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

Dame Eliza was trying to make two main points by implication, I am told. The first is that the typical homegrown Islamic terrorist is far more dangerous than the public understands: he is not the young, amateur extremist talking wildly about making fertilised bombs in his bathtub. Now, the suspects categorised as ‘essential’ by MI5, the highest risk of the three categories, are more likely to be trained by al-Qa’eda professionals — and seeking chemical weapons. Qualitatively and quantitatively, the threat is of a different scale. The deadly sophistication of the plans hatched by Dhiren Barot — the al-Qa’eda terrorist sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court to at least 40 years in prison earlier this month — shows how right Dame Eliza is on this score.

Her second point was to prepare the public for a terrorist success. When she gave the figure of 30 separate terrorism plots being kept under surveillance, those familiar with MI5 idiom knew what she was really saying. If one plot is considered active, as the Heathrow plot was in the summer, it consumes literally half the manpower of MI5. If three or four plots go live at the same time, the agency would be overwhelmed. Even now, it is working to such capacity that its headquarters, Thames House, will run out of desk space by Christmas.

Each terror suspect discovered usually leads to several more, so the problem, by definition, increases exponentially. MI5 casework has jumped by 80 per cent this year alone — and it is impossible to train agents, analysts and even Moneypennys at the same rate. So in releasing these figures Dame Eliza was effectively saying that she is overwhelmed. This was a message which ministers were happy for her to send out in whatever code she wanted: sooner or later the terrorists will succeed. So we should not blame MI5 (or their ministerial overlords) when this happens.