Dishonourable Members? Spies in Parliament

We are fascinated by fictional tales of espionage, tantalised by what we don't know as well as what we do, but some real intelligence officers have also been legislators

This has a slightly tortuous and wandering genesis. This week, my City AM column was about the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, commonly known as MI6), asking whether we are uniquely secretive about spying and whether our intelligence agencies could be more effective if they were more open and transparent about their existence and their operations. We still only know officially the identity of one SIS officer, the chief of the service, Richard Moore, known—as all chiefs have been since the first—as ‘C’. (There is a marvellous photograph of an early meeting of the National Security Council at which everyone has a nameplate in front of them: ‘Minister for Security’, ‘Secretary of the Cabinet’, ‘National Security Adviser’ and so on. That for the chief of SIS, then Sir John Sawers, says simply ‘C’.) But today’s C is more public-facing than any predecessor, speaking in public on intelligence matters, albeit guardedly, and even having his own Twitter account.

I then ended up, while on my regular peregrinations of YouTube, watching a few interviews with the excellent spy novelist Charles Cumming, who was himself tested for SIS but did not end up as a spy. I am an enormous fan of spy fiction, from Ian Fleming and Len Deighton through John le Carré to Cumming and Mick Herron and Alan Furst and Adam Brookes. The secret world has always fascinated me, and I know I am very far from unique in this, with its intoxicating blend of glamour, violence, tension and shabbiness, and I think my addiction sprang, if I go far enough back, from my possession and repeated reading of the KnowHow Book of Spycraft which I must have seized on when I was seven or eight.

When I was old enough to concentrate a little more rigorously and realistically on the genuine world of espionage, I took my cues from the fictional world, learning about the different roles of SIS, the Security Service (MI5) and GCHQ, the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency from the heirlooms of the wartime OSS in 1947 and the dazzlingly brilliant but long-concealed work of Bletchley Park (officially the Government Code and Cipher School) breaking the “Enigma” codes of the Nazi war machine. (If you want a brief but rollicking introduction to Bletchley Park, I cannot recommend highly enough the brilliant Enigma by novelist and New Labour courtier Robert Harris. If you’re not hopelessly in love with Claire Romilly by the end of the book, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.)

I know my way around the history and architecture of the secret services and can fold them into my historical and public policy narratives as appropriate, but I am not an expert; however, there are some absolutely first-rate authors specialising in the field, from journalists and commentators to academics. To take the latter first, I would point you towards Professor Christopher Andrew, Dr Rory Cormac, Dr Dan Lomas, Professor Richard Aldrich, Stephen Dorril, Dr Patrick Walsh, Professor Sir David Omand, Dr Ben de Jong, Dr Andrew Defty, Professor John Ferris and the late Professor Keith Jeffrey. (Yes, it’s a very male-dominated discipline: it’s not my fault.) On the journalistic side, you can find superb commentary by Richard Norton-Taylor, Ben Macintyre, Philip Ingram, Gordon Corera, Richard Kerbaj, Julian E. Barnes, Greg Myre, Jim Sciutto and Mark Huband. There are dozens of other fine authors and researchers but that will give you a start if you need to find your way.

All of this led me to think about former spies, in a relatively broad sense, who have become politicians and legislators. Let me draw a couple of boundaries at this point. I will be focusing on the UK Parliament, and particularly, though not exclusively, the House of Commons. I exclude those who have been agents for foreign powers—sadly there are quite a few examples of those—and I will also generally exclude those who did wartime service in the covert world, as there would simply be too many, from Roy Jenkins (Government Code and Cypher School 1944-45) to Fitzroy Maclean (Special Operations Executive 1943-45).

Having spent the length of a newspaper column effectively clearing my authorial throat, let’s push on. Why would spies be drawn to the world of politics? Intelligence work is, after all, axiomatically secret, whereas publicity is the very lifeblood of politics, and those who lurk in the shadows are unlikely to be comfortable pushing themselves forward to even the fringes of the limelight. There is something in that, though one can read of many spooks who were brought low by an inability to stay anonymous, but there is another aspect of spying which requires qualities which are better aligned to political success.

Oleg Gordievsky, a colonel in the KGB, the Soviet Union’s principal security and intelligence agency, who worked as a British double agent and then defected to the West in 1985, considered that there were several characteristics of successful intelligence officers which, if we consider them broadly, are obviously transferrable.

Charm is a vital quality. “A good spy, fundamentally, is somebody who knows how to persuade other humans to give him what he wants,” wrote Gordievsky, and that kind of persuasiveness and ability to win over others is something with which a politician cannot do without. He went on to stipulate that a spy must be “charismatic, charming, clever, interesting and well-spoken”, all of which will go a long way in politics, particularly in the early stages of a career when you have little to offer but much to gain from the goodwill of other people.

A spy must also be analytical and logical. Gordievsky said “You have to have arguments at your disposal”, which even in an age like ours where voters respond much more readily to vibes than to critical debate, is a sine qua non of the politician’s skill set. This is obviously true of those who work in desk jobs in intelligence agencies, but the officer in the field will not prosper either if he or she is muddy-thinking, instinctive or impulsive.

Increasingly, intelligence agents must be familiar and confident with technology, not just in terms of usage but in its wider implications for the field they work in. It is also becoming an important value for politicians, although, unfortunately, it is often one notable for its absence: our legislators tend to come from predominantly humanities backgrounds, and, while they like the shiny glamour of tech, their knowledge and experience is often woefully superficial. There are only three genuine science graduates in the current cabinet—Dr Thérèse Coffey, Kemi Badenoch and Nadhim Zahawi—and none has a predominantly technical brief. Most tech and science policy lies with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Michelle Donelan, history and politics) and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Grant Shapps, business and finance). I wrote about this lack of expertise last year and I see little sign of things getting substantially better.

If we take Gordievsky’s word for it, then, and he ought to know as both a spymaster and an agent himself, there is enough of a crossover between spooks and legislators that some must have made the switch. I want to look at a few of those in a bit more detail, though of course this essay has to carry the significant health warning that information on the secret world is inevitably scarce and incomplete, all the more so for recent employees of the intelligence agencies.

Perhaps the most significant, recent and in many ways intriguing spy/MP is the former Conservative cabinet minister and Member for Penrith and the Border, Rory Stewart. He is currently out of Parliament, until very recently a senior fellow of Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, where he taught courses in politics, international development and grand strategy. He served in the House of Commons from 2010 to 2019, and was briefly international development secretary under Theresa May, before he stood unsuccessfully for the Conservative leadership and then stepped down when Boris Johnson, whom he dislikes intensely, became prime minister. Before he turned to elected office, Stewart had a career full enough for half a dozen men: an officer in the Black Watch; tutor to the Prince of Wales’s sons; a member of the Diplomatic Service; a provincial deputy governor in post-conflict Iraq; a travel writer who walked across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal; the chief executive of a development charity in Kabul; and a professor of human rights at Harvard University.

Stewart is an intriguing and attractive figure. He can be disarmingly honest, self-deprecating and humble, but he has great ambition, both for himself and for politics, and hides beneath the surface of the gentleman amateur a deep self-belief. I do not mean that in any way as a criticism. I like Rory, he is quirkily charismatic and listening to him speak is never dull. But was he, as has often been suggested, a spy? The secret, if you will endure the pun, lies in that short stint as a British diplomat from 1997 to 2000, serving in the embassy in Jakarta and then as the UK’s only representative in Montenegro, which was trying to break away from Serbia. Several sources have stated, some with complete confidence, that during this time he was a member of SIS.

He was certainly familiar with the realm of the spook. His father, Brian Stewart, was in the Secret Intelligence Service from 1957 to 1979, lastly as director of technical services and assistant chief. He was in the running to become C in 1978 when Sir Maurice Oldfield retired, and his failure to climb the last rung is ascribed to difficult relationships with his senior colleagues: it is rumoured that they threatened to resign en masse if Stewart became C, and Dickie Franks was appointed instead. It doesn’t automatically follow, of course, that Stewart worked for SIS, but even by the late 1990s the service performed a lot of recruitment through personal contacts and recommendations, so it is not a vast stretch to imagine that somewhere, at some point, a conversation was had.

The man himself denies it, albeit with varying degrees of conviction. He says emphatically that people should have “the very, very clear understanding that I stopped working in embassies and for the government proper in 2000”. But in the late 1990s? His denial is more peremptory. There is an element of ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’, and, indeed, his response would be negative whether or not he had been an intelligence officer. The truth? Unknown and unknowable. My own guess, having talked to other spooks of different kidneys? I suspect Stewart had a relationship with SIS. Whether he was a full-time officer, I don’t know.

The House of Lords had until relatively recently two very senior former members of SIS, and, unusually for a service which is still male-dominated, both were women. Well, ladies, literally: Lady Park of Monmouth and Lady Ramsay of Cartvale. The former died in 2010, aged 88, but the latter is still active at the age of 86.

Daphne Park graduated in modern languages from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1943 and, an obvious high-flyer, was offered posts in the Treasury and the Foreign Office, but she was determined to make a more direct contribution to the war effort and volunteered for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY; they didn’t think that one through). During her selection process, however, she was talent-spotted by SOE and was employed to train and brief agents working with the Resistance in Europe. She stayed in government service when the war ended, and by 1948 was an SIS officer, officially working for the Foreign Office. She served around the world until retiring in 1979 as controller Western Hemisphere at SIS, the most senior post then ever held by a woman, after which she became principal of Somerville. In 1990 she was ennobled and became the service’s semi-official spokesperson in the Lords.

From 1959 to 1961, Park was consul and first secretary in Léopoldsville, effectively SIS head of station in the Belgian Congo. The colonial régime was rapidly falling apart after 50 blood-soaked years as a personal possession of the king of the Belgians, and, as was so frequent in decolonisation, the two power blocs of the Cold War were desperate to ensure that a successor administration of Africans would be in their camp. As part of this struggle, over the uranium deposits into the breakaway province of Katanga, Park allegedly organised the assassination of the recently deposed prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.

Meta Ramsay joined SIS after the University of Glasgow, where she studied alongside Elizabeth Bennett, later widow of Labour leader John Smith and now Lady Smith of Gilmorehill, and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. A fluent Russian speaker, she specialised in Scandinavia, serving in Stockholm and then, from 1980 to 1985, she was SIS head of station in Helsinki where she oversaw the exfiltration from the Soviet Union of Oleg Gordievsky (see above). In the early 1990s, Ramsay is rumoured to have been in the running to become C, which would have been a revolutionary step for an often-staid organisation, but she retired in 1991 and became foreign policy adviser to John Smith a year later. She was ennobled in 1996.

Lady Ramsay was a member of one of my parliamentary delegations when I worked in the House of Commons Overseas Office. She is warm and kindly, especially if, as I have, you had well-spoken Scottish grandmothers from the west of Scotland. I hope she won’t mind me saying that one of my abiding memories is sitting in a meeting in Dubrovnik and she rooted around in her handbag for a paracetamol to give me. But, although delightful company, there is still obvious steel in her, and for all her charm and courtesy, you never quite forget that she was a very senior spy: almost, of the rumours are true, the most senior. Of course she confirms nothing, merely pointing to her CV which says she was in HM Diplomatic Service 1969-91, but I don’t think anyone earnestly believes that, nor does she really expect them to. Perhaps there will come a day when former officers can confirm post hoc their careers in SIS, but that day has yet to come.

Paddy Ashdown is now a name regarded as one from the history books, or at least the political history section. “Paddy” wasn’t even his name: he was christened Jeremy John Durham Ashdown and gained the unoriginal nickname for his Northern Irish accent when he went to boarding school in England (it quickly wore off). But there was a time when Ashdown was hugely popular and respected, far outstripping the Liberal Democrats he led; even though he grew their parliamentary party from 18 to 46 in 1997, and came within a whisker of becoming coalition partners with New Labour, he was a more substantial figure than that, regarded by the electorate as a “grown-up”. Tony Blair described him after his death as “a political visionary and leader”, while Theresa May said he “served his country with distinction”.

Ashdown was a heavyweight enough figure to be considered as secretary-general of NATO in 1999—eventually the post went to the more experienced George Robertson, then defence secretary—and in 2002 he was appointed high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, overseeing the civilian aspect of implementing the 1995 Dayton Agreement which ended the war in Bosnia. He concurrently held the post of EU representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was a major foreign policy position, and it was a mark of Ashdown’s character and the esteem in which he was held that he was thought credible despite never having held government office. He left Bosnia at the beginning of 2006, and, according to rumours, was offered the job of Northern Ireland secretary by Gordon Brown in June 2007, which he declined. The following year, again approached by Brown and by US secretary of state Dr Condoleezza Rice, he was asked to be UN special representative to Afghanistan, but once more declined.

Why did he have this reputation for authority and toughness that made colleagues seek him out for hard jobs? Much lay in his early career. In 1959, aged 18, he left Bedford School and joined the Royal Marines, where he served for 13 years and rose to captain. In 1965, he qualified for the Special Boat Section (SBS) and led a unit in the Far East, and in 1970, as his last posting, he commanded a company of Royal Marines in Belfast at the beginning of Operation Banner, the armed forces’ 38-year deployment to Northern Ireland. After leaving the Marines, he joined SIS and served under the cover of first secretary at the UK Mission to the United Nations in Geneva. After such a rough and active role as a Royal Marine, he supposedly found his time as a spook dull and sedentary, and in 1975 he resigned from the service to join the Liberal Party. The rest is history.

Having said I would exclude those who had undertaken their secret work during the Second World War, I will make one exception because of his involvement in a famous—or notorious—SIS operation during the Cold War. Christopher Montague Woodhouse, who has a brief (1998-2001) existence as 5th Baron Terrington, inheriting the title from his childless brother in old age, was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford (the traditional combination) before joining the Royal Artillery in 1939. Having served in the SOE, he became head of the British Military Mission to Greece in 1943 (he had read classics at Oxford and spoke fluent Greek) before translating to second secretary to the embassy in Athens until 1946. He then returned to Britain, but in 1951 was asked by SIS to go to Tehran, where there was concern of political instability and a potential Soviet invasion, threatening the oilfields controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company.

In April 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh, a reformer and populist, was nominated as prime minister by the Iranian parliament and appointed by the shah. His rhetoric and intentions were obvious threats to the status quo and the West wanted him removed. In 1952, Mosaddegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company and expropriated their assets for the government, for which the UK took the Iranian government to the International Court of Justice in the Hague, but the ICJ ruled it had no jurisdiction. The Attlee government imposed a wide-ranging embargo on Iran, enforced by the Royal Navy, and when Churchill returned to office in October 1952, he took a yet harder line.

By the beginning of 1953, the embargo was taking its toll, the economic situation in Iran was declining and Mosaddegh was being held responsible, his popularity plummeting. The US and UK saw an opportunity to engineer the prime minister’s downfall, and SIS began Operation Boot: Woodhouse paid substantial sums to Iranian activists in order to arrange popular agitation against Mosaddegh, and flew to Washington to convince his US allies that the project was worthwhile and workable, emphasising the risk of Soviet incursions if Mosaddegh was not removed. He supplied arms to tribesmen in Northern Iran, to forestall any efforts by the Soviets to intervene, and lobbied the shah’s sister, living in Switzerland, to stiffen her brother’s resolve to stay in power and resist any pro-Mosaddegh adventure. With American resources, the coup was a success, in that Mosaddegh was deposed in August, sentenced to three years’ solitary confinement before dying in 1967, still under house arrest. The CIA’s part, which they called Operation TPAjax, was led by Kermit Roosevelt, son of former president Theodore Roosevelt (of the Oyster Bay branch of the family rather than FDR’s Hyde Park branch).

Woodhouse had overseen a success, in its own terms, but the British reputation in the Middle East took a severe knock. But his job was done and he returned to the UK, serving from 1955 to 1959 as director-general of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) before being elected Conservative MP for Oxford in 1959, being defeated in 1966 but winning the seat back in 1970. He lost again in October 1974 and retired to an agreeable academic life. He enjoyed a brief ministerial career as parliamentary secretary for aviation from 1961 to 1962 then under-secretary at the Home Office from 1962 to 1964.

I could cast the net much more widely. It should be noted, particularly, that the last three directors-general of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Jonathan Evans and Andrew Parker, have all been elevated to the House of Lords after retirement, a practice which has not been applied to SIS. Some former Cs have been relatively active in public life after their retirement, especially Sir Richard Dearlove (1999-2004) and Sir Alex Younger (2014-20), but there has been no effort within government to regularise their activities or give them the platform of the Lords.

We have yet to see a former spook, apart perhaps from Rory Stewart, assume senior ministerial office. The closest has been Admiral Sir Alan West, who was ennobled as Lord West of Spithead by Gordon Brown and appointed minister for security at the Home Office in 2007. West had served with distinction in the Royal Navy, and that included being chief of defence intelligence from 1997 to 2000, in which role he would have sat on the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) along with the heads of the other agencies. The JIC was briefly chaired by Pauline Neville-Jones, who became a Conservative peer and succeeded West as security minister, but she was not a career intelligence officer and was accused of rather overplaying her involvement in the covert world, serving as JIC chair for about six weeks.

There may be other spies and spooks in the current House of Commons. It is the function of our agencies that we would not know. There are some former members of the Diplomatic Service, such as Wendy Morton (Con, Aldridge-Brownhills) and Richard Graham (Con, Gloucester), while Tom Tugendhat (Con, Tonbridge and Malling), Sarah Atherton (Con, Wrexham), Flick Drummond (Con, Meon Valley) and Bob Seely (Con, Isle of Wight) have all served in the Army Intelligence Corps. But as far as I am aware, no-one is under active suspicion of having been a full-on spook.

I hope that’s been entertaining, useful or both. I apologise for any lacunae or errors, but the world of espionage and intelligence is difficult to navigate and analyse with certainty. I have done my best with the resources available. Anything more that readers know, please do speak up! And next time you see your Member of Parliament, ask him or her if they’re an ex-spook.