Lord Barker of Battle spends big on lawyers
Never underestimate the value of reputation. Lord Barker of Battle certainly doesn’t. The Times reported on Tuesday that the Conservative life peer and former executive chairman of the Russia-based, London-listed EN+ aluminium giant, had spent heavily on lawyers specialising in reputation management to delay a response to a freedom of information request. The background is another such request by Tortoise’s Paul Caruana Galizia in April 2019 for the minutes of a meeting between Barker and Sir Alan Duncan, then a Foreign Office minister. That request took seven months to yield a reply. Barker seems to have been anxious to withhold details of the meeting, but he was also peeved about Caruana Galizia’s earlier story about a large portrait of the peer, defaced in red paint with the words “GREG, F***ING, BASTARD”.
Photograph David Levene / eyevine