A WHITEHALL censor has disabled his social media accounts after the Morning Star revealed his controversial past as a mercenary, counterinsurgency expert and Ukip candidate.

Charles Bennett stood for Ukip in the 2010 general election but lost his deposit. Last year he started work for the Foreign Office as a “sensitivity reviewer,” part of a select team trusted with vetting diplomatic cables and redacting awkward episodes before they are released to the National Archives.

After we splashed on his story yesterday, Mr Bennett quickly took down his LinkedIn profile and made his Tweets private.

But it caught the eye of the Green Party’s Phil Chamberlain, who ran against him in 2010 in North Wiltshire and remembered him as “always smartly-suited, his moustache echoing Windsor Davies from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.”

Mr Chamberlain said: “His CV certainly suggests a career at the sharp end of various conflicts — but I am not sure that is the best qualification for weeding out FCO [Foreign & Commonwealth Office] files.

“And I say that as a journalist by training and an academic by practice who has made extensive use of our FoI [freedom of information] laws.

“The Civil Service has an aversion to sunlight and instinctively prefers to keep matters in house rather than out in the open.

“Choosing an insider to judge what should be dribbled out to the public feels like a very safe way of ensuring we will learn nothing of consequence.”

Our revelations also alarmed Paul O’Connor from the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry, a human rights group trying to obtain Troubles-era files from the Northern Ireland Office (NIO).

“We have serious concerns about these sensitivity reviews,” he told the Star.

“At a recent meeting with the secretary of state [Karen Bradley, now succeeded by Julian Smith] we were told that two files on children killed by plastic bullets — Paul Whitters and Julie Livingstone — are to remain closed until 2059 and 2064 respectively because of a sensitivity review, but neither she nor the NIO officials with her was able to explain why.

“The Orwellian excuse the families were offered at the meeting was that because the files are closed, the NIO no longer knows what’s in the files.”

Both children were killed in 1981 during the Troubles.