I am being forced by my parents to muck out the Augean Stables, aka my bedroom, and in among the debris is an old file I used in the summer of 1999 while working for the Labour Party at Millbank Tower (interesting as to how it was built on the site of an old prison, I’m sure some Labour members would agree with me there, but never mind that either). In the file is a heap of miscellaneous papers, cartoons, photocopied Conservative Party leaflets, press releases from Smith Square...sorry, hang on a minute, what?

Yes, I worked on Excalibur. Yes, I broke it.

For those of you not old enough to remember life before Labour, Excalibur was an infernal machine that gathered data for the Labour Party’s “Rapid Rebuttal Unit” both in Opposition and in the early years of Government. What Labour did with it was feed thousands of clippings about MPs – usually Opposition MPs but also their own backbenchers and figures like Ken Livingstone and Tony Martin who occasionally misbehaved – in order to be able to call upon a complete record of who said what when. Opposition leaflets were also acquired – again, legitimately through the public domain, or probably from libraries (my university library ticket to the British Library of Political and Economic Science was an asset as far as this research was concerned). This is not exactly news – it was all rather more of a compilation of public domain information rather than a deliberate espionage organisation.

Except for the large pile of Conservative Party News press releases which we were also feeding through the OCR scanners into Excalibur.

I stole one. Well, borrowed it as a souvenir, scribbled some bizarre and unconnected notes on the back, and stashed it in a pile of other papers which include the tenancy contract on the flat I rented in my second year at university. Sometime after this, the servers storing this mountain of information crashed and never to my knowledge got going again.

I took one about the Sierra Leone affair and it is a list of parliamentary questions from Michael Howard to Robin Cook. It is a forwarded fax (from a withheld number, surprise surprise, otherwise I could have googled that, too) of a press release fax to the “Parliamentary and EU News Service”, a press agency which files stories for major newspapers and broadcasters on, well, Parliament and the EU (and in this case the “Arms to Africa” affair which arguably made Mr Howard’s reputation as an Opposition spokesman as well as a government minister and, as Owlperson notes, essentially won him the leadership five years later). What they were doing sending it, and others like it, on to the Labour Party, is a question which I’ve only just asked myself. It’s nothing really remarkable, it’s not exactly an receipt for “12 pints of blood and a replacement cape” marked FAO Fees Office – but it’s still not really something that should have ended up being fed into a Labour Party computer, as Owlperson notes.

Someone essentially working within a press agency leaked it and others to the Labour Party; the time at which it was sent, 8.33 in the evening, suggests it was done after hours as well.

If Mr Howard would like it back, my email address is louise.stanley@live.co.uk.