Why spies withholding intelligence from the home secretary would be nothing new

Doubts about the reliability of minsters such as Priti Patel have always been harboured, fairly or not, writes Sean O’Grady

Intelligence chiefs are reported to have withheld information from home secretary Priti Patel (PA)

Did the spooks avoid showing Priti Patel certain items of vital intelligence?

The Sunday Times insists security chiefs did precisely that – because MI5 “do not trust” the home secretary. An extraordinary state of affairs, you might think. A “source” stated: “The spooks find her extremely difficult to deal with. She doesn’t grasp the subtleties of intelligence. It’s not black and white. They don’t have confidence in her abilities.”

In response, Ms Patel and her permanent secretary at the home office say it is not true – but then again, how would they know? The thing about the secret services (or others) restricting the access of minsters to any given bits of intelligence is that it is impossible to prove.

Indeed, practically speaking, if the security services are obliged (because of the sheer volume of material) to sift and select what they share with a cabinet minister, they’re necessarily “withholding” some parts of the vast, complex and conflicting intelligence picture. Of course, the minister, by definition, will be unaware of what they’re missing, never having seen it or even heard of it.

Or, as the security source told The Sunday Times, it is all about subtleties: “They have to decide how much to share, and they share less. She is also informed about things later in the decision-making process than before. Some things the security services do have legal implications, but she tends not to want to hear that.” It might not have helped that Ms Patel didn’t go to some inter-departmental intelligence-sharing sessions.

Funnily enough, it is very reminiscent of what was reported in the summer of last year, just as Boris Johnson was launching his leadership campaign. On that occasion it seemed to be No 10 (ie Theresa May) briefing against him.

It was supposed that during his time as foreign secretary, No 10 and/or the security services also exercised some caution about what Mr Johnson was allowed to see. It was reported that some in the intelligence community had worries about Boris Johnson’s ability to keep information confidential. Their doubts seem to have dated back to Mr Johnson’s time as Mayor of London (2008 to 2016), when he dismayed the then home secretary, Ms May, by inadvertently revealing some confidential information before it was due to be made public.

It was also reported that Downing Street would arrange pre-meetings, or “pre-meets”, to discuss sensitive subjects before Mr Johnson turned up. One of his allies confided to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg “it was obvious there were concerns on issues from early on” and suggested ”there was a constant question of whether he was really seeing everything” – the full intelligence picture that he would be entitled to in his role as foreign secretary.

Apparently, No 10 did not want Mr Johnson to be shown a category of sensitive secret intelligence after he was appointed in July 2016. One person said Mr Johnson was aware of the decision at the time and was “very unhappy”. None of this has been openly acknowledged.

In fact this kind of selectivity and access to intelligence was witnessed on a macro-scale in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war – with the so-called dodgy dossier at the centre of allegations about who knew what when. What seems to have happened, ironically, in that case was that the intelligence community was actively encouraged to be selective in what they presented to the prime minister, Tony Blair, and his colleagues in order to build the case for armed intervention, at least in order to prevent Saddam Hussein acquiring weapons of mass destruction. For example, according to the Chilcot Inquiry, the then foreign secretary Jack Straw’s reaction, when the dossier came across his desk, was: “Good, but should not Iraq be the first and also have more text? The paper has to show why this is an exceptional threat from Iraq. It does not quite do this yet.”

The doubts and frailties in some of the Iraq/WMD intelligence, which after all proved faulty, were excluded from the dossier – something those involved seemed more than content with.

Doubts about the reliability of minsters and potential minsters have always been harboured, fairly or not, in the minds of those in MI5 and MI6.

It was, for example, rumoured last year that Jeremy Corbyn, with his background as a wide-ranging campaigner for peace in Ireland and the Middle East was a potential security risk.

In the 1970s a group of maverick secret services officers were so convinced that the then prime minister and labour leader, Harold Wilson, was a spy that they started to hatch a plot to smear him and topple the democratically elected Labour government. As it happens, they also thought the head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, was also a Soviet agent. It was all detailed by the eccentric Peter Wright in his 1988 memoir, Spycatcher, written in defiance of the usual rules.

That, in turn was banned from publication in Britain by the Thatcher government, though it was legal to buy a copy abroad and bring it into the UK (as the author did). It was also legal to read sections of it out at Speakers Corner, a liberty gladly exploited by Tony Benn. It made the whole intelligence “circus”, as they like to call themselves, look rather clownish.

But sometimes there were genuine eastern bloc, ie Soviet, spies at the top of government as well as dotted around parliament, mostly but not exclusively on the Labour benches. Most offered titbits in exchange for relatively small bribes.

One was happy enough to turn up the Czechoslovak embassy and stuff his pockets with expensive Cuban cigars in exchange for material that actually could be picked up in the newspaper gossip columns or Private Eye. His Czech handlers were so annoyed they changed his codename from “Lee” to “Greedy Bastard”.

On the other hand, the then postmaster-general, John Stonehouse, was probably a Czechoslovak agent, and was, in that bygone era, the powerful position of having to approve tapping of phone lines.

The most unorthodox relationship between a top politician and the spies was that of Harold Macmillan, prime minister from 1957 to 1963. It was the height of the Cold War, and multifarious Soviet spies were at every level of the British armed forces and security services; the Philby, Burgess and Maclean affairs were only the most famous examples of longstanding Russian spies who betrayed much valuable intelligence to their Moscow spymasters (whence they eventually defected for good as full colonels in the KGB.)

“Supermac”, ever the politician, took the view that the less he was told about the spies and their mutual suspicions the better. When the inevitable defections and treachery were uncovered he could then get up in the House of Commons and truthfully claim he had no idea what they were up to. He told his intelligence chiefs to, in effect, keep him in the dark.

When the Profumo affair broke, with its lurid allegations about the Minister for War (ie the army), John Profumo, sharing a girlfriend (Christine Keeler) with the Russian military attache, it was true he knew little about it – but Mr Macmillan was still damaged by the revelations. The irony seems to be that the most celebrated spy scandal of the 20th century, the Profumo scandal, was one where not much in the way of UK nation’s security was ever revealed by Profumo, and that, had he taken a closer interest in the private lives of his ministers, Macmillan might have known a few things that might have helped his government get through the scandal.

As the old saying goes, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing – an adage Ms Patel ought to take some solace in.