Spin, lies and vitriol at the Department of Turmoil

Barrie Clement, winner of the Scoop of the Year award for breaking the Jo Moore e-mail story, reveals the workings of the Department of Transport

Downing Street is finding it increasingly difficult to distance itself from the continuing turmoil at the Department of Transport.

While the ministry has become a byword for vacuous spin and outright lies, one source close to the department alleged the true villains of the Pam Warren e-mail affair were at a more exalted level. "We are not talking here about one department in chaos. It is more sinister than that. We are talking about deliberate campaigns of malice orchestrated by Downing Street against people of whom they disapprove."

Apart from Dan Corry's e-mail trawling for information about Mrs Warren and her colleagues, the sources revealed another unseemly plot by other figures in the department, under the direction of Downing Street, to discredit John Robinson, the former chief executive of Railtrack.

Mr Robinson – one of many people who accused the former transport secretary Stephen Byers of dissembling – had been the subject of a covert campaign of vilification, controlled by senior figures at No 10, sources said last night.

Mr Byers claimed that prior to his decision to place Railtrack into administration, Mr Robinson warned him that without further government aid the company could become insolvent. Mr Robinson denied saying that and the Secretary of State for Transport was unable to produce any minutes to prove that he had.

Although some sources argue that the buck stops in Downing Street, there is no doubt Mr Byers presided over one of the most dysfunctional ministries in the history of modern British government.

Under John Prescott it bumbled along, drawing up desperately needed plans for public transport, relying on good old-fashioned bluster and bombast. The message was largely disseminated by civil servants. Mr Prescott had employed "brains" in the shape of Joe Irvin, a clever former official of the Transport and General Workers' Union. Incredible as it might now seem, the Deputy Prime Minister, who was Secretary of State for Transport at the time, had no use for "spin" or its practitioners. There was a minimum of news management and a maximum of heart-on-sleeve inarticulate Prescott bluntness.

Then it all changed. A somewhat reluctant Stephen Byers was moved from the Department of Trade and Industry to become the Secretary of State for Transport.

Tony Blair had decided that the ministry, which was presiding over a chaotic rail network still recovering from the Hatfield disaster, was in need of a steady hand on the tiller; someone who would turn the issue of transport into a "good" news story.

Unfortunately for all concerned, however, Mr Byers presided over the most hapless, most hopeless and arguably most mendacious regime seen in a British ministry.

He arrived from the Department of Trade and Industry with an appalling reputation among civil servants. In discreet telephone conversations, officials at the DTI warned their counterparts at the Department for Transport about Mr Byers and his "spin doctor" Jo Moore. The pair were said to run the DTI as a two-person junta. They were accused of bullying and attempting to intimidate staff in a relentless campaign to persuade them to toe the New Labour political line.

The First Division Association, the union for Whitehall mandarins, received a series of complaints about them, but no one was prepared to risk their career by putting heads above the parapet. Whitehall rules at the time meant that a civil servant had to "go public" with any complaints if they were to be considered. Then Mr Byers appeared at the DoT last summer and the department was meant to become a paradigm of New Labour slickness.

On 11 September, however, Ms Moore sent out the infamous e-mail urging colleagues to find bad news stories to "bury" as world attention focused on the attacks in America. The message was copied to Mr Corry, a policy adviser to Mr Byers.

All the civil servants who saw Ms Moore's missive were "disgusted", one source said, but they would have needed to lodge a formal complaint for disciplinary measures to be taken against the spin doctor.

Instead, officials leaked the e-mail to The Independent. It seemed to be the only way in which Ms Moore's behaviour could be exposed without damaging the informants' careers.

Despite the furore that followed The Independent's disclosure of the contents of the memo – and the much-repeated dictum since that matters of controversy should never be committed to e-mail – Mr Corry seemingly saw fit last month to trawl for information about Pam Warren and other members of the Paddington Survivors' Group in an alleged attempt to discredit them.

In keeping with the subculture engendered by his seniors, Mr Corry sent an e-mail to Labour Party headquarters, allegedly trying to discover if there were any political skeletons in Mrs Warren's cupboard.

The darker arts of politics seemed to gain pride of place under Mr Byers. While senior figures at the department plotted and the minister contrived to put his own spin on a series of debacles, the quality of the public transport system continued to decline.

Last month the Labour-dominated Commons Select Committee on Transport attacked the £180bn 10-year blueprint for transport, unveiled last year, as "incoherent" and "incomprehensible" and accused the Government of being frightened of a backlash by motorists. The report warned that traffic congestion would not be curbed because motoring would get cheaper while public transport became more expensive.

The document was seen as the final nail in Mr Byers' ministerial coffin.

Mr Darling has started his new job by placing considerable distance between himself and the antics of the old regime. He has told senior civil servants – without overtly criticising Mr Byers – that his stewardship will be different. What seems clear is that he will also need to keep the apparatchiks of Downing Street firmly in their place.

Digging dirt - the e-mails

A version of the memos exchanged between Dan Corry and the Labour Party on 23 May and released by the Department of Transport yesterday:

Dan Corry: "Can you get some sort of check done on the people who are making a big fuss on the Paddington Survivors group attacking SB [Stephen Byers] (i.e the ones taking over from Pam Warren). The names are in the press."

Millbank: "What sort of check? If I put their names into a search engine it will only come up with their names in ref to this current story."

Corry: "Basically are they Tories?"

Millbank: "Checked Excel [a Labour Party Database] and there is no record of them as Tories."

Corry: "I'm told that their spokesman Martin Minns(?) works for a PR company. Can we find more on this please."

Millbank: "This is all I can find ­ I'm not sure about Benham."

Electronic press cuttings were passed from the Labour Party on Minns and Benham, but a note from the Department of Transport said they will not be released for reasons of "personal confidentiality".

Corry: "Any more on Minns' company (and is he still there?)."

There was no response from the Labour Party.

There is no indication if this is a complete version of the exchanges on that day or whether there had been any other e-mail traffic about the survivors' group.