FFS, everyone knows that bugging is what intelligence agencies do. I thought Boutros Boutros Ghali was surprisingly good on this point on Radio 4 this morning: yes, it’s annoying, yes, it’s against international law (as is all espionage, which doesn’t prevent anyone from doing it); but really Clare Short should catch herself on. As I’ve said before, I was opposed to the Iraq war, but ratting on your own intelligence services for doing their job properly is a pathetic way to behave.
It would be a different matter if the spooks had been out of control and pursuing their own political agenda, independent of government policy. But they weren’t.
It would be a different matter if the spooks had been selectively leaking the information they got to particular British politicians in order to skew the agenda. But they weren’t.
It would, frankly, be a different matter if they had been caught. But they weren’t.
All of us who are involved in international politics are aware of our interactions with intelligence agencies; sometimes it’s overt, sometimes it’s not. I have assumed that most of my international phone conversations, and probably all from my workplace of the moment, were bugged since I got into this game seven years ago. And my experience is that whenever such bugging is revealed – eg the Croatian secret services tapping the Milosevic family chit chat, or MI5 listening in on Martin McGuinness and Mo Mowlam – you have to look really hard at the motives of the whistleblower.
Have I become a reactionary in my old age?
with the caveat that some of the non fiction I’ve not read page by page but chunks over time. The polls bring home to me how much less I manage to read than I used to – there are big gaps in the recent years where once there may not have been.