Sunday 10 January 2016

The unseen Lucy Allan evidence - what we know about the 'Unless you die' email

   
I have been appalled at Lucy Allan’s consistent refusal to publish the email which she claims contains the words ‘Unless you die’. This would be the only evidence there is to support Lucy Allan’s claim that these words came from a separate email rather than from her own hand.

As an MP, Lucy Allan must follow the House of Commons Code of Conduct and two of the General Principles of Conduct are Accountability and Openness which state:

Accountability

Holders of public office are accountable for their decisions and actions to the public and must submit themselves to whatever scrutiny is appropriate to their office.

Openness

Holders of public office should be as open as possible about all the decisions and actions that they take. They should give reasons for their decisions and restrict information only when the wider public interest clearly demands.’

I believe that by failing to publish the email that Lucy Allan claims to exist she is fundamentally breaching these Principles of Conduct and it is little wonder that people wish to complain to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. (See here for my simple guide)

So let us summarise what we know about this unpublished email and try and understand why Lucy Allan will not publish it.

What we know about the ‘Unless you die’ email

  
1.     It was received on 27th November 2015 as Lucy Allan has confirmed that it was received on the same day as the email from ‘Rusty Shackleford’ (pseudonym of Adam Watling).

2.     The email is anonymous as stated in Lucy Allan’s official statement.

3.     Lucy Allan did not regard this email as a ‘threat of any kind’ as stated in her statement on her facebook page.

4.     Lucy Allan stated to me by email on 24th December 2015:

‘Please note the police have a file containing various online malicious communications, which include communications containing the words to which you refer.

5.     On 4th January 2016 I asked Lucy Allan for clarification of this statement which seems to be inconsistent with her official statement that the words ‘Unless you die’ came from one single communication but I still await a reply.

6.     There has been no statement from Lucy Allan to say that the police are preventing her from publishing the ‘Unless you die’ email but I asked Lucy Allan on 4th January 2016 to confirm this.

7.     If this unseen email exists, there seems to me to be no reason why Lucy Allan cannot publish it because it is anonymous, it does not constitute a threat and she was very quick to publish the doctored email from Adam Watling and she was very quick to release the telephone threat to the media.

8.     As far as I have seen, Lucy Allan has not offered an explanation as to why she did not report the alleged cyber-harassment campaign and online malicious communications to the police until after her doctoring of Adam Watling’s email with the words ‘Unless you die’ was exposed. When she published Adam Watling’s email on 1st December 2015 she introduced this by saying that from that day she intended to publish the online abuse she received. There was no mention of reporting the abuse to the police at that stage. Common sense tells me that if Lucy Allan believed that the online abuse was serious enough to be a police matter, she should have notified the police straight away on the 27th November 2015, when she received the emails from Adam Watling and the anonymous author of the words ‘Unless you die’, or perhaps the following day. Instead, she felt then it was not a police matter and then waited 4 days before publishing the doctored email from Adam Watling on 1st December 2015. According to newspaper reports Lucy Allan then made a report to the Metropolitan Police on 2nd December 2015 and a separate report to West Mercia Police on 4th December 2015.  

9.        Lucy Allan only has a small majority of 730. The last thing she can afford to do is lose votes. She has lost the support of many Conservative voters by her refusal to publish the email with the words ‘Unless you die’ and by her refusal to give a credible explanation for withholding it.  She has also damaged the chances of her gaining votes from Labour supporters because of her ongoing attack on the Labour Party. Therefore, politically, it makes every sense to publish the ‘Unless you die’ email so that she can try and win back some support. It is hard to understand why her colleagues in the Conservative Party have not urged her to publish the email because they surely can see the political benefit of her doing so……… Unless, of course, that email simply does not exist and that is the logical conclusion Lucy Allan has driven me to.


Neil Phillips
10th January 2016

I am a Telford resident who has always previously voted Conservative