Ministers misled High Court throughout Afghan super-injunction scandal – giving decide false info and maintaining mammoth £7billion public spending secret from taxpayers

Ministers misled the High Court during the Afghan super-injunction scandal, the Daily Mail reveals today.

The public and Parliament were deliberately kept in the dark about the secret Afghan airlift for two years.

Now it can be revealed that even the judge was not given the full picture.

Behind the scenes, while they were signing off £7billion of public money without taxpayers knowing, ministers were supposed to be keeping Mr Justice Chamberlain strictly up to date. With MPs not told anything, he was the only person allowed to know the secret details of the decision to spend hundreds of millions of pounds airlifting migrants to Britain.

The judge had granted the draconian gagging order allowing ministers to do this covertly despite his grave concerns the super-injunction was ‘completely shutting down’ democratic accountability.

Yet a Daily Mail investigation can now reveal the Ministry of Defence (MOD) misled him over the timing of a crucial internal review that was key to the whole scheme.

Last night MPs questioned whether the MOD had been cynically ‘buying time’ to extend its unprecedented shutdown of the democratic process.

The Daily Mail and other media organisations fought a two-year battle for open justice in secret courts to expose the Afghan airlift scandal.

It started after blundering UK defence officials lost a database of Afghans – who had applied to a scheme offering sanctuary for those who had served British forces – putting 100,000 people ‘at risk of death’ from Taliban reprisals.

When the Mail discovered this data breach disaster in 2023, the Government obtained the super-injunction to hush it up, and launched Operation Rubific to rescue thousands of Afghans.

The Mail attended more than 20 hearings in locked-door courtrooms as Mr Justice Chamberlain was asked by the MOD to extend the super-injunction for almost two years.

The judge repeatedly made it clear to the MOD he wanted to be kept fully informed of any developments. 

He vowed the super-injunction should not last any longer than necessary, because it was ‘corrosive to the public’s trust in government’ and ‘likely to give rise to understandable suspicion that the court’s processes are being used for the purposes of censorship’.

Yet at a critical moment in the hush-hush case, government officials misled the judge by telling him in February 2025 that Defence Secretary John Healey was ‘considering whether to’ launch an internal review into the covert scheme. This was untrue. In fact, it can now be revealed, he had commissioned the Rimmer Review at least a month earlier.

Led by retired civil servant Paul Rimmer, the review was crucial because its conclusions eventually enabled the judge to lift the injunction in July 2025, which immediately prompted uproar as parliamentarians realised they had been deliberately cut out of the democratic process for two years. Four parliamentary probes were launched.

The misleading statement was contained in an MOD document submitted to the court for the hearing on February 20, 2025. Written by senior Whitehall official Natalie Moore, she stated that the Defence Secretary was ‘considering whether to commence a specific review’ of the scheme – when in fact he had already done so weeks earlier.

Since July, the Daily Mail has been asking the MOD repeatedly to name the date on which Mr Rimmer was actually commissioned. The requests were all ignored. Eventually, after a protracted Freedom of Information battle – simply asking the MOD to supply a date – the answer came: January 23.

Despite the facts, the MOD insists that the court was not misled. But it has not explained why the judge was given incorrect information. Either way, the delay bought several weeks of time for officials under pressure to end the secrecy.

Tan Dhesi MP, chairman of the House of Commons Defence Committee which is investigating the scandal, said: ‘It is unsurprising that questions of this kind continue to emerge given two years of secret court proceedings on the Afghan data breach. Secrecy understandably breeds suspicion.

‘Ministers have a duty to be open and honest with the courts, and this duty applies all the more so in situations such as this, where Parliamentary and public scrutiny were absent.

‘I look forward to seeing the MoD’s response to this allegation. Meanwhile, the House of Commons Defence Committee’s broader inquiry continues, where we will continue to hold the Government to account for its decision-making.’

Asked why officials misled the judge, the MOD said: ‘These claims are untrue. The Rimmer Review was commissioned in January 2025 by the Defence Secretary. During February, work with Ministers was ongoing to finalise the specific scope and details of the review. This was what Natalie Moore was referencing in her submission.’

It is not the first time the MOD’s behaviour has been under scrutiny. Mr Justice Chamberlain was previously informed, during a behind-closed-doors court hearing in November 2024, how the MOD was planning to actively deceive Parliament.

The judge appeared genuinely incredulous when told ministers were planning to ‘deliberately mislead the public’, to keep both MPs and the public in the dark. Back then, Mrs Moore, the same MoD official, had told the court that ministers wanted to ‘control the narrative’ with a statement to Parliament that did not tell the whole truth – a situation the judge said was ‘very, very striking’.

When, in July, the Government finally abandoned its attempt to smother the truth, and the public discovered that ministers had agreed a £7billion scheme, while neither asking nor informing them, it triggered a national outcry. The Mail was able to show photographs of the unmarked Government-chartered planes landing at Stansted with hundreds of migrants, which it had not been able to publish at the time of the super-injunction.