This ex-Foreign Office insider risks the ire of his former employers with this candid reading of the leaked embassy cables. He also says that a resolution on the Chagos could come sooner rather than later.

● Wikileaks has done it again. What are your impressions of the leaks made public by the whistleblower website last week?

The leaks concerning the Chagos are telegrams that were sent from the American embassy in London to Washington reporting on conversations with officials responsible for the Chagos in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). I’m familiar with those officials and I was shocked, as were many people, by the sort of language they used. Two things in particular worried me. One was the use of the word Man Fridays, which has strong colonial and racial overtones. The other thing that bothered me was the cynicism with which officials seem to regard Parliament and the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on the Chagos.

● According to the leaks, the head of the FCO’s Overseas Directorate’s British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) Section, Joanne Yeadon, described the APPG as “a ‘persistent’ but relatively non-influential group”. As head of the APPG, what’s your opinion on this appraisal?

It’s wholly wrong. The group is in fact very powerful it has 42 members, five of which are members of the current coalition government. Four of them have been ministers in the FCO, including Baroness Kinnock, who was dealing with these issues only three months ago as a Labour minister. It’s a very heavy weight group that is considered as possibly the most effective of the 80 or 90 parliamentary groups that exist.

● The cables have also shown that the Marine Protected Area (MPA) was, as many people initially suspected, a cynical ploy to prevent resettlement. How does this make you feel?

Indeed, the leaks make it abundantly clear that the officials who conceived the idea of a MPA were using it as a sham. Their purpose was to use it to deny the Chagossians the right to return. Whilst the officials, and we’re not talking about ministers here, saw it as a way to make it more difficult for the Chagossians to return, others saw it as a very good thing. I don’t think that the current coalition government would regard it that cynically. The view of the APPG is that the MPA could be an extremely good thing, providing it makes provisions for the interests of the Chagossian people, Mauritius and, to a lesser extent, the Seychelles.

● Yet the FCO conveniently managed to ignore that part, didn’t it?

The MPA that was declared implied that all these issues would be dealt with afterwards. But let’s just look at where the MPA is now. It was declared on April 1st, there has been a ban on commercial fishing on October 28th, but in law it hardly exists. There is no legal framework for it. And that has to exist before it can be of any use at all. It’s clear that the current government is going very slowly indeed, because it knows that Mauritius is against it. Going off on a tangent, one of the reasons why Mauritius opposes the MPA is fishing. Britain has said since 1965 that Mauritius’s traditional fishing rights in the Chagos would be respected. But with the commercial ban on fishing that particular interest seems to have been ignored. Many people think that Britain and Mauritius should go to UNESCO to ask to have the Chagos declared a World Heritage Site. Just because there’s a sovereignty dispute shouldn’t stop that from happening.