Queen's private secretary Sir Christopher Geidt won high court libel action against John Pilger and Central TV in 1991
This article was amended on 31 May 2013 to remove a number of inaccuracies regarding Sir Christopher Geidt in the article, which overstated his role as the Queen's private secretary in relation to the royal charter for the press. We have also clarified aspects of his legal action against John Pilger and Central Television. We apologise for the errors.
The senior royal official tasked with handling a royal charter to regulate the press is a former military intelligence officer who successfully sued an investigative journalist who had sought to question his presence in Cambodia in the 1980s.
Sir Christopher Geidt, who is the Queen's private secretary, won a high-court libel action against John Pilger and Central Television in 1991. Uncertainty around Geidt's role in Cambodia sparked a debate at the time in parliament that included questions over his possible links to MI6 or the British military.
A court heard that Geidt and another former army officer, Anthony de Normann, had wrongly been accused by Pilger's documentary of being SAS officers who trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines.
Pilger, who had claimed he never intended to make any such allegation, gave an unqualified retraction and apology in court in settlement of the case which was reported to have cost Central TV £350,000 in libel damages and costs.
During the course of the three-day trial, which ended in settlement, the government issued a gagging order citing national security that prevented three ministers and two former heads of the SAS from giving evidence about alleged SAS involvement in Cambodia.
The intervention – likened by the defence QC to the 1987 Spycatcher case involving a government bid to suppress material about spying – also meant the judge would be asked to rule out any evidence that related to the SAS and the security services such as MI6 and their involvement in the Asian country.
Geidt's current position makes him the principal link between the Queen and Downing Street on all political matters, including the proposed royal charter, which must be issued by the monarch to allow the creation of a new body to supervise the regulation of the press in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal and the Leveson inquiry.
Buckingham Palace emphasises that, as private secretary, Geidt is responsible only for the process of any royal charter in so far as the Queen has a role, not its substance.
Ultimately, any royal charter has to be sealed by the Queen in the presence of the privy council, of which Nick Clegg is the president. The picture is complicated by the fact that there are two royal charters in circulation – a document drawn up with the agreement of all three party leaders, and a second produced at the behest of the five largest newspaper groups.
Royal charters, which date back to at least the 13th century, are supposed only to be granted in non-contentious circumstances, but the hostility of some publishers has created a constitutional dilemma. Bodies applying for charters are warned to expect "a significant degree of government regulation of [their] affairs".
Geidt's position means he has a direct line to Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, on political matters. Civil servants at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport say that Geidt has been "kept updated" on the progress of the royal charter proposals. Buckingham Palace said his role was "to make sure the Queen is informed of developments and is in the right place at the right time in order to act on the advice of government".
The 1991 libel case came after Geidt and De Normann travelled to Cambodia in 1989 and joined an international party observing the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from the conflict-ridden state. In a debate on Cambodia in the Commons in 1990, the Labour MP Ann Clwyd said in the House of Commons that she was on the same mission and met the men but was not convinced by their explanation that they were on holiday.
Geidt had been working for the Royal United Services Institute when he arrived in Phnom Penh. He went on to work in military intelligence and as a diplomat in the former Yugoslavia at the time of the Bosnian war.
The parliamentary visit came at a time of numerous allegations of British military support for resistance factions in Cambodia, one of which was the Khmer Rouge.
In the same debate on Cambodia, Chris Mullin MP said that Geidt had obtained a visa to travel from the Vietnamese embassy claiming he was "a representative of RUSI" and he signed himself "assistant director" on RUSI notepaper. This was "economical with the truth", Mullin told the Commons.
David Bolton, then director of RUSI, had told Mullin that Geidt "did not travel to Vietnam and Cambodia as a representative of RUSI, and had no business to be passing himself off as such". Neither was Geidt assistant director but an assistant to the director responsible for fund raising; he was self-employed and his job had nothing to do with Cambodia, Mullin said Bolton told him.
The MoD separately told Mullin that Geidt and De Normann were visiting Cambodia at the invitation of the Hanoi Institute of International Relations, but again Mullin claimed in parliament "that is not true". Covering letters and visa applications showed it was at their own initiative, he said.
Clwyd told MPs they were on the official mission guest list as "Fonctionairre de L'Institut de Researche Min Defence", but they told her they were on holiday.
This was puzzling because "even if one is an ex-military man, I doubt whether one would spend a holiday in Cambodia … watching people kill one another," she told the Commons.
They seemed to be "very hostile to Cambodia" and Clwyd said they asked for help to get to the frontline "because they wanted to look at some of the fighting at first hand".
The next day, on a sightseeing trip to the temples of Angkor Wat, her suspicions grew. "I noticed that they were pointing their telescopic lenses towards the undergrowth surrounding Angkor Wat rather than the temples themselves," she said.
Clwyd also settled, giving a retraction and apology in court and paiying costs to Geidt and De Normann, who took action against her when she wrote to Margaret Thatcher after Pilger's documentary, calling for a public inquiry and suggesting the allegations were accurate.
Buckingham Palace declined to answer questions put to Geidt about the possible inconsistencies raised under parliamentary privilege by MPs. "He didn't comment on the accusations at the time and as then, he will let the legal judgments speak for themselves," a Buckingham Palace spokesman said.