It was in the bowels of the Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall that I was handed a piece of paper by a government lawyer, to read in silence, that would put me at the heart of a nearly two-year legal battle in Britain’s High Court – a battle involving a major data breach, secret government operations, and the most far-reaching legal order ever imposed on the British press.
I had been brought to the MoD building, on Friday 8 December 2023, by a story I was investigating. Since the botched evacuation of Kabul in August 2021, I had extensively covered the government’s attempts – and failures – to bring Afghan soldiers who had fought alongside Britain, and were desperately trying to escape the clutches of the Taliban, to the UK.
