Staff morale can be quite fragile in circumstances where there can be no public praise for success, when a planned terrorist incident does not take place, but failure is there for all to see, in glass-covered streets and ruined buildings, and sometimes also maimed and dead people. We took it hard when we failed, even though we did not expect always to succeed. But the readiness of the Prime Minister to come and thank the staff when they had some success known only to a very few was very reinforcing.
When I first went to call on John Major to be introduced by my predecessor, he saw us in a sitting room, which at the time he used as a small meeting room, but he seemed uncomfortable there and complained rather grumpily that it smelled. Whatever was causing the smell was apparently incurable, as after that when I went to call on him he was always in the Cabinet Room, sitting at the long table and looking rather lonely. Not surprisingly, he often seemed rather gloomy, and I rarely brought him good news. But he used to enjoy pulling my leg, which he succeeded in doing quite well when I was new. He once asked me with great solemnity how many telephone interceptions we were doing without a warrant. I was rocked back at the idea that the Prime Minister should for a moment think that his Security Service was intercepting telephones without a warrant. Or, on the other hand, that if I were the sort of person who would lead an organisation that broke the law, I would calmly tell him about it when he asked. But when I got to know him better, I realised that he liked to ask this sort of question just to see how I would react. In similar vein, he once asked me solemnly which Members of Parliament we were investigating. By then I knew him better and I knew what he was up to. He knew perfectly well that if I had ever thought that there was a need to investigate any, he would have been the first to know about it.
Much later, as things began to get very difficult with his Europhobe MPs, he used to ask wistfully whether I had any techniques for dealing with dissidents that I could pass on. By then I felt quite sorry for him and I would come back thankful that I was leading a team of colleagues who were supportive, who broadly thought the same way about the issues we were dealing with and were united about the way to go about tackling them. He on the other hand seemed isolated, surrounded by people who were looking primarily to their own self interest, and who even if they were broadly supporters could not be relied on not to undermine him behind his back. I was profoundly thankful that I was not in politics. But in spite of it all he still kept his sense of humour and just before I left he got me to join in playing a joke on Marmaduke Hussey, then Chairman of the BBC. I was at No. 10 for one of our regular briefing meetings; the Prime Minister’s next appointment was with Duke Hussey. A few days earlier the BBC had broadcast a leaked document, which the government regarded as damaging and they were rather put out. The Chairman had been called in to account for the BBC’s actions. ‘Let’s give him a shock,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘You stay on and be in the room when he comes in. Then he’ll think he’s really in trouble.’ So, when we came to the end of our meeting, Alex Allen, John Major’s Private Secretary at the time, showed in Duke Hussey. On seeing me, perfectly on cue, Duke said, ‘My God, it’s not that bad is it?’ The Prime Minister roared with laughter and I left them to it.
However, my observation of government ministers was that they were chronically exhausted. This showed more and more as the parliamentary term wore on. I don’t think I am any more boring than other people, so perhaps it was because many of my meetings with ministers were to brief them, rather than to ask them to take decisions, that I frequently found myself talking to a zombie-like figure, slumped in his chair, with drooping eyelids and a whey-coloured face. Michael Howard’s way of dealing with his lack of sleep was to rock and lurch in his chair, which was slightly disconcerting until you realised what he was doing. John Major once admitted during a briefing meeting that he just could not keep awake and I left. Douglas Hurd used to sink far down into his chair and hood his eyes so you could not tell whether he was awake or asleep.
The middle of my time as Director-General was overshadowed by a great tragedy for the whole intelligence community. On 2 June 1994 I had just got home from work at about 7 p.m. and was thinking about telephoning my brother to wish him a happy birthday when the phone in the kitchen rang. It was the Duty Officer. He said, ‘There’s some bad news.’ That is a phrase I hate. All sorts of possibilities went through my head. Had one of the girls had an accident? Had a mortar bomb blown up Whitehall again?
It was bad. A helicopter was missing on its way from Northern Ireland to Scotland. It seemed likely, said the Duty Officer, that it was the Chinook carrying colleagues who were working in Northern Ireland, with RUC and Army personnel, on their way to their annual conference. Efforts were being made to find out whether it was indeed that helicopter and if so, precisely who was on board, but things looked grim. Meanwhile the television was carrying the story and the wives and families of those who might be involved were ringing up desperately for news.
A dreadful evening began. It took some hours to confirm that it was the Chinook and that everyone on board was dead. The helicopter had come down on a remote headland on the Mull of Kintyre, near the lighthouse, but miles from anywhere else. It was a dark, misty night and pouring with rain. I spoke on the telephone to the wives of some of those who had been lost, but what comfort could I give? A couple of days later I went over to Northern Ireland to call on the bereaved. It was a terrible time. The families were heartbroken and the colleagues of those who had died were stunned with grief. We could do no more than sit silently with each other. I felt both grief and responsibility, as the leader of the organisation which had unwittingly sent them to their death.
Then began a dreadful period of weeks of funerals. I will never forget the funeral of the Head of Special Branch of the RUC, a great colleague of my Service and a dedicated police officer. It took place in Newtownards, on a dark, rainy Northern Ireland day. After the service the mourners lined up behind the coffin to walk to the graveyard, as is the custom in Northern Ireland. The uniformed officers of the RUC and the military walked first in the cortège, behind the coffin, and then came the civilians. I walked behind an RUC officer and I watched the rain pour off his cap and down the back of his uniform jacket in big drops. What a terrible day.
Then there were the funerals of our own staff, some of them men with a lifetime of public service behind them, others young men with promising futures and young wives and families. Their families had not known exactly what their husbands, fathers, sons or brothers did but they had trusted us to look after them. And we had not done so. It was a very bad feeling, which I will never truly get over.
I retired from MI5 in April 1996 after twenty-seven years as a member and just over four years as Director-General. I left a very different organisation from the one I joined as a Junior Assistant Officer in 1969. I started out in a fairly lighthearted spirit, enjoying what I saw as the eccentricity of it all and thinking it might be fun. Before long, it became much more serious and I grew to be convinced of the fundamental importance of the job we were trying to do and involved intellectually in tackling some of the difficult issues that the doing of it raised in a democracy. I lived through some big institutional shocks and helped to manage the consequent changes; the four years I was Director-General saw as much change as any previous period. By the time I left in 1996, I was confident that anyone joining would feel that they had become part of a modern, accountable and respected organisation, clear about its role and responsibilities and professionally competent to carry them out with probity, imagination and drive. I felt proud of the contribution I had made to achieving that.
POSTSCRIPT
Sixty is the magic age for retirement in the public service, but as I had been given a four-year appointment as Director-General, I was nearly sixty-one when I left MI5. I have met many people whose retirement is all planned out well in advance – they have their house, their garden, their building project or their DIY tasks all lined up and their dream cruise ready book
ed. My retirement did not begin well. When I came home on my final day, with a box full of junk from my office and a bunch of flowers from my colleagues, I was taken aback when Harriet said, ‘Well is that it then?’ and burst into tears. I was surprised she was so upset, but it was because her whole life for many years had been so affected by my job – where and how we lived, her relationships with her friends, her own sense of danger and insecurity – that she could not believe that it could all end in what seemed to her such an anticlimax. If anyone deserved a medal from a grateful State, she did.
But of course it hadn’t ended. Because my flooded house was still in ruins and my successor needed to move into the official premises, Harriet, the dog and I moved into a sort of holding bay, a small flat beneath one of the Service’s operational properties. There we lived for nearly a year, surrounded by most of our possessions in large cardboard boxes and tea chests. Unfortunately for me, the operational task they were performing in the upstairs flat was being done twenty-four hours a day, directly above my bedroom, and it seemed to involve constant walking about on very creaky floors. What’s more, they changed shifts at 6 a.m. I learned something I had not until then appreciated, that MI5 officers are particularly cheerful in the early morning. The shift changes were accompanied by loud greetings and the sound of the kettle being put on. The dog, who had never learned great discretion, in spite of his time as an assistant to the security officers, used to bark very loudly to accompany the shift change, so my early months of retirement were not nearly so restful as I had hoped.
As my retirement date had drawn near, I had begun to wonder how I was going to keep myself amused. I did not see myself being comfortable sitting knitting in a rocking chair after all I had seen and done. My first idea was that I might take a leaf out of the book of the Foreign Office who seemed particularly good at getting their ex-Ambassadors berths as Masters of Oxford and Cambridge colleges and try for such a post. While I was thinking about it, a small advertisement appeared in a Sunday newspaper, seeking applications for the Mastership of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to succeed Lord St John of Fawsley. I put in an application though I am sure now that the advertisement was not expected to produce serious applicants. Indeed, the selection process had hardly begun before it became clear that a majority of the Fellows had already decided to elect one of their own number. They wanted a counterbalance to what they saw as the flamboyant style of Lord St John’s Mastership, which, as they described it to me, had been characterised by Royal visits and a building and restoration programme of Renaissance proportions, though accompanied, as they admitted, by formidable fund-raising.
Nonetheless, I decided, partly for interest’s sake, to go through the selection process. The whole procedure had a rather mediaeval touch, consisting as it did of a series of ‘trials’. First there was trial by dinner. After dinner at High Table, one was required to converse in the Common Room with Fellows, moving from group to group so they could sum you up. It was quite a bizarre occasion. The Fellows, a few in suits or sports jackets but most in something very much scruffier – jeans and pullovers or similar – all covered by the ritual black gown, looked out of place and uneasy as they sat with their port in an 18th-century panelled room, which had been painted in bright, flat designer colours chosen by the outgoing Master. He had had most of the public rooms of the College and the Master’s Lodge decorated in the same style. Indeed, the Master’s Lodge had had the unusual honour for a college building of being featured in Homes and Gardens.
‘Do you like it?’ I asked innocently looking round the room. ‘No,’ they said firmly, and went on to complain that they had been unable to do anything in the face of Lord St John’s determination to smarten them up. It was a complaint which sat oddly with what I had been told of the governance structure of the College, namely that no decisions at all could be taken except by agreement of all the seventy or so Fellows. Lord St John had clearly found ways of getting round that.
Then there was trial by presentation. The idea of this was that candidates, having met the Fellows at dinner and having been indoctrinated into the financial accounts, would make a speech to the assembled company, setting out what they would do if they became Master. Although, as I now know, this sort of event is normal in the selection process for the Heads of Colleges, it seemed very odd to me to be required to present one’s plans before one had even arrived. True to form, I told them I thought they were old-fashioned and needed a bit of modern management, which was clearly not what they wanted to hear. The internal candidate was duly elected, as had, of course, always been intended.
The whole process was interspersed, in the case of my candidacy, by leaks to the press about my progress through the trials, and comments, made no doubt by supporters of other candidates, about the immense levels of security it was assumed my presence would require. Security, it was said, would be of so intrusive a nature that academic life would become impossible. When, at an advanced stage of the selection process, the Provisional IRA let off a huge lorry bomb in Docklands, marking the end of the particular ceasefire they were engaged on at the time, those against my candidacy claimed justification. Not for the first time the Provisionals had intervened in my affairs and I was never to find out what made the academic world tick.
Having failed in that enterprise, I began to receive enquiries about joining the Boards of some companies as a Non-Executive Director, as well as many enquiries from charitable organisations. I eventually took up some of these and thus began my third career, as a portfolio person.
In many ways this was to be the most surprising part of my life. Having spent the last few years of my career in the Security Service pursuing an ‘openness programme’, attempting to explain who we were and what we did, and above all what we did not do, I was surprised at how few of those people I now encountered had absorbed any of the messages I thought we had been giving out loud and clear. Most were confused about the difference between MI5 and MI6, which I suppose was not all that surprising. But I was amazed by how many regarded me with caution and concern on the assumption that I must know everything about everybody’s private life.
This attitude was typified for me by an episode which occurred just after I retired, and which I mentioned in an article I wrote shortly afterwards in The Times. I went to a dinner given by the De La Rue Company for the London diplomatic corps. Much of the business community was there. I was at the same table as the Ambassador of a country formerly part of the Soviet bloc. He had been observing me with some interest during the first course, and just as the main course arrived, he suddenly announced to the table at large, ‘She knows the names of all my mistresses.’ A frisson went round the table and I could see all my fellow guests thinking to themselves, ‘Perhaps she knows the names of all my mistresses too. And what else does she know?’
Many people I now met assumed that my main contribution to the corporate world would be in providing information about security risks and how to manage them. It did not seem to occur to them that having managed a major programme of change in one of the most secret parts of the state, I might have some skills that would be relevant to managing companies. Though I found that surprising at first, I think now, three or four years on, that I understand better why this was. It is just one example of the profoundly imperfect relationship and the lack of understanding which exists between the corporate world and the public service.
In my last few years in the public service we were continually being told that compared with business we were inefficient, slow, risk-averse, wasteful and a number of other uncomplimentary things. Successive Prime Ministers have brought in senior business figures in an almost tutorial role, to demonstrate and explain to the public service how to improve the way it does things – how to manage itself and its business better. Many of these relationships have eventually ended in disillusion or misunderstanding. Various ideas have been adopted, some suitable, some not. Where they have not been suitable, it has often been because businessmen and consultants
quickly become baffled, and sometimes irritated, by the sheer complexity of public issues and by the requirements of accountability, which are key to the way the public service conducts itself. Public administration is not free to move, as may seem at first sight best, to solve single issues. The single issues have always to be seen as parts of other bigger issues. And the public service cannot be casual or slaphappy about establishing precedents – you are dealing with people’s rights and people’s expectations.
In MI5, being somewhat to the side of the mainstream, we were freer to pick and choose from the management models which we observed succeeding or failing in other areas. Though many outside commentators had views on precisely how we should be made accountable, for the most part businessmen were less eager to enter our business to tell us how to conduct it than they were in other parts of the public service. With us they knew they didn’t know what it was all about, with other areas they thought they did.
But, after having been told so firmly and for so long that the corporate world was the model we should all be adopting, I was both surprised and sometimes disappointed by what I found when I joined it and met a cross section of people at the top of British business.
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