The Hutton inquiry has confirmed what we all should have guessed– Britain ’s secret intelligence services are untouchable. It does not matter how badly wrong they were on Iraq and how often they have got things wrong in the past. They will continue to go from strength to strength because, as Lord Hutton realised, they are in bed with the government and a major power in the land.
Lord Hutton’s narrow terms of reference did not allow him to examine the intelligence services’ role in making the case for war and the accuracy of the dodgy dossier. This was, he said, “beyond my remit”.
Poor old James Bond has had a terrible thrashing this week. First former British ambassador Sir Peter Heap accused Bond and his colleagues in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) of being useless spies who frequently made things up. Then the the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) reported that it could find no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, thus underlining a fundamental failure of intelligence and removing at a stroke Britain’s justification for going to war.
James Bond and his masters will never be the same again. The changes in the relationship between the British intelligence community and the government, revealed by the Hutton Inquiry, are–for better or worse –here to stay.
Intelligence bureaucracies such as Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and America’s Central Intelligence Agency have traditionally seen their role as identifying monsters. Their officers go out into the world, keep their eyes and ears open and return with warnings for their masters of threats to the well-being of the nation they serve.
So more than half the population of Britain wants to live abroad and their first choice among non-English-speaking countries is Spain.
So more than half the population of Britain wants to live abroad and their first choice among non-English-speaking countries is Spain. Down here on the Balearic island of Ibiza this news has raised a few delighted chuckles among the locals. They presume that the Brits longing for exile are the same high-spenders who flock here during August, the height of the clubbing season, and who pay up to £50 a head to join 10,000 other ravers at Privilege, officially the world’s biggest nightclub. It is more likely, however, that they resemble me, wanderers in the autumn of their life who admire the Spanish, especially the Ibicencos, for their gentle hedonism, tolerance, loyalty, good manners and recognition of what is important in this world and what is froth.
