The various legal ramifications of the long-running Building Schools for the Future saga have been covered on a number of occasions on this blog, including here, here and here. In a rather unexpected development, it appears that BSF has managed to draw this blog into the previously unchartered territories of the phone hacking furore, more usually the type of newsworthy matter covered by our learned brethren over at Panopticon.
The BBC is reporting that Tim Byles, the chief executive in charge of BSF, had raised with his Permanent Secretary and the Cabinet Secretary concerns that he was being subjected to nuisance phone calls and suspected that his phone had been tampered with. The story has arisen because of the cryptic question posed by former Labour Minister Nick Raynsford at the phone hacking debate on 20 July 2011 to the Prime Minister attempting to link Andy Coulson to a ‘politically motivated’ campaign against a senior civil servant. Mr Byles is now believed to be the figure in question. The Cabinet Secretary appears to have poured cold water on any link to Mr Coulson and the police apparently found no evidence of interference with the phone. Nonetheless, it is perhaps of some small comfort to those labouring away in the sometimes dusty fields of education law to know that they are but one controversial political decision away from potentially joining such icons of the modern age as Max Clifford, Sienna Miller and Hugh Grant.