MI5 is still so secret it’s actually spooky
As royal visits go, a trip to MI5’s black museum beats a walkabout in the rain. So I’m sure the Queen had a ball there on Tuesday.
Among the cloak-and-dagger exhibits she saw were the gizmos which enabled us to hoodwink the Nazis.
But I hope you also caught my favourite, Ma’am – the boots belonging to the 2001 airline shoe bomber Richard Reid, their heels cut away to reveal where he hid the explosives.
As the Londoner is now serving a 110-year prison sentence in Colorado, he’s not likely to be back to reclaim them any time soon.
And as our James Bonds are technically On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, MI5 chief Sir Andrew Parker had no problem showing off the hush-hush tools of the trade to his boss of bosses.
His line manager Priti Patel is another matter.
She’s angry at reports he might not be as open with her and holds back the most sensitive intelligence because she’s flaky.
MI5 denies this, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they? There are claims a leak inquiry was demanded. Even weirder because you only investigate the leak of something which is true.
Loathe as I am to defend the Home Secretary, I know from former ministers they find dealing with our intelligence agencies deeply frustrating.
One told me: “They may advise you to do this or not do that. But they won’t tell you the hard evidence that advice is based on, which means you can’t judge its value.
“For all we knew they may have just dreamed it up that morning over their cornflakes.”
I get that what MI5 and our overseas intelligence service MI6 say to Whitehall must be necessarily opaque. They have sources to protect and careless talk costs lives.
And it’s not just Britain’s secrets they keep under their hats, but also those of our so-called Five Eyes partners – America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Our record here is nothing to shout home about, what with Kim Philby and the other Cambridge traitors during the Cold War.
I grew up with spies. My mum was in MI6, though true to form I didn’t find that out until after her death, and I’ve been dealing with spooks professionally for 20 years.
So I can appreciate the need for operational secrecy, but it is the culture of secrecy I question.
Whatever my mum got up to operationally surely cannot still be sensitive 70 years later, yet I’m denied a peek at her service record until 2023 at the earliest.
Still, the fact that spooks deal with me at all is an improvement on the past – when even the very existence of both MI5 and MI6 was officially denied.
But a bit more openness without compromising operational security would not go amiss. The more MI5 can tell us about what terrorist plots are thwarted, the more we will be on the lookout for future ones.
We are all acutely aware of the horrors of 9/11 and 7/7 because they are seared into our memories.
But we don’t give so much thought to the reason behind the airport ritual of bagging up scent, aerosols, creams or gels of 100mls or less and showing them to security staff before boarding planes.
That’s because the terrorists prompting this were caught and the attack never happened.
Yet if the 2006 Liquid Bomb Plot had succeeded, hydrogen peroxide explosives in soft drink bottles would have taken out transatlantic planes and killed 10,000 people, three times the 9/11 death toll.
And there are other nipped-in-thebud atrocities more people than just the Queen should know about.
Mum was in MI6, but 70 years on I can’t see her record s a bloke I’m taking my life in my hands here, but I take issue with Scottish Lib Dem MP Christine Jardine’s private member’s bill which says it’s “unacceptable that in 2020 women pay more than men for... haircuts.” Isn’t this because women, by and large, have more hair than men?