Charles Moore Charles Moore

Spies shouldn’t be political

[Getty Images]

Now that events in Ukraine are restoring a sense of proportion about the difference between aggressive autocracies and free countries, it seems almost incredible that, only last year, sporting teams etc were all but compelled to ‘take the knee’ in deference to Black Lives Matter. One official prominent in this obeisance (metaphorical not literal in his case) was Sir Stephen Lovegrove. As Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, he emailed staff in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, using the BLM hashtag, and castigating the racism of his own department. When challenged about creating this official link with a hard-left organisation with borderline racist views against whites, Sir Stephen defended himself, saying his was ‘Not a political position whatsoever. It’s not a gesture of support for any particular organisation’. In 2021, Sir Stephen was promoted to the post of National Security Adviser, an appointment which caused some dismay in the world of defence and security. Even in that capacity, he put out a document telling employees of MI6 and MI5 to check their ‘white privilege’ (he is, needless to say, white). These are strange preoccupations for someone charged with co-ordinating our opposition to Vladimir Putin. Some accuse him of being half-hearted about helping Ukraine win.

Partly, perhaps, because of this sense that the main government adviser on security has his thoughts elsewhere, there is a growing tendency for other officials to make public speeches. Last week, Sir Jeremy Fleming, head of GCHQ, spoke in Australia, showing a bit of ankle by implying that intercepted comms had revealed that Putin’s advisers did not dare tell him the bad news about the war in Ukraine. Sir Jeremy went on to speak about the new ‘global security architecture’ (of which the new Aukus pact is a part), and how it is based on ‘our values’ which ‘have made our systems and democracies so successful’.

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