A newly unearthed revelation from independent outlet Middle East Eye has thrown the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) into fresh controversy over government accountability, after confirmation that no official records were retained of a December meeting between Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper and former prime minister Tony Blair focused on Middle East affairs. The unminuted meeting occurred at a pivotal moment: Blair was actively lobbying on behalf of U.S. President Donald Trump’s controversial Gaza Board of Peace, a body that has sparked global backlash for its structure and mandate. Details of the 4 December gathering first emerged in FCDO documents published on the UK government’s official website in March, but the absence of any documentation of the discussion had not been previously reported. In response to a freedom of information (FOI) request from Middle East Eye, the FCDO confirmed that not only were no meeting minutes created, but there are also no surviving records of pre-meeting briefing materials prepared for Cooper, nor any internal or external correspondence related to scheduling the encounter. The controversy comes against a backdrop of longstanding scrutiny of Blair’s decades-long role in Middle East policy. Blair, who led the UK into the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, was appointed as a founding member of Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace in September 2025, with his role formally confirmed in January 2026. Internal EU meeting minutes obtained by investigative outlet Follow the Money in February show that just 11 days after the Cooper-Blair meeting, lobbyists from Blair’s own Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) pushed EU officials to formally join the board. The Trump-led body, which grants the U.S. president lifetime chairman status and sweeping authority over post-conflict Gaza, has no Palestinian representatives on its executive committee — a flaw that has drawn widespread condemnation from global rights groups. To date, 28 world leaders have joined the board, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who currently faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant over alleged war crimes in Gaza. The UK has publicly rejected membership, with Cooper citing concerns over Trump’s decision to include Russian President Vladimir Putin on the board’s executive committee. “We won’t be one of the signatories today, because this is about a legal treaty that raises much broader issues, and we do also have concerns about President Putin being part of something which is talking about peace, when we have still not seen any signs from Putin that there will be a commitment to peace in Ukraine,” Cooper stated publicly on 22 January. Tensions between Cooper and Blair have already surfaced in public: in March, Blair publicly criticized the UK government for hesitating to back full U.S.-Israeli military action against Iran, and Cooper pushed back by referencing the lessons of the 2003 Iraq war. “I also think, having been a minister in the last Labour government, it is important to learn lessons for what went wrong in Iraq … and recognising that all of our decisions need to be about what is right for British citizens,” she told the BBC. Blair has already faced intense scrutiny over his institute’s past involvement in Middle East planning. TBI, which has received massive funding from billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, previously drew widespread condemnation for its so-called “Gaza Riviera” development plan, which critics argued effectively condoned the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people from the territory. Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, argues that policymakers have long given Blair unearned credibility on Middle East issues despite a consistent track record of failure. “Among many policymakers there’s still this sense that he should be respected because he spent so much time working on the Middle East, rather than a sober assessment of his dire record when dealing with it,” Doyle said. “In terms of the Middle East, it has just been one failure after another for Blair. He is a man who is entrenched in the palace views of the uber-elites of the Middle East, with very little sense of the real trends going on there.” Transparency experts have echoed those concerns, warning that the absence of records for such a high-stakes meeting is unacceptable. Sam Raphael, professor of International Relations and Human Rights at the University of Westminster and director of government transparency research group Unredacted, called the missing documentation “deeply concerning.” “The lack of minutes and other official records in relation to the Foreign Secretary’s meeting – especially with an individual as controversial and consequential for the Middle East, and with such labyrinthine personal interests – is deeply concerning,” Raphael said. This is not the first time the FCDO has faced public criticism over poor record-keeping and lack of transparency. Just last week, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) condemned the department for failing to maintain adequate meeting records during its review of the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the U.S. in December 2024. Raphael noted that the Cooper-Blair meeting perfectly exemplifies the systemic failure the ISC already flagged. “The ISC found that ‘the FCDO stands out as a department failing to produce a necessary audit trail for discussions and decisions,’” Raphael said. “The ISC found this to be ‘unacceptable’, and the Cooper-Blair case is a clear and flagrant example of this.” Adding a layer of historical irony to the controversy, the UK’s freedom of information laws — which enabled this revelation — were introduced by Blair’s own government in 2000. Blair later named the legislation one of his biggest political regrets in his 2010 memoir, and declassified government files released in 2024 revealed he encouraged cabinet ministers to use disposable Post-it notes for official business during his premiership to avoid mandatory public disclosures. Both the FCDO and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change have been contacted for comment on the latest revelations, and have not yet issued a response.