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Spy conference at 10 Downing Street shows up the Intelligence and Security Committee as a paper-tiger


MI5 HQ, Thames House, London................................................MI6 HQ, Vauxhall Cross, London

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith presented a self-satisfied smirk as she arrived for a meeting at 10 Downing Street Spies' Day. She gave the impression of being in 'control' but certainly the unimpressive Jacqui Smith has no real power over The Executive and has proved this by not yet releasing the Hunt Report.

It does not happen often but the House of Commons had a brief chance to 'debate' the supervision of MI5 and MI6 - the very intelligence world whose work was manipulated to take us into the disastrous and illegal Iraq War.

'Three and a half hours is our lot every one and a half years,' snorted Andrew MacKinlay (Lab, Thurrock). He was clearly unimpressed and hardly surprising given the fact that he has been targeted by MI5 for meeting a Russian Federation diplomat at the Commons.

The Westminster committee which is meant to oversee the spooks calls itself the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) aka as Paper Tiger 2 and second only to the Joint Intelligence Committee. But it is not, strictly, a House of Commons committee because its members are appointed by Downing Street poodles who have whimpered long in favour of the Police State and snapped away at the legs of democracy. Peter Kilfoyle (Lab, Liverpool Walton) called the ISC 'a poodle of the Prime Minister of the day'.

The ISC annual report, given to MPs before the discussions was, as ever, full of redacted [blanked-out] passages. It's like reading a half-filled crossword puzzle written by those who hold all the cards and dealt out to those who have no idea at all how to play the Great Game.

So clinically paranoid is the New Labour regime that MPs are not even told the name of the committee's clerk. Secret, you see, old boy, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. He, or she, works in the Cabinet Office, deep in the gubbins of The Executive where files appear and disappear with the frequency and morality of a whore's knicker's at King's Cross. And it should be noted that more than a few government poodles have spent dark hours trawling the streets and discarded knickers of prostitute alley aka Kings Cross....

But Jacqui Smith, Home Secretary, who has not imbibed Kings Cross opened the meaningless 'debate'. In fact the debate so much as it exists in a powerless vacuum of meandering waffle, was so meaningless that we refuse to print anything about its minutiae other than to say nothing of any real significance happened.

And we will take the ISC and the Home Secretary seriously when the Hunt Report into the Wilson Plot is released into the public domain. Jacqui Smith is only too well aware that such an act would demonstrate her authority over MI5 but the fact that she will not release the damning dossier proves that MI5 still has the whip-hand over her... anyone for a game of Max Mosley?

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