UN GATE / FEDERAL COURT, Sept 2 – The
United Kingdom is one of five permanent Security Council
members, meaning its vote in this year's Secretary-General
straw polls is treated differently from the outset:
ballots for the P5 are color-coded separately from
non-permanent members', since a UK vote against a
candidate carries the weight of a veto the other ten
Council members' votes do not. That weight is
precisely why UK's silence in August is worth noting.
On July 30, Inner City Press wrote directly
to Ambassador Dame Sarah MacIntosh and four named FCDO
officials — Jaclyn Licht, Sorcha Lowry, Isabella Olex, and
Mungo Woodifield, some probably since leaving the Mission
since Inner City Press was ousted by UNSG Antonio Guterres
— asking the UK to raise, with the Security Council
presidency and the UN's Department of Global
Communications, why the first straw poll's readout
appeared absent from UN Web TV's own published schedule,
and separately asking the UK to press MALU on an
eight-year-old, unexplained press exclusion.
None of the five responded to the various
emails, nor to a tweet on X directly at Ambassador / Dame
MacIntosh, to her selfies of meeting in and around the UN,
if she also met with the Ghislaine Maxwell board member
whom Inner City Press spotted at the UNGA stakeout (on
UNTV, which for now is its visual window into the UN it
still closely covers). Nothing, including on the place of
the Malvinas / Falkland Islands in the UK's calculus,
Rafael Grossi, none of it.
Inner City Press has since filed a formal
request under the UK's Freedom of Information Act 2000,
and separately emailed the same request directly to
fcdo.correspondence [at] fcdo.gov.uk, the Foreign,
Commonwealth & Development Office's own general
correspondence address, to ensure the request reaches the
Ministry through more than one channel.
The response, after five full days, is
telling: nothing at all from Dame MacIntosh's Mission, and
an auto-responder then nothing more from the FCDO:
"From: FCDO Correspondence
<fcdo.correspondence@fcdo.gov.uk> Date: Sat, Aug 29,
2026 at 8:32 PM Subject: Freedom of Information Act
2000 Request — UK Mission's Response to July 30, 2026
Correspondence and Positions on Secretary-General
Selection To: Matthew Russell Lee / Inner City Press
Thank you for your email to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). This mailbox is monitored during business hours only from Monday to Friday, not including UK public holidays."
It seems they are still on holiday.
That was Saturday, August 29, Nothing since. This is
today's UK FCDO, corruption by its UN Mission and the UN.
The request asks, in part, whether the UK
treated this as a standing matter to be answered once the
Secretary-General selection concludes, if not before — an
acknowledgment that some of what's being asked may take
months to fully answer, but that the asking itself should
not.
A permanent member's vote shapes who leads the United Nations for years. Whether that same government will say, on the record, what it did or didn't do about how transparently that choice was made is a considerably smaller ask — and, so far, one the UK has not answered either, yet. We will report results. Watch this site
