I have a rare illness of the spine that prevents me from bowing before the powerful.
-Gustavo de Greiff, the first Attorney-General of Colombia
In 2016, the Isle of Man immigration department refused to renew my visa — and would not even meet with me to discuss it. I had created an innovative structure to extend my stay there, secured support from economic development officials and even had a lawyer’s blessing. But unfortunately, the Immigration officials proper turned me down flat! Fortunately, I had a right of appeal.
The courts there are pretty swift so, over a few months, I launched 3 lawsuits and won. I even got some damages, which I donated to the local food bank. The next year, I wanted to go for permanent residency, called Indefinite Leave to Remain ("ILR") in the UK context. (The Isle of Man is a British Crown dependency between England and Ireland. It shares a common immigration system and travel area with the UK). Unfortunately, the Immigration people were sore losers and changed the rules so that someone using my structure (where I owned more than 10% of my employer) could not get ILR. I had learned a lot by then about public law and knew they could not change laws like that and had to grand-father me, due to the doctrine of "legitimate expectation". I now had a new fight on my hands. But I’d had enough of court, so I decided to escalate beyond it.
By then, I had antagonized the immigration people so much that they were encouraging other departments like the tax people and the financial regulator to investigate me. It was complete bollocks! They played dirty! Another example is when, after initially refusing to meet, the immigration people suddenly invited me to meet under the guise of "working it out." I knew perfectly well this was an undisclosed interrogation. I felt legally obliged to go, but refused to shake their hands and kept my sunglasses on. Every time I provoked them, they would retaliate, sure. But such retaliation only gave me ammunition to escalate matters to ever more powerful people.
As it happens, the ultimate decision-maker in immigration cases in the Isle of Man was the Lieutenant Governor - the Queen's representative. At the time, the Governor was one Sir Richard Gozney. I emailed his secretary to ask for a meeting. But he refused to meet. Eventually, I found his email, but he never once replied to any of my emails. Much of what the immigration officials did was completely unlawful, I found the Governor negligent. You won't be surprised I quickly found some compliance matters the Governor was himself deficient in - just some opening volleys. But I felt his biggest vulnerability was that he was an outsider too. The Queen is a figurehead - in practice, the Governor was really the UK's man in the Isle of Man. They're always parachuted in. So some local nationalists who identify as Celtic resent the Governor as a colonial relic and a burden to the local taxpayer. This BBC article about the costs to house the Governor, resulting from a Freedom of Information request I filed is one public example of my s***-stirring.
Kids these days have ChatGPT. But back then, I only had shows on Netflix to help with my lawyering. At the time, I was really big on the series Narcos, which features a quietly powerful Attorney-General of Colombia who stands up to the United States. I looked up some of the finer points of what the Isle of Man Attorney-General does. It turns out that among many other duties, he advises the Governor on the law. Having previously beaten the government in court - on positions taken by his office - I felt I had some credibility with the Attorney-General. We met and he agreed that going to court was generally dumb. He peppered me with detailed questions. I almost felt like he was opening a parallel application process, but he was all sphinx-like, revealing nothing. It could just as well have been British politeness.
So as far as I was concerned, I was still at war. I started digging into a common law principle called the Carltona doctrine. Carltona has to do with the proper delegation of administrative power from queen bees to worker bees. You see in the BBC photo above that the Governor works out of a manor. But the immigration officials were based in another department called Cabinet Office. That's a pretty good hint that something was off. So I took positions and opened a new front in my war - unlawful delegation! Eventually, through my relentless lobbying, the laws that were blocking my path to ILR were changed. And so I seized the opportunity to secure my ILR status once and for all and get the immigration people off my back.
I submitted my ILR application in early November 2017. I kept the Attorney-General informed, but he didn't say much in response. There was one catch: while the application was being processed, the government kept my passport. Shortly after my application, my siblings decided to have a big reunion in Montreal. By then, it had started weighing on me that my mom lived for family, but that her children were now split on three continents. And then during this big reunion, I was stranded in the Isle of Man.
And so I decided to book a flight for December 12th and started an operation I called Saving Private Klev. I started sending emails every day to get them to return my passport. Technically, if I requested my passport back, my ILR application is treated as withdrawn. So I had to be artful.
By this point, my family reunion in Montreal had already started, I was missing out on quality time. I was resigned that in the worst case, I would withdraw the ILR application just to get my passport back and make it home.
On December 11th, less than 24 hours before my flight, I sent the government side one final missive: this video as inspiration.
On December 12th, I gave up my fight for ILR. With about 2 hours to spare before my flight, I went to collect my passport. But I got more than my passport, I was told to wait a bit and then was handed the full ILR documents! I was chuffed, as they say. I had recovered a right all four of my grand-parents were born with - to live in the UK. (That's how the Empire worked.)
It's only in 2020, that I learned that the immigration officials had originally recommended that my ILR be refused, but that the Governor had overturned their decision, just a day before my flight. I was eventually able to get a hold of the 3-page legal memo where the Governor reverses the Chief Immigration Officer's decision:
The rest of the document is a legal analysis where the Governor bends over backwards to accommodate my legal views. If you have followed along, this is quite a reversal! Legally Blond Gozney was otherwise pretty standoffish. His formal training is in geology. So what happened? Well, as I said, the Governor has to act on legal advice (just like ours). The Attorney-General is the one who accepted my legal arguments and intervened! Just like in Narcos!
Not knowing what had gone on behind the scenes, when I got back to the island in January 2018, I went back to fighting the Governor on his unlawful delegation practices. In 2019, my arguments prevailed. The Governor was stripped of his immigration powers, which were transferred to a Minister, ending one of the last non‑ceremonial exercises of Crown executive power in the Isle of Man. Even before that, the immigration route I was refused a visa renewal under collapsed. In all, hundreds of pages of law had to be re-written for various reasons. It was a total omnishambles, the government ballsed up from beginning to end.
I remember at the very beginning, when I first went to the Immigration counter and met a simple officer, an old lady. I floated my plan to her and she said: "You are not going to cram your plan down our throats." That was an incredibly belligerent thing to say - at a time when I had done absolutely nothing to deserve such hostility. But I think I rose to her challenge!