Conservative Middle East Council (CMEC) is an organisation founded in 1980 to foster better understanding of issues in Palestine and the wider Middle East, which played an important role in the Conservative Party. In 2019 it disaffiliated from the Party (relevant correspondence published here) and subsequently changed its status to a limited liability company, allowing it to lobby and charge fees for its services.
Press articles, re-published here, highlighted a series of junkets arranged by CMEC for MPs. A Middle East Monitor investigation noted that nearly all CMEC’s financial backers had strong business interests in the Gulf States and donors were influencing CMEC’s support for an unconditional relationship with Saudi Arabia.
On or around December 2020, after I had met Charlotte Leslie to discuss the possibilities of mutual collaboration, she distributed a memo making defamatory and untrue allegations about my personal and professional background to 12 parliamentarians, four Arab ambassadors and at least two members of our security services. In the interests of full transparency, I have re-published it here.
My legal representatives first wrote to Ms Leslie in January 2021, correcting the information and asking her to confirm she was the author and to disclose the identities of the recipients. The letter requested that she retracted the allegations and apologised.
Legal correspondence, disclosed here in full, continued for several months and Ms Leslie and other CMEC officers were subsequently asked to disclose full details of my personal data which had been published to third parties through a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR). In May 2021, Ms Leslie admitted publishing the memos.
In June 2021, Ms Leslie and other CMEC officials offered to apologise to me and retract the allegations, acknowledging they were defamatory. However, these undertakings were not sufficient to settle the matter.
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