When the spooks get it right...

Once again I’ve had the experience of having to reconsider some of my fondest convictions. This time I had my lesson from Eliza Manningham Buller, former head of the British security service, MI5, in one of her BBC Reith lectures this year.

Ex-spook chief with remarkable insights

The unease that comes from feeling personally targeted came when she referred to those sceptics who tended to see security and freedom as opposed, with her firmly on the side of the former. That was, I shamefacedly had to admit, certainly my position, to classify among those inclined to limit rather than to defend liberty.

Her view is that there is no contradiction between security and freedom. For her, MI5’s mission is to protect both. As she pointed out, twice to stress the point, the stated objective of the organisation is to defend parliamentary democracy.

Within this general framework she made two specific points that struck me particularly.

On the use of waterboarding by the United States, she said ‘torture is illegal in our national law and in international law. It is wrong and never justified.’

Like quite a few opponents of the use of torture, I’ve tended to argue that it doesn’t generate good intelligence. She on the other hand believes that it sometimes does, but points out that the argument that lifesaving intelligence was sometime obtained by it, ‘and I accept it was, still does not justify it. Torture should be utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives. I am proud my Service refused to turn to the torture of high-level German prisoners in the Second World War, when, in the early years, we stood alone and there was a high risk of our being invaded and becoming a Nazi province. So if not then, why should it be justified now?’

It was chastening to listen to her. The argument over whether torture is effective or ineffective is irrelevant – it’s quite simply wrong. Turning to a utilitarian justification only weakens the moral argument, which is more than strong enough on its own.

As it happens, though, she comes out with something close to a utilitarian argument herself, almost as an afterthought.

I believe that the acquisition of short-term gain through water-boarding and other forms of mistreatment was a profound mistake and lost the United States moral authority and some of the widespread sympathy it had enjoyed as a result of 9/11. And I am confident that I know the answer to the question of whether torture has made the world a safer place. It hasn’t.

Giving up the moral high ground weakens us and attracts more recruits to the ranks of our enemies.

But Manningham-Buller made another point that struck me almost as strongly and much more personally. It concerned the rule of law. She declared:

The Security Service Act of 1989 was long overdue - the government of Mrs Thatcher was not, at first, convinced of its necessity - but its importance was critical. The Service’s experience of working on a proper legislative basis has been wholly positive. But even at that early stage in 1989 we knew its importance.

Like most people, I would have expected the spooks to do all in their power to resist legal oversight. So it was a bit of a surprise to find that Manningham-Buller was, on the contrary, only too pleased to have a proper legal framework for her work.

Funnily enough that chimed with a personal experience of my own, though not perhaps at quite her level.

My work involves using large quantities of healthcare information, often including confidential material about identified patients. Following a series of scandals some years ago – you know, the usual things: lost USB keys, stolen laptops, all the mundane disasters that can happen with unsecured data – regulations were so massively tightened that it became almost impossible to do my job.

Recently, though, good sense has prevailed. Regulations have been revised and intelligent procedures put in place. People have realised that there is no point in having a system so restrictive that it’s impossible to do the very things they regard not only as legitimate, but actually necessary for the sake of good healthcare.

For instance, a key thing when looking at how an individual case has gone is to be able to look at other cases for the same patient – but that means knowing who the patient is, which in turn means working with ‘patient identifiable data’, the very stuff the regulations had originally made inaccessible.

The problem's been met by setting ways of doing things that mean that, as long as we stick to rules about who can see what, how it needs to be handled, how long it is kept and so on. And, funnily enough, I find it surprisingly relaxing to work that way: I know that what I’m doing is within the rules, it isn’t going to expose me to any unpleasant consequences with the law, and at the same time it’s making sure that patient confidentiality is preserved. 

And since, in other conditions, I’m a patient myself, I’m really rather happy about that last point.

So it’s good to be able to say with Mannigham-Buller that my ‘experience of working on a proper legislative basis has been wholly positive’. I know what she means.

On the bigger points, though, about the morality and nature of a security service – well, I can’t claim to have anything like her insight – only, despite myself, to rather admire her point of view.

A safe haven, but short on appeal

At the risk of making it look as though I spend a disproportionate amount of time in our smallest roomw, I can’t resist the opportunity to share another toilet sign with you.

It read ‘Out of order. Please do not use.’

What’s special about that, I hear you ask? We see it all the time. Very irritating it is too, but profoundly banal.

Ah, but you’ve missed the point, I reply. This sign was on the inside of the door. What it was saying was ‘this loo is absolutely fine, but out there things are seriously messed up. Probably best not to take the chance of going back.’

Probably good advice

Not far off the mark, I’d say. Probably good advice. Sadly, though, even if I do spend longer in toilets than is strictly customary, I have to confess that I find the possibilities they offer frankly limited. Not that attractive a spot in which to take refuge from the evils of the world.

So I screwed up my courage and plunged back out into the maelstrom we call daily life. Scary stuff, but more entertaining.

Still, I appreciate the advice from the lavatory. Nice to know someone is looking out for us that way.

What's to be so relaxed about?

It’s sometimes worrying how easily one can be sucked into a superficially plausible view to which normally one wouldn’t give any house room at all.

For instance, like rather a lot of other people I’ve tended to go along with the idea that it’s no bad thing that Greece and Italy now have ‘technocratic’ governments. I’m not quite sure why I should be relaxed about this idea, because ‘technocratic’ only seems to be a synonym for ‘unelected’. I like to think of myself as a bit of a democrat, so how can I reconcile myself to this obvious travesty of accountability?

And yet when I saw an Italian being interviewed on the streets on that heady day when Berlusconi finally fell, and heard him say ‘now, we just need to get things sorted out, there’ll be time for elections later’ I caught myself nodding and agreeing. But what happens to the principle of one citizen one vote?

In the cases of Greece and Italy we seem to have reduced it to 15 or so non-citizens, one vote.

On the one hand, we have Merkozy, one half of which at least has the merit of being relatively civilised, though the other half is just a would-be Napoleon who worries all the time about his physical stature, presumably because any other kind is beyond him. He has all the qualities that won Berlusconi the general admiration he so richly deserves, as well as the career exit he had done so much to earn himself and which, we can but hope, Sarko might soon emulate.

Less impressive half of Merkozy

Then there are two or three international financiers, the heads of the European Central Bank, the IMF, whatever.

And there are the credit rating agencies.

Because let’s not forget that one of the main drivers behind government policy and government changes recently is the need to satisfy the ‘markets’. 

And that means the credit ratings people.

Have you noticed  how people talk about them as though they were impersonal? I heard it last week. ‘Standard and Poor’s are considering downgrading France’s debt.’ Standard and Poor’s? They make it sound like an oracle of some kind, a handing down of tablets of timeless truth from the Lord himself on top of a mountain in a desert.

Just bear in mind that S&P’s is basically twelve guys in suits sat round a table in a board room in New York and voting  - yes, voting – about whether Italy or Iceland or the US itself deserves needs ticking off. If seven decide to reduce the grading, a bunch – which can mean some hundreds hundreds of thousands – of people lose their jobs or their pensions or their savings.

And what qualifies those seven to make these decisions?

They’re accountants. Or economists. Or they’ve spent some years in – wait for it – financial services.

Feeling relaxed about seeing them calling the political shots can’t be right. Surely? 

Season's greetings from our sponsor

A couple of weeks ago, a friend from Marseille wrote to complain about an initiative to include the name of a sponsor in that of the City’s historic stadium, the Vélodrome. 

‘Will it become the ‘Vélodrome Nutella’?’ he asks. And goes on to wonder whether Bernard Delanoë, mayor of Paris, isn’t missing a trick. ‘Why not turn the Champs Elysées,’ he suggests, ‘into the Champs L’Oréal – because we deserve it?’

Funnily, not more than a couple of hours after reading his remarks, I discovered that St James’s Park, as iconic in Newcastle as the Vélodrome is in Marseille, was being rebaptised the Sports Direct St James’s Park stadium. It seems that there’s a bit of trend starting here.

My friend sees cynicism in all this, quoting Oscar Wilde’s view that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

Well, maybe. On the other hand, isn’t this just a matter of turning some grand old monuments into tributes to business? And doesn’t business perhaps deserve them? After all, isn’t it to some our greatest businesses, especially in financial services, that we owe today’s climate of economic stability and widespread prosperity?

On the other hand, I was a little disturbed by a sight that greeted me as I came through St Pancras International station the other day. The main hall now houses a massive Christmas tree made of Lego bits.

Lego gets the tone right

At first sight, I was amused by it – it’s striking and funny at the same time. But then I thought again. 

Christmas is the second most important feast of the Christian year after Easter (yes, though you wouldn’t know it from the scale of the celebrations, the death and resurrection trump, in liturgical terms, the birth. You’ve got to admit that birth’s more common). This is a time of year devoted, by Christians at least, to giving thanks for the birth of the Lord and Redeemer of all mankind. Turning it into an opportunity for advertising by Lego, however charming, might seem inappropriate.

After all, what would it say about our moral qualities in the West if Christmas became just another massive binge of commercialism?

Postscript with no relevance to the above: we’ve just started watching the second series of The Killing. It’s proving as gripping and powerful as the first (I’m talking about the original Danish version – I don’t know about the American remake which I haven’t watched). 

What’s extraordinary is that Series 2 manages to be strikingly fresh in feeling, even though the formula is exactly the same: a main story that is a classic thriller based around murder (but with an extraordinary central character in the detective, Sarah Lund), a family struggling with events risking to tear it apart, and a reasonably likeable political figure having to cope with a crisis of fearful complexity without being able to place full trust in his staff.

Well worth watching. 

Toiletries

‘This toilet is reserved for the use of Intellect’ read the sign on the door.

Putting the works of the mind in their place

Now I have certain pretensions to intellectualism – purely amateur, you understand, I remain a mere dilettante – but I have to admit that the sign may convey a particular, and fundamental, truth .

If you'll excuse my bad language, I'm afraid that I've read rather a lot of intellectual work which I'd have to describe as such a pile of crap that I can only assume the author is simply taking the piss. It therefore seems particularly appropriate and insightful to reserve a toilet specifically for intellectual use.

Of course, the toilet may be only for the use of visitors to an organisation that has chosen to call itself, perhaps a trifle pretentiously, ‘Intellect’, and whose offices I happened to be visiting. But how much duller an explanation that would be - I reject it out of hand as unfit to puncture the monotony of the everyday.

The sign put me in mind of a note of Voltaire’s which I have never been able to track down, but would nonetheless like to believe was by him: ‘Sir, I am in the smallest room in the house. Your letter is before me. Soon it will be behind me.’

Postscript on a related subject: after a conference dinner tonight, the speaker who happens to be doctor, told the story of a visit to a toilet in the Department of Health building in London. Written across the cubicle door were the words ‘2000 people work here. Right now, you are the only one who knows what he is doing.’

He also described life as a bowl of shit, and a doctor’s role as steering patients to the shallow end. Not perhaps the most noble description I’ve heard of medicine, or of life for that matter, but is it wholly without merit?

Back to the quiet life...

Such a relief to be out of the woods at last.

No, no, I don’t mean that the Euro crisis is over, or that Italy is back on an even keel. On the contrary, Italy’s new Prime Minister is going to have to live up to his name: Monti has some steep hills to climb.

What is finally over is the bad time for poor old Janka, our black-haired, rasta-curled dog. 


She and I have a ritual of slipping out at the end of each evening for the final walk of the day. It’s a precious time for us both. Conversation is, I will admit, limited but she trots along perfectly happily sniffing the curious smells she comes across, while I listen to an audio-book or a podcast on an i-phone. We may walk in silence, but it’s a companionable silence, which helps us drain the last of the day’s stress before settling for the night.

But between mid-October and mid-November all that gets seriously subverted. It starts with Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, enlivened with its fireworks. It builds from there to Guy Fawkes Day, when we Brits lay on a special feast for our young children, to celebrate the torturing to death of a Catholic dissident four centuries ago – and we celebrate with fireworks. In between, there’s Halloween which has nothing to do with fireworks but, hey, if you’ve been letting them off for Diwali before and will be letting them off for Guy Fawkes immediately after, you might as well keep letting them off for Halloween too.

Since the people who set off fireworks seem to feel the need to get some serious practising done in preparation for the major festivities, no night goes past without bangs occurring somewhere.

And as a result, at home Janka cowers at our feet, while on the street she turns and bolts for home, only restrained by her lead, by which she drags me back towards the house.


This evening, however, we had our walk without incident. As we strolled home, I realised, with blessed relief, that we had emerged from our bad times for another twelve months. 

Janka: able to relax again at last

Janka has regained her composure. And we can enjoy our evening ritual again, in perfect contentment. 

Next: how we got Italy back to stability and solved the Euro crisis.

We shall not see his like again. Or won't we?

It has taken until today, we hope his last day in office, for me to understand something that had been bothering me about Silvio Berlusconi: something about him seemed strangely familiar, but I couldn't place it. 

What was it that I was reminded of whenever I saw him?

Then this evening, as I watched film of him being driven away from the Parliament in Rome and bestowing on us that smile with all the charm we’ve come to expect from him, it suddenly struck me: he reminded me of Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland.

Judge for yourself.

The Cheshire Cat as seen by John Tenniel

Berlusconi demonstrating his charm.
Spooky, isn't it?

Obviously, the resemblance between the two characters isn’t total. The Cheshire Cat did have a certain air of mystery about him, whereas the only mystery about Berlusconi is how he managed to maintain his hold over the Italian people for so long. And the Cheshire Cat, though he could often be deeply irritating, did have some redeeming features.

The similarities, though, are striking. And one of them is a matter of concern: the Cheshire Cat would gradually disappear with the smile going last, and Berlusconi is doing the same; the Cheshire Cat would then reappear unannounced at inconvenient times, and Berlusconi has shown a tendency to do that too; so the frightening thought is, could he pull the trick off again? 

I find myself looking around for a wooden stake.

Still, let’s stay positive. For now he’s on his way, and for that let us be properly grateful. It’ll be wonderful to see the Cavaliere’s back – if only so that we don’t have to see that smile.