‘The Government Does Not Comment…’: Parliament and the Intelligence Services

Abstract

Although the British intelligence and security agencies have a longer history than most, the UK was rather late in subjecting the agencies to parliamentary scrutiny. For most of their 100-year history the intelligence and security agencies operated with relative anonymity and impunity. In the official history of MI5, published to mark the agency’s centenary in 2009, the historian Christopher Andrew observed that until recently the work of British intelligence and security agencies had been underpinned by two constitutional doctrines. The first of these was that the existence of intelligence agencies should never be officially acknowledged. As the historian Sir Michael Howard observed in 1986, ‘so far as official government policy is concerned, enemy agents are found under gooseberry bushes, and our own intelligence is brought by storks’ (quoted in Andrew, 1988). The second constitutional doctrine under which the agencies operated was that their work would not be subject to external scrutiny or regulation. As Andrew points out, any regulation which was carried out was undertaken by the agencies themselves, and occasionally, with a very light touch, by the government. There was no notion that Parliament, or indeed the public, should be able to question or scrutinise the work of the intelligence and security agencies, a situation, Andrew adds, which was widely accepted both by Parliament and the public:

It followed from the storks-and-gooseberry-bush tradition that the mysteries of intelligence must be left entirely to the grown-ups (the agencies and the government) and that the children (parliament and the public) must not meddle in them.