by Sam McBride
Cairns said that he had made clear that the breakfast row had not been an isolated incident, and that there had been previous unpleasant altercations between Bell and DUP members in which Bell had been aggressive. But Robinson had ‘dismissed’ this, Cairns said. The spad admitted that his behaviour the previous day had been inappropriate. But Bell had previously denied to Robinson that he had done anything wrong. Cairns said that Robinson seemed to look disapprovingly on his voluntary admission of guilt at the first opportunity, viewing it as a sign of weakness. Robinson told the inquiry that in the meeting Cairns had ‘raised an issue about Mr Bell’s temper’ but that ‘no other complaints were submitted’. Cairns was told that he was not allowed to talk about what had gone on and that if he did so he would be immediately dismissed.
In a text message immediately after leaving Stormont Castle, Cairns told his friend Emma Little-Pengelly – at that point a DUP spad but who would go on become the DUP MP for South Belfast – that Bell had denied even sacking him when challenged by Johnston. However, Cairns said that Johnston had told Bell that ‘he didn’t make decisions and especially about his spad. He told him that he would go against the party officers at his peril and that if he didn’t like me while his name might legally be at the bottom of an appointment letter they could always get someone else to sign it’. Cairns went on: ‘JB [Bell] has come out of this very badly. Firstly because I now owe him nothing and will report his every transgression to TJ [Johnston] who wants him out. Also I’ve made sure Andrew and Arlene know that he is messing up in their department.’ Little-Pengelly replied: ‘He is a [expletive censored by the inquiry].’ Cairns then told her: ‘My goal now is that he was one year max and done. If I get a chance I’m going to film him drunk and talking shit and show it to TJ.’ Little-Pengelly endorsed this unorthodox approach to party discipline, telling Cairns: ‘You should – but he will rip your head off if he catches you!’
In another message, Little-Pengelly – who was herself close to Robinson – said she was ‘shocked’ that Robinson ‘would take [Bell’s] side in any way’. But then, alluding to Bell employing several of Robinson’s family, she added: ‘Of course he employs the family!’ Cairns responded with an intriguing message about Robinson’s lobbyist son, Gareth Robinson – who was not employed by Bell but had been lobbying Stormont departments in ways which were beginning to attract attention. Cairns said: ‘I laid it on thick about Gareth. That helped a bit.’ Little-Pengelly later denounced Bell in another message to Cairns as ‘a bully’ and nicknamed Bell ‘Ding Dong’.
Although Johnston had been advocating for Cairns in the meeting, it was a draining experience for Bell’s spad, who felt that Robinson was taking the side of his friend Bell and was not taking seriously the warnings about Bell’s temperament and behaviour. Cairns went to his doctor and was medically signed off work with stress. When told about what had gone on, his doctor asked: ‘Where on earth do you work? How is this even allowed to happen?’ Perhaps as a result of the DUP’s strict omerta about discussing internal party rows publicly, Cairns said: ‘I don’t want to say.’
The following day, Cairns exchanged messages with Bullick. Cairns told him he was ‘quite upset’ that Bell had ‘made allegations which are lies’, adding: ‘He’s done that in the past. He is attempting to assassinate my character.’ In an indication of how Bell was viewed by one of those closest to Robinson, Bullick replied: ‘He would lie without hesitation’.
Two weeks later, Johnston phoned Cairns to say that as a temporary civil servant he could either stay on sick leave for six months – but if he did so there would then be no party job for him – or he could return to work. Cairns said that he was assured by Johnston that there would be mutual apologies and a reconciliation meeting was arranged for the following day. It was a disappointment for Cairns who had expected to be moved to either another spad job or back into DUP headquarters, believing that he and Bell simply could not work together. His hope of moving had been ‘shattered’, he later told the inquiry, because other spads would not move to work with Bell. During his evidence to the inquiry, Dame Una O’Brien asked him why, having been treated like that, he did not walk away. Becoming momentarily emotional, Cairns responded: ‘Well, I guess we’ve got mortgages to pay and bills to pay and, yes … life.’
The day after Johnston’s phone call, Bell, Cairns and Johnston assembled in Stormont Castle. Johnston claimed that Robinson had been present – a potentially significant point because without his presence Johnston, who was being paid almost £92,000 a year from the public purse to assist Robinson with departmental business, was now engaged in a quasi-human resources role within the DUP. One of the few points on which Bell and Cairns agree is that Robinson was not present, with Cairns saying that he was ‘100%’ sure that Robinson was not even in the building because his police bodyguard’s vehicle was not outside. Robinson said that he had asked Johnston to set up the meeting but does not believe he was present for it.
But, having reluctantly come to accept that he was now going to have to return to working with Bell, Cairns was now to be doubly disappointed. Having been, he said, led to believe by Johnston that there would be mutual apologies, there was now no apology from Bell. Bell told the inquiry that ‘the supposed issue of my “temper” was never mentioned at the meeting. This allegation is completely new to me’.
Now Johnston turned the meeting to focus on what Cairns had missed in his two weeks away from the department. Cairns told the inquiry that ‘I recall NIRO and RHI being discussed. This was a very brief discussion … I was requested to liaise with Andrew Crawford, in the presence of Mr Bell who raised no objections.’ Cairns said that Johnston had said RHI cost controls would not be introduced and that he should work with Crawford on developing an alternative. However, Cairns gave two caveats to that evidence. He said that ‘I do not believe Timothy was fully appraised of the seriousness of the matter when he made that remark … to be absolutely fair to Mr Johnston, I don’t think he knew of what he was speaking.’ Then, when asked by inquiry chairman Sir Patrick Coghlin how sure he was that Johnston told him ‘tariff controls must not be introduced’, Cairns said: ‘That’s my recollection. I’m not gonna go to the sword on it.’
Cairns said that Bell was nodding and assenting to what Johnston was saying in this part of the meeting with a degree of ‘bravado’ because he was delighted to have won the argument with Cairns without having to apologise. Johnston told the inquiry:
I don’t believe there was any specific reference at this meeting to the RHI scheme but I do recall the suggestion being made by [the First Minister] that Mr Bell should use Arlene Foster as a reference point if he felt he needed information or advice on DETI matters. I do not believe there was any discussion on the RHI scheme and I did not instruct or suggest at any point to Mr Cairns that tariff controls would be introduced, the details of which I was unfamiliar with at the time.
Johnston’s argument that it was Robinson who suggested some working arrangement between Bell and Foster – and presumably their spads – is undermined by the evidence that Robinson was not even at this meeting. For his part, Bell said that ‘none of the issues referred to were discussed at the meeting … The sole purpose of the June 2015 meeting was to address Mr Cairns’s behaviour’. However, he added that Johnston and Cairns had continued to talk after a point where he had ‘disengaged’ and was looking at his phone, so on his own evidence he was not paying attention.
In Cairns’s mind there was a logic to Johnston having some understanding of RHI because he believed that Johnston and Crawford had been informally working to assist Bell during the time that he had been off work. Whatever went on in Stormont Castle that afternoon, the understanding which Cairns developed at that time was to be crucial in what was to follow. He had what he viewed as two instructions in his mind: the DUP opposed cost controls on the scheme and he was to work with Crawford on how to get something else in their place.
The meeting was on a Friday so th
e following day did not involve Cairns going back to work at DETI. However, clearly still unhappy at how he felt he had been duped by Johnston, he sent him a text message, reminding him that he had never wanted to be Bell’s spad at DETI and that he wanted to record ‘my disappointment and annoyance’ that at the meeting there was no mention of Bell’s temper, something which he warned was ‘still an issue’. Johnston replied that it was ‘an unfair characterisation of the meeting’ and, with a hint of menace, given his huge power, added: ‘Believe me there were not to [sic] many working to get this resolved so bear that in mind.’
As June came to an end and Cairns returned to his desk in Netherleigh House, there was little trust between himself and Bell. It had been made clear to both minister and spad that the real decision-makers in the DUP were in Stormont Castle and, despite a dysfunctional relationship with the adviser who ought to have been his most trusted political confidante, Bell was left working with a man who he believed did not respect his authority. Right at the point where RHI was moving deeper into the red, it was the DUP’s internal arguments on which Bell and Cairns were most focussed. In time, their relationship would improve, but from this point it was a strictly professional marriage of necessity.
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Just eight working days after Cairns returned to DETI, officials finally submitted their proposal for solving the RHI predicament. It was customary in the Stormont system for ministerial submissions to go first to the spad, who would add any of their own comments before sending it on to the minister for a decision. The submission, which was drafted by Wightman, arrived with Cairns on the evening of 8 July. But although there was now a written communication to the minister setting out that there was a problem with RHI, it omitted some of the key issues of which the officials were by that stage aware.
Inexplicably, the cover of the submission simply referred to the funding as ‘AME’ – money coming directly from the Treasury. There was no caveat or explanation of what Wightman now knew clearly: there was at best confusion around whether the funding really was AME and at worst it was clear that it probably was not. But it got worse. The submission went on to say that the funding ‘does not impact directly on NI departmental budgets’. This submission was central to the huge spike in RHI applications which was to come. Although it was marked ‘urgent’ by civil servants, they had sat on the issue for months, demonstrating no urgency themselves. However, that was unknown to Bell and Cairns at the time, and what they were presented with was a submission about a scheme, which was hugely over-budget and where officials were asking for an urgent decision. It would take almost two months for Bell to take any decision.
The minister and spad also did not realise that the document sent to them had been significantly watered down the previous night. Wightman had sent a draft of the document to Chris Stewart, McCormick’s deputy, and copied it to multiple officials including Trevor Cooper and his boss, Eugene Rooney. It was also copied to Wightman’s boss, Mills. Even though Mills was on holiday he kept an eye from afar on what was going on. The draft which he read on his phone included a comment on the financial implications of the situation: ‘Forecast RHI expenditure in 2015–16 is £23 million – almost twice current AME allocation of £11.6 million.’
In one of several changes to the document, which made the gravity of the situation less explicit, that was changed to the more anodyne: ‘We are currently seeking extra funding as forecast scheme expenditure exceeds previous funding allocations.’ Wightman told the inquiry that Mills and Stewart had requested multiple changes to the submission. Mills recalled phoning Wightman from a taxi into central London, suggesting some of the key changes that removed the blunter messages to the minister. Pressed to explain why he had removed important factual information, Mills said that it may have been out of ‘caution to not mention specific figures’ because the forecasts had risen so rapidly that he did not have confidence in the exact figure. He insisted: ‘There was absolutely no intention to conceal or try and make the picture rosier for the minister.’
Wightman said that the first draft was ‘my own words’ and was ‘a bit more up front’ but admitted that after requests from his superiors he had agreed to changes which amounted to a ‘significant downplaying of the need for concern’. Coghlin said it was clear that all the most senior DETI officials had seen how the document was being reshaped and that ‘the end result of this is that the minister gets a submission which has been changed with the knowledge and/or at the direction of the senior members of DETI in such a way that it is false. That’s the very difficult situation … that is what is happening here.’
The document also gave a confusing picture of a scheme painted as a great success but which urgently needed to be reined in – while stressing that there was no threat to the departmental budget. Nevertheless, despite the deep inadequacies of the 8 July submission, its central message was understood by Cairns. The submission said: ‘Given these budget pressures, we need to urgently implement cost control measures to manage future RHI expenditure.’ Cairns knew what that meant. But he recalled what had happened in the meeting with Johnston and forwarded the submission to Crawford, beginning a process which would have disastrous consequences.
The submission did not make its way past Cairns to Bell, but the spad said that they discussed its contents the day after it arrived and then around 30 July. Cairns later said that the minister ‘made no significant comments or raised any objections at that time’. The spad said that at this point both he and the minister were still at a ‘rank amateur’ understanding of the scheme, but that he had briefed Bell in his office and ‘what I knew, he knew’.
Two days after the submission, Bell flew to China for two and a half weeks on a family holiday. On his return to Northern Ireland, the minister was briefly back in the department before decamping to his ‘summer house’ in Portstewart, 60 miles north of Belfast, for several weeks, something which Cairns said impeded decision-making around RHI and other important issues. Bell said that he had left instructions at the department to contact him about anything urgent, yet he was not contacted about RHI.
While Bell was not being spoken to about RHI, Crawford was. Cairns had ‘several discussions’ with Foster’s spad, focussing on the question of cost controls. He said that he also spoke to Johnston about the issue, something Johnston later denied. Few of those discussions – which were mostly by phone or in person – were recorded in any written form. Cairns told the inquiry that the clear message communicated to him in those spad-to-spad discussions was that the party wanted to delay any cut to the tariffs for as long as possible. Based on that, Cairns freely admitted to the inquiry that he had acted to delay changes to the scheme – but said that neither he nor Bell had the slightest interest in the scheme and were only doing so at the request of others in the DUP.
Foster’s evidence to the inquiry was that although she knew Cairns had asked for assistance and Crawford had agreed to provide that assistance, there were financial implications to what they were discussing. At no point thereafter did she, as Finance Minister, make any enquiry of Crawford as to what was going on. Foster said: ‘I didn’t think it was of any issue.’ But intriguing new information, not given to the public inquiry, adds to the picture of what DUP ministers knew in this period. On 8 July – hours before the submission went to Cairns – an individual outside of politics met with DUP Social Development Minister, Mervyn Storey.
The meeting was to discuss energy issues in Northern Ireland’s public sector social housing stock. In an interview for this book, the individual – who for professional reasons asked not to be named – said that Storey had ‘unprompted’ raised what he said was a major problem with RHI. That raises two significant questions. Firstly, if Storey was aware of the significance of the RHI problems, how could Bell, as the minister responsible, not have been aware of the importance of RHI and been pressing his spad and officials as to what was being done about the situation? Secondly, if Storey – as a relativ
ely junior DUP minister – was aware of the significant RHI problems, it would be surprising if Foster remained unaware of the significance of the problem. Not only was she the minister who had set up the scheme and therefore had political reason to be concerned, but as Finance Minister she would have known that any financial problems were going to ultimately come to her door.
When asked how he was aware of the major problem in RHI at this early stage and if the issue had been discussed between the DUP ministers, Storey declined to answer and instead responded with a solicitor’s letter. Even though there was no suggestion that Storey had acted improperly, the letter – sent in concert with Foster, Johnston, Crawford and Peter Robinson – threatened legal action if ‘publication of inaccurate and defamatory material occurs’.
Nine days after the 8 July submission went to Cairns, Bell’s private secretary confirmed in an email that Cairns had read it. But as the summer wore on, it became clear to officials that something strange was going on, and they became increasingly concerned about the delay in making a decision about bringing the scheme under control.
On 30 July, Mills emailed Cairns and Stewart after a meeting between the three of them. It is clear from the email that Cairns was kicking back against the request to rein in the scheme. The email also hinted at what was beginning to become clear to officials from Cairns – that the DUP thought that the funding was being paid for by the Treasury and that was a reason not to precipitously intervene. Mills said: