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 Bond girl in Casino Royale is an official from HM Treasury sent to ensure Bond does not become bamboozled by the financing of terrorism. He finds her irksome at first, then indispensable. In similar spirit, though in rather less glamorous form, Mr Brown has dispatched a Treasury official to keep an eye on Mr Reid’s terror committee. But in their joint attempt to salvage an anti-terrorism strategy, the two great rivals are actually working well together. The Chancellor has indeed offered MI5 all the cash it wants: Dame Eliza is in the unusual position of resisting the bonanza he is keen for. Her agency will suffer, she believes, if it expands too fast.

Mr Brown is doubtless motivated by guilt, or the political equivalent: awareness that he has made an error which must be corrected if he is to avoid future trouble. He froze the intelligence agencies’ budgets when he arrived at the Treasury, and even after 9/11 denied them the increases they asked for. At the time, MI5 was identifying 250 domestic terrorism suspects — or ‘primary investigative targets’, as the spooks say — each year. Within two years this figure had doubled to 500, and Mr Brown was forced by the new realities to concede substantial budget increases. But his failure to start the process earlier, to heed the spooks in his 2002 spending review, is an error the agency is paying for now.

The crisis is not one of funding but of its timing. Dame Eliza’s speech was interpreted in some quarters as a plea for more resources, but she had no such intention. ‘Had it been a coded protest, Reid would not have let her say it,’ one old hand says. ‘MI5 cannot grow any faster. It was on its maximum budgetary growth path before 7/7, as were the other agencies, and it will probably reach its full strength next year.’ But to reach the strength it needs to be today, it should have started five years ago. This delay is born of political indecision.