Fiasco Royale: Labour’s ineptitude

18 November 2006

Fraser Nelson reveals the mounting fury within the intelligence community at ministers’ failure to set in place a serious framework for smashing Islamic terrorism. Too little too late is the angry verdict of the spooks

The fiasco of Tony Blair’s terror strategy has been one of the best-kept secrets in Whitehall. As a matter of principle, the Prime Minister never answers questions about MI5 or MI6 — although he enjoys flaunting what he claims is his close relationship with the ‘professionals’. Those affected by his years of indecision have tended to keep their counsel. But fractured pieces of information can be collated to form a wider picture of chaos, disharmony and a sense of betrayal. I wrote a brief item about this in a newspaper last weekend, and found the response remarkable. Since then, I have spoken to a range of sources who concur that the problem is grave and that much of the blame should be attributed to indecisive politicians.

The head of MI5 came as close as she could to making this exasperation in the intelligence community explicit last week. In a rare public speech, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said she wished her job was as simple as fiction would have us believe — the spook dramas in which a small team of people hunt a known enemy, one at a time. In reality, MI5 is monitoring 1,600 suspects, with 2,800 staff trying to distinguish serious plots from youthful fantasy. They have scored several successes, most notably disrupting the alleged transatlantic airline plot this summer. But the jihadi menace, Dame Eliza concluded, will be with us for a generation.

Afterwards, the spies held a secret party at the Imperial War Museum to celebrate the 70th birthday of the Joint Intelligence Committee. It was a jovial affair where Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, surprised guests by making a thoughtful and touching speech. Former Qs came out of retirement and mixed with today’s agents. In all these decades of British espionage, with the ever-changing threat, MI5 has never changed as much as it is changing now.

What Dame Eliza did not say is that the political framework within which MI5 and MI6 must operate is in appalling disarray — and that the delay in setting a sure trajectory has given the terrorists a long and potentially lethal head start. The current strategy, ‘Project Contest’, was designed in 2002 — a time when Mr Blair thought fighting terrorism meant firing Tomahawk missiles into Kabul. What should be a Bond-style blueprint for rooting out terrorists with urgency and ingenuity reads like the woolliest sociological lecture by Sir Ian Blair into the causes of crime.