Chapter 5: The Shadow Archive

There comes a point in a long dispute when paper stops feeling like paperwork and starts feeling like oxygen.

That point arrived after the legal years had done their damage and the matter showed no real sign of dying. By then I had learned a hard lesson. If you are dealing with a large company, memory is not enough. Everything must be kept, dated and retrievable: letters, pleadings, notes, press cuttings, witness statements, internal documents, leaked emails, legal threats, apologies, and all the other fragments from which a truer picture might later be assembled. What might have looked like obsession from the outside was, from where I stood, a survival method.

One reason I learned that lesson so completely is that even the apparent peace after the Smart trial did not hold. After the sale of the house and the move into rented accommodation, I spent a couple of years helping a relative in the IT world. Some of that period took me to Florida, which I remember as peace in a pleasant environment with good food. None of it had anything to do with promotional games. That was precisely the point. It felt, for once, like life moving in another direction.

Then the old pattern returned, and this time the documentary trail is unusually clear. In August 2001, a company called injini, linked to my family, explored the possibility of an internet-only Make Money game with no physical pieces involved. I saw it as a possible second act, perhaps even a way of restarting my career. As a matter of courtesy, and caution, the proposed venture was put to Shell in advance. On 17 August 2001, Richard Wiseman replied that the plan would fall within the old 1994 settlement and that proceeding would breach it. I later supplied further explanation, arguing that a paperless online version in cyberspace was a different creature altogether. Shell did not soften. Keith Ruddock repeated the company's hard line.

Then came the detail that, to me, changed the moral temperature of the whole exchange. On 7 September 2001, Wiseman told my nephew Steven Donovan that Shell was exclusively entitled to Make Money, reserved the right to stop the venture or claim profits, and referred to the judge's remarks from the Smart trial, adding that he would be happy to send a transcript. That is not some later embroidery. It is there in the correspondence. The implication was obvious. The old reputational poison, which I believed had already been neutralised by the deed's complete propriety clause and by the released press statement in which Shell withdrew allegations of impropriety made in the course of the proceedings, was being brought out again.

The effect was predictable. injini's own press material said that, in the face of Shell's threats of legal action, it had abandoned for the time being its plans for the first online Make Money game. So this was not only a matter of feeling insulted or threatened. A real opportunity was being chilled in real time.

When Wiseman later realised that clause 4 of the Deed of Compromise might itself prevent him from sending the judge's remarks without my consent, the absurdity became almost comic. But it was not funny to me. I told him he had poisoned my relationship with injini and put Shell in repudiatory breach of the agreement. I notified Malcolm Brinded. I notified Phil Watts. I told them we were back to square one. I repurchased shell-shareholders.org and prepared to relaunch the site. Shell denied any breach. I did not accept that denial. As far as I was concerned, the peace treaty had been torpedoed.

That matters because it explains why the archive and the website became not merely habits, or outlets, but necessities. If even a supposedly settled set of allegations could be revived when useful, then every piece of paper mattered. Nothing was safely past.

Shell had taught me to distrust the official version of events. Once you have lived through years in which a powerful company can be conciliatory in one letter, aggressive in the next, moralising in public and legalistic in private, you stop assuming that the truth will take care of itself. You keep things because one day the smallest scrap may prove to be the hinge on which a larger argument turns.

The archive accumulated. At first there were the obvious categories: contracts, drafts, promotional ideas, court papers, correspondence. Then there were the materials of any public campaign: articles, letters to editors, notes from journalists, records of conversations, speeches and AGM questions. Over time, another category became more important still: material from inside Shell itself.

This is where the story enters murkier territory, and I must be careful. Not every allegation can be proved to the same standard. Not every source can be identified. Not every internal document is self-explanatory. Yet it would be false to leave out the basic fact that over the years a stream of internal Shell material reached my father and me, and later our websites. Some came through formal channels such as subject access requests. Some came from whistleblowers, current or former employees, or people close to events who believed the public story was incomplete. Some of it was banal. Some of it was astonishing. All of it increased my sense that the dispute was larger than the company had ever admitted.

Once that starts happening, the nature of a campaign changes. You are no longer simply arguing with a corporation from the outside. You are reading its shadow. You are glimpsing how it describes you when it thinks you will never see the description. You are discovering who inside the machine is anxious, who is contemptuous, who is rattled, who is trying to "kill the story," who thinks your website is ridiculous, and who quietly admits it is better than their own internal communications. Those are not the sorts of revelations that soothe a grievance. They deepen it.

One reason they deepen it is that they expose a second battle running behind the visible one. The first battle is public: statements, lawsuits, websites, media coverage, annual meetings, formal correspondence. The second battle is private: monitoring, internal assessments, leak-hunts, quiet containment, and the effort to work out who is talking to whom. At various points, material that later came into my hands suggested that Shell was paying serious attention to my activities, my father's activities, our website, and the possibility that employees or insiders were providing us with information.

By 2007 this seems, on the face of internal materials later cited on the Donovan sites, to have become especially intense. There are references to March 2007 internal emails, a round-table response, and a broader concern inside Shell about what the Donovans might do with sensitive subjects or newly emerging information. There are later references to confidential Focal Point reports and to internal concern about employees taking "internal laundry" to Donovan. There are suggestions of a global effort to identify leaks. Some of this material is heavily redacted; some of it requires contextual caution; some of it sits awkwardly between what can be stated confidently and what can only be inferred. But the pattern is still revealing. Shell did not behave as if we were irrelevant.

For years I was often portrayed, explicitly or implicitly, as a nuisance on the margins. Yet nuisance figures are not usually tracked with this sort of attention. Nuisances are brushed away. What appeared to trouble Shell was not simply that I criticised the company but that I preserved things, published things, connected things, and sometimes received things it would clearly have preferred to keep inside the building.

There is an old saying that sunlight is the best disinfectant. It sounds noble. In practice, sunlight creates its own dangers. When people trust you with information about a powerful employer, or a powerful former employer, you acquire obligations that are partly journalistic, partly moral, and partly strategic. You must decide what can safely be published. You must try to establish whether a document is genuine, complete, or manipulated. You must consider whether disclosure serves truth or merely noise. You must also think about your sources, who may be frightened, reckless, disillusioned, or all three at once. The romance of the whistleblower vanishes quickly when one realises the actual work consists of protecting people, checking facts, and bearing the weight of things you may not yet be able to use.

I do not pretend I always navigated that world elegantly. But I can say with confidence that it changed me. The legal years had made me stubborn. The archive years made me methodical. I became less interested in argument for its own sake and more interested in records: who wrote what, when, to whom, under what heading, with what hidden assumptions. The archive was not only a weapon. It was also a discipline, a way of forcing myself to move from outrage toward evidence.

So the story cannot be reduced to paranoia. If all I had possessed were suspicions, the chapter would be shorter and far less persuasive. What made the archive powerful was that it so often contained the company's own words. Even a shell of redacted internal correspondence can still reveal a great deal. An accidentally disclosed email can be more instructive than a hundred public statements. A note intended for internal circulation can expose tone, fear, contempt, flattery or alarm in ways no polished press release ever will.

Some of the most striking material from these years concerns the changing role of the website itself. Inside Shell, it appears at times to have been treated not merely as a gripe site but as a live reputational problem. One internal comment later disclosed said, in effect, that the Donovan website was an excellent source of group news and comment and superior to what Shell's own internal communications were putting out. I have always treasured that line, partly because it is funny and partly because it reveals something very serious. The company knew the site had become useful. Perhaps more useful than it wanted.

And usefulness attracts surveillance.

Here it is necessary to tread carefully again, because the subject of espionage has a tendency to excite both believers and sceptics beyond reason. The book must not become silly. What can responsibly be said is that the Donovan archive and associated websites became entangled over time with materials and allegations touching on private intelligence, internal security, covert monitoring, and efforts to identify or contain leaks. Hakluyt appears in this world. So do corporate-affairs and security structures. So do former or current insiders with intelligence backgrounds. Some episodes are better documented than others. Some are still best presented as allegations, reports, or John's understanding of events. But taken together they create a persistent impression that the conflict had long since escaped the boundaries of ordinary commercial disagreement.

When the surrounding conduct begins to feel shadowy, paperwork becomes moral ballast. It is how one resists being gaslit by scale. It is how one protects oneself against the later suggestion that everything was imagined, exaggerated or invented. The archive says: this was written; this was said; this was sent; this existed; this happened on this date.

There was a more human reason too. The archive gave the years shape. A long grievance can dissolve a person if it remains purely emotional. Archiving turns suffering into labour. It gives one a task beyond fuming. It allows anger to become curation. That is probably one reason I did not collapse into self-pity. I was busy. If Shell would not end the story, I would document it.

Of course that had a cost. Archiving a fight is not the same as escaping it. There are only so many hours in a day. Time spent scanning, filing, cross-checking, publishing and protecting is time not spent elsewhere. One of the quiet tragedies of this whole saga is that the skills I poured into the archive were real skills. They involved organisation, judgment, communication, persistence and nerve. In another life they might have built something gentler. In this life they built a record of what Shell had done and how it had responded when challenged.

By the end of this period, I was no longer just a litigant with a grievance or even a shareholder with a campaign. I had become something else: an unofficial archivist of Shell's discomfort. That is not a title I ever sought, but it explains the next stage. Once you possess not only an argument but an archive, the internet changes from a noticeboard into a weapon.

The websites came next. And once they were fully alive, the story changed again.