‘Labour leader a clear and present danger to the country’
who have political agendas. But Mr Corbyn wasn’t negotiating with them, he was hugging them; supporting them. He was an enthusiastic encourager. That must count him out from running the country. Of course, it’s not just him. The people around him, too, are deeply compromised by their past, by the people they have associated with, encouraged, and seen as political allies. And at a time when we in this nation face a serious security problem, the idea that the security of the nation might rest in the hands of people like this makes me shudder. It’s deeply shocking.
By contrast, we have in Theresa May someone who has a good track record in the Home Office; someone who understands the complexity of security problems; how investigations work, and what needs to be done.
Of course, she has become embroiled in a row about policing numbers. There has been talk of putting 10,000 extra officers on the streets. But this is nakedly political. If you ask professionals in the police they would recognise that creating 10,000 jobs for community policing won’t have a slightest effect on the problem of Islamic terror.
Police officers may stop attacks as they happen, as they did so bravely last weekend. But they will not get you to the extreme fringes of the Muslim community. Those fringes are extremely difficult to penetrate. In some ways, we’d do better to recruit 100 theologians, because the answers
‘Our allies are every bit as surprised that someone like this is contending for the position of Prime Minister’
to extremism are going to come from them, inside the Muslim community.
Meanwhile, it is Theresa May who has overseen massive increases in the budgets for the security and intelligence agencies. The benefits from this increase will take time to come through. It takes a long time to train intelligence officers. But the benefits will be seen clearly in due course. All this, it strikes me, should make it perfectly obvious, startlingly obvious, that Mr Corbyn represents a clear and present danger to the country. The amazing thing is, there is a degree of vetting once you’ve joined the Cabinet. Were he to go through that, it would have an impact on the materials he could see. But you can’t vet the Prime Minister. In a democracy there comes a point for security and intelligence services like my own where you can’t pick and choose anymore. You have to serve the government of the day. So the election of Mr Corbyn would put the intelligence services in a very difficult position. It’s unprecedented. It’s a situation that has never been tested before, and it would certainly be a very peculiar situation.
I’m afraid that the truth is that with him in power the country would be less safe. He doesn’t have the experience or the credentials to inspire the confidence of the British people. And it is not just here that questions are rightly being asked. Internationally, our allies are every bit as surprised that someone like this, with his background, is contending for the position of Prime Minister. Eventually, and who knows how quickly, that would have to have an impact on most important intelligence sharing relationships; our closest allies would be very worried by his political views. They would draw breath when they looked into his record.
To me this just seems so fundamental, so important. Yet it has not been a dominant theme of the campaign. But now the campaign has ended and Mr Corbyn may potentially be hours from office. That astonishes and frightens me. It is time that someone said, loud and clear: “Come off it, this man isn’t fit for the office.”
♦ Sir Richard Dearlove was Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1999 to 2004