Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favorite stories in this weekly newspaper.
Ministers should have been made aware of inflammatory tweets by UK-Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah before they arrived in Britain last week, according to the former head of the UK Foreign Office.
Lord Peter Ricketts said that with hindsight ministers should have told authorities about Abdel Fattah’s historic social media comments before they welcomed him to Britain with open arms, a move that has sparked a fierce political row.
Sir Keir Starmer said on Friday he was glad the activists had come to Britain after he learned of the tweet posted by Abdel Fattah, which the prime minister described as “absolutely disgusting” on Monday.
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has ordered an official investigation at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office into the “serious reporting failures” uncovered in the case.
Ricketts, the former permanent secretary of the FCDO, said on Tuesday that although the department has to deal with many consular cases, the investigation should establish that cases involving direct ministerial intervention should be treated differently.
“Where officials are going to ask ministers to advocate on behalf of dual nationals, perhaps background checks should be carried out, to try to avoid some of the problems that have emerged in the last few days,” he told the BBC.
Cooper told the Commons foreign affairs committee in a letter this week that previous foreign secretaries and prime ministers had made public statements on Abdel Fattah’s case “without all the relevant information”.
Following the revelation of a tweet calling for the killing of “Zionists” in 2012, Conservative and Reform UK have called for Abdel Fattah to be revoked of his citizenship and deported. He appeared separately in 2011 calling for the killing of police. He has “explicitly” apologized for the tweet.
Starmer has apologized to Britain’s Jewish community for initially enthusiastically welcoming Abdel Fattah’s return, but Downing Street has insisted the activist is welcome in Britain.
“We welcome the return of any British citizen wrongly detained abroad, as we would in all cases and as we have done in the past,” No 10 said on Monday.
Earlier this year Egypt pardoned Abdel Fattah, seen as the country’s most prominent political prisoner, after he was jailed for opposing authoritarianism.
The blogger and software developer has spent most of the last 11 years in jail, with a six-month break in 2019, during which he still had to sleep in the police station every night.
The controversy comes at a sensitive time for Starmer’s Labor government, which is facing pressure from the right on immigration, with Reform UK calling for mass deportations of people living in the country illegally.
A new poll A change in attitudes about what makes someone “British” has been found, with an increasing number of people (36 percent) saying a person must be born in Britain to be truly British, up from 19 percent in 2023.
The Institute for Public Policy Research’s YouGov survey found that a majority still believe that being British is rooted in shared values, but a growing number argued that it has more to do with ethnicity, birthplace and ancestry.
The survey found that 37 per cent of Reform voters said they would be proud of their country if there were fewer people from minority ethnic backgrounds living in Britain in 10 years’ time.
