Fiasco Royale: Labour’s ineptitude

15 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

On Wednesday morning, Mr Reid observed that such a message coming from a politician would not be heeded. ‘But coming from the director-general of MI5 it carries a great deal of weight.’ Not for the first time, the intelligence services are helping the Labour government make a political point. But it is precisely this steady politicisation of the intelligence agencies, which we saw during the Hutton inquiry three years ago, that is the problem for the spooks. Their overall strategy has been marinaded in the same political correctness which infects the rest of government policies. In Dame Eliza’s speech, as with the Queen’s Speech, it is possible to detect the passages inserted by a Labour spin-doctor. Is it really possible that the head of MI5, who spends her time tracking plots to wreak mass loss of life on the British public, thinks that climate change is a ‘worse problem’ than terrorism?

The betrayal of the real Bond would be difficult to depict on screen. It would have to be an incongruous mix of the American series 24 and Fawlty Towers: a chaotic leadership bumbling around making it almost impossible for highly skilled agents to catch the deadly enemy. It would have to show the terrorist enemy spending five years developing and multiplying while the nation’s hapless leaders desperately searched for a strategy. In the real Bond movie, our hero would be betrayed not by anyone in his agency, but by the more mundane reality of ministerial fecklessness.