The Ministry of Defence deliberately misled the High Court during the Afghan super-injunction scandal, the Daily Mail can reveal today. Ministers kept the public and Parliament in the dark for two years about a secret, multi-billion-pound airlift operation, and even the judge overseeing the unprecedented gagging order was not given the full picture.
A Covert Scheme and a 'Corrosive' Gagging Order
While secretly authorising the expenditure of £7 billion of public money, ministers were legally obliged to keep Mr Justice Chamberlain fully informed. With MPs told nothing, he was the sole individual outside government permitted to know the details of the decision to spend hundreds of millions airlifting migrants from Afghanistan to the UK.
The judge had granted the draconian super-injunction, allowing the operation to proceed covertly, despite his grave concerns that it was ‘completely shutting down’ democratic accountability. He warned the secrecy was ‘corrosive to the public’s trust in government’ and would breed suspicion.
The Crucial Misleading Statement
Now, an investigation has uncovered that the MOD misled the court over the timing of a critical internal review. At a secret hearing on 20 February 2025, senior MOD official Natalie Moore stated in a written submission that Defence Secretary John Healey was ‘considering whether to commence a specific review’ of the airlift scheme.
This was untrue. In fact, Mr Healey had already commissioned the so-called Rimmer Review, led by retired civil servant Paul Rimmer, at least a month earlier, on 23 January 2025. This fact was only revealed after a protracted Freedom of Information battle by the Daily Mail.
The Rimmer Review was pivotal; its conclusions eventually enabled the judge to lift the injunction in July 2025, triggering a national outcry as the scale of the hidden operation and its colossal cost became public.
'Buying Time' and Controlling the Narrative
MPs have now questioned whether the MOD was cynically ‘buying time’ to extend its shutdown of democratic scrutiny. Tan Dhesi MP, chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, stated: ‘Secrecy understandably breeds suspicion. Ministers have a duty to be open and honest with the courts… where Parliamentary and public scrutiny were absent.’
This was not the first instance of questionable conduct exposed. In a behind-closed-doors hearing in November 2024, the court learned the government planned to ‘control the narrative’ by issuing a statement to Parliament that deliberately omitted the full truth, providing ‘cover’ for the operation. Mr Justice Chamberlain called this plan ‘very, very striking’.
The scandal originated from a catastrophic data breach in which UK defence officials lost a database of Afghans who had applied for sanctuary, putting an estimated 100,000 people at risk of Taliban reprisals. When the Mail discovered this in 2023, the government obtained the super-injunction and launched Operation Rubific.
The MOD denies misleading the court, claiming work was ongoing in February to finalise the review's scope. However, it has not explained why the judge was given incorrect information about whether the review had even been commissioned.
The lifting of the injunction finally allowed the publication of images, captured by the Mail at the time, of hundreds of migrants disembarking from unmarked, taxpayer-chartered jets at Stansted Airport, revealing the hidden reality of the two-year airlift.
