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"He came at us, last year,with a Data Subject Access Request. I told him his application was an abuse of the process, quoting Wikipedia."

Andrew, I'm glad you succeeded! (especially as Wiki rarely seems even close to being current on data protection)

Actually I recall the Home Office once tried something very similar on me... the subject access request was for copies of our young non-English-speaking child client's interview and in-country application which had been refused by the ECO (then the appeal refused by the same ECO), followed by the Home Office's written refusal to comply with an Immigration Tribunal Order ordering specific disclosure of the same documents, on the wonderfully Kafkaesque ground that the Immigration Tribunal is not a Court and therefore lacks jurisdiction over the Home Office. Our client's subject access request cost nothing (we were acting pro bono) so we did it mainly out of curiosity to see what they'd try on! So alleging abuse of a process whose validity they otherwise refused to recognise was a belly-laughingly good start - to gold-plate it they also suddenly stated they refused to accept our word that we represented our client(!) in data protection matters unless he sent written confirmation to them (! again: young child, remember, not to mention all the other idiocies).

(for anyone who has similar difficulties with Home Office insanity, I mean policy, just judicially review them, the Treasury Solicitor seems to fold instantly in such absurd cases as a written decision to refuse to comply with Tribunal orders. SSHD still "win" of course in the sense of burning paying clients' money and time and pro bono lawyers' time and taxpayers' money, but then abuse of process is SSHD's MO, you just have to roll with it)