First Minister’s advisers were involved and instead believed the delays to have been primarily the work of Foster’s spad, Andrew Crawford.
Parts of the conversation revealed Bell to be hopelessly confused about the key timeline of the delays. At one point he suggested that the spike in applications – where claimants piled in before cost controls – had come after cost controls. McCormick agreed to meet him the following day and Bell said he would bring ‘one of my researchers’ with him.
By this stage, the DUP was suspicious of what Bell might do. Prior to McCormick allowing Bell to view documentation in his office, the mandarin spent more than an hour with Timothy Johnston and Richard Bullick, the First Minister’s two key lieutenants, who had asked to go through the material with him in advance.
In that meeting, McCormick told Foster’s closest advisers that he had understood that Crawford had worked in the background to delay cost controls. The civil servant felt exasperation at what seemed to be a reluctance by the DUP spads to accept the evidence of delay from someone in their party. By the time McCormick left that meeting and travelled a mile across the Stormont Estate to his department’s Netherleigh House headquarters, Bell was already waiting to see him.
But alongside the former minister that evening, Bell was accompanied by someone familiar to McCormick – Ken Cleland. Cleland was a somewhat mysterious figure, known to many at Stormont and an associate of some senior DUP figures. He and his wife had been extremely close to Peter Robinson, the former First Minister, and his wife Iris. After the revelation of her affair with a young man and subsequent financial transactions with property developers, Mrs Cleland stood by her friend, taking her shopping and looking after her at a point when some of the former DUP MP’s erstwhile friends forsook her.
Peter Robinson had trusted Cleland with a sensitive Stormont appointment, putting him on the board of the Maze Long Kesh Development Corporation, a body with responsibility for developing the economically significant and potentially lucrative site of the former Maze Prison, but whose work was riven with political arguments. In that role, Cleland had travelled with the then DUP Health Minister Edwin Poots and McCormick, Poots’s then permanent secretary, to Germany three years earlier for a study trip. The three men had discussed their shared Christian faith, meaning that when Cleland arrived with Bell he was a figure known to the civil servant.
On entering Room Two in Netherleigh House with Bell, Cleland said to McCormick that he was probably wondering what had brought them together. Answering his own question, Cleland told him that they had become close companions in Christian fellowship. McCormick recollected that they presented themselves as ‘seekers after truth, indeed potentially as “agents of righteousness”’. Cleland proceeded to inform the mandarin that he had arrived bearing a prophecy about Bell. The self-proclaimed prophet went on to predict that Bell would be vindicated over RHI. The agent of righteousness then admonished the civil servant: ‘We’ve got to be very careful what our motivations are here … and we’re not going to allow any motivation, which is a wrong motivation, because God will not bless that.’ Later, McCormick would ponder whether Bell had engineered the encounter to appear motivated by high religious principle so that he would lower his guard.
With the politician’s spiritual adviser having prepared the path, the MLA then turned to more pressing temporal matters. Bell, who was prone to exaggerated earnestness, even if answering Assembly questions on mundane matters, did not undersell the significance of his mission. He told McCormick that he was determined to make public the truth of what had happened even if it cost him his career. He assured McCormick that he would strongly protect the interests of officials and not allow them to be blamed for the failures of others.
McCormick, one of Stormont’s most experienced senior civil servants and someone who was respected across the political spectrum for his integrity, handed over a file of documents to Bell and left the room for him to study it.
Prior to contacting McCormick, Bell had spoken to Robinson who advised him that as a former minister he could go and ask for documentation from the department. Bell’s closeness to Robinson and the fact that there was some contact between the two men about the issue in this period led to speculation within the DUP as to whether Bell was acting as part of some wider plan.
During a whispered conversation while McCormick was out of the room, Cleland asked Bell: ‘Why did you decide to go to the fount of all knowledge or of all wisdom?’ A source familiar with Bell’s thinking in this period said that this was a coded reference used by the two men to refer to Nolan. But before Bell could answer, McCormick reappeared in the room.
On his return, Bell asked McCormick what he would say if he was asked why there had been a delay in reining in the scheme. Speaking bluntly, McCormick replied: ‘Well to be totally honest with you, I’d be saying I was aware that there were discussions within the party and the ministers and the special advisors had been asked by others within the party to keep it open – that’s the truth.’
After more than an hour at Netherleigh, and with the alarm for closing time ringing, Bell and Cleland bade their farewells and disappeared off into the night.
Throughout the encounter, Bell had made a series of references to preparing himself for some future occasion on which he might have to answer for what had happened on his watch. For three months, the Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee had been holding hearings to investigate the scandal, and McCormick assumed that was what Bell had in mind. He never considered that he might have a more immediate and more public plan. But the day after his meeting with the former minister, the DUP spad in McCormick’s department, John Robinson, informed him that his meeting with Bell and Cleland had been recorded.
It is still not clear how Robinson had knowledge of the recording, but within the DUP it was known that Bell had a habit of covertly recording conversations. McCormick was profoundly disturbed. For a former minister to secretly record his most senior civil servant was not just outside of his experience; it was unprecedented. Over coming days, it became clear that Bell had given the recording to the BBC and was threatening to give permission for it to be broadcast.
It was a period of intense personal turmoil for McCormick. After a long career in the civil service, just three weeks earlier he had been interviewed by the First and deputy First Ministers in what was the final stage of the competition to be Head of the Civil Service. At that point he did not know whether he had got the £180,000-a-year job, but he knew that the rules had recently been changed to allow the DUP and Sinn Féin ministers to conduct the final interviews for the appointment – a level of political control over the politically neutral post which does not exist anywhere else in the UK. In the days to come, DUP minister Simon Hamilton said in a message to senior DUP spad Richard Bullick: ‘His concerned reaction suggests he has said things he knows he shouldn’t have. This could be very bad for him. And us.’
Bell had told the public in his Nolan interview that McCormick was ‘a man of the utmost integrity and one of the finest servants of the civil service that the public could ask for’. Yet he had secretly recorded him on at least two occasions and was holding over this ‘man of the utmost integrity’ the threat of releasing those conversations if he did not act in a certain way. Almost two years later at the public inquiry, Bell would be pressed repeatedly to explain why he had felt it necessary to act with subterfuge. He told the inquiry that ‘all I wanted to do was have a valid record of what my concerns were’. But when David Scoffield QC asked him why he had not chosen to use ‘more transparent ways’ of securing that objective, Bell did not answer the question but gave a rambling reply, which included everything from the scale of the RHI overspend to the fact that he had been a premature baby and a comment on his political career.
Eventually, inquiry chairman Sir Patrick Coghlin interjected:
You have told us already that you regarded him as a man of integrity. All I’m trying to find out … is why,
