute for Public Policy Research found that a majority still believe being British is rooted in shared values, but a growing number argued it was more to do with ethnicity, birthplace and ancestry.
The poll found that 37 per cent of Reform voters said they would be prouder of their country if there were fewer people from minority ethnic backgrounds living in Britain in 10 years’ time.