The confusing thing about Michelle Donelan’s ongoing moment in the public eye is that it was a completely unforced error.

Even if she had strong reasons (or utterly unfounded reasons, for that matter) to suspect that a member of a minor Research England advisory group was a terrorist sympathiser, she would have been able to write to the UKRI umbrella body with impunity to demand answers.

Only by tweeting her letter to Chief Executive Ottoline Leyser out to followers on a slow October Saturday did she leave herself, and – as it turns out – her department subject to legal challenge.

As The Times has revealed (drawing on a Freedom of Information request from Jesus Siller), the letter was signed off at two minutes to midnight by aides forced to work through the previous Friday evening, following the receipt of a peculiar briefing from Policy Exchange that lunchtime. But as David Allen Green pointed out in Prospect, via the magic of “qualified privilege” it was not the letter that was actionable (or indeed, the PX press release) it was the publication of the letter in a (since deleted) tweet from Donelan’s official account.

The wording of the original tweet:

Academic freedom & free speech are totally sacrosanct. But Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation. This is outrageous from a public body.

is interesting in itself. She starts by emphasising the sacred nature of academic freedom, before making it clear that such freedom only extends as far as the limits of the law (thus, not “totally sacrosanct”).

Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation, and it has been described as such by the UK government since 1987 (this initially referred to the paramilitary wing, it was extended to the whole of Hamas in 2021). Under the 2000 Terrorism Act it is an offence to express an “opinion or belief” that is supportive of a proscribed organisation.

Michelle Donelan is not a lawyer. But you do not have to be a lawyer to figure that the words “this is disturbing” tweeted above a Guardian headline that read “Suella Braverman urges police to crack down on Hamas support in the UK” is not in itself an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation. It is entirely possible, to give one facetious example, that someone could be disturbed that Suella Bravemen was somehow still Home Secretary.

The final line of her tweet put the blame on UKRI rather than the individual academics – the advisory group or its members are not a “public body”, UKRI is. She may have meant that UKRI should not allow people that hold the opinions that Donelan believed they held to work with it – but the tweet, and the letter it contained are both directed at a body Donelan herself had overall political responsibility for.

Again, if she was merely concerned that a vetting process may not have been followed properly (as her quasi-apology suggested) she should have been able to seek assurances on this count via a request for information from UKRI (Section 105 of HERA) – this did not have to be made public, and any competent government lawyer would have been clear on this. The government legal advice we’ve now seen via the Freedom of Information request concerned the foreshadowing of elements of the government’s then imminent (it actually came out in February 2024) response to Adam Tickell’s review of research bureaucracy.

The tweet was the mistake – and from the looks of it the mistake was Donelan’s own.

Why didn’t she send the letter without tweeting it? Did she not think she would get the response she wanted? Why did she feel the need to perform her outrage on a once-popular social media platform? Did she want to see her concerns addressed or make news?

And, assuming for the moment she used twitter to ensure that UKRI got the blame, why would she wish to publicly frame an organisation she has ultimate responsibility for? Why would she feel the need to cause trouble for public servants in her own arms-length body?

Assuming good faith on behalf of Donelan, the conclusion would have to be that she did not trust UKRI to act in the way she wished without public pressure. She knew, or thought she knew – as generations of politicians have thought they knew – that public servants will act in their own interest, hiding behind processes and regulations, rather than what she rather narrowly and ideologically saw as the national interest.

This could have been because the Secretary of State understood the weakness of the case she was making – but it looks more and more like there has been a serious breakdown of trust between the independent research councils and the department that it is responsible for.

This should concern anyone with an interest in research funding or the Haldane principle.