At last MI5 sees the funny side of spying

Of the ghosts of MI5 past, none would have been more horrified than Sir Vernon Kell, its founder and chief for 31 years, a man so secretive that he went to his grave described only as “Commandant, War Department Constabulary”.

For most of the past century large swathes of government were heavily cloaked in secrets. In 1971, Labour politician Richard Crossman called secrecy the “real English disease”. Edward Heath, the Conservative prime minister, described Britain as the most secretive state in western Europe.

The workings of the intelligence services were hidden from all but a tiny elite, concealed under a draconian and undiscriminating Official Secrets Act, and by the class-based code that gave rulers the right to keep secrets from the ruled.

The original act was passed in 1911 during the run-up to war, at a time when Britain was delirious with spy fever. A blanket ban on releasing official information that encompassed 2,000 distinct criminal charges, it covered not only the intelligence services, but also the police, the cabinet, the civil service and almost every other ordinary official activity conducted behind closed doors.

Secrecy is, of course, vital to effective government. Intelligence-gathering, policing, journalism, all rely on keeping secret information that could, if made public, endanger national security or current operations. A state unable to maintain some measure of discretion would not function. Spies cannot be recruited without an inviolable promise of confidentiality.

Bletchley Park, the wartime code-breaking centre, was the best-kept secret in history. Churchill described the codebreakers as “the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled”. Churchill himself cackled loudly, particularly after a few drinks: the top-secret Operation Mincemeat (which misled the Germans over the Sicily invasion) only emerged after the war because the prime minister repeatedly regaled after-dinner audiences with the tale.

In the course of two world wars and one Cold War, secrecy became a national obsession, a central ethos of government based on an assumption that the public was best kept in the dark about official matters. Concealment in the interests of security evolved into secrecy for its own sake.

For most of the 20th century British citizens had the importance of secrecy drummed into them.

When a civil servant or politician muttered “need to know, old boy” and tapped his nose knowingly, the discussion ended. In that atmosphere, the secrets legislation was too often used to silence rebels, browbeat critics, spare government blushes, protect reputations and cover up the truth.

Robert Armstrong, cabinet secretary during the Thatcher years, once recalled that secrecy “was part of life … that was the code you lived by in those days”. Being economical with the truth was a central technique of government.

The cult of official secrecy has been steadily eroded over the past 30 years, though never fully dismantled. MI5 routinely declassifies files over 50 years old. Chiefs of the intelligence services are public figures, and intelligence officers are now openly recruited by application rather than through the old boy network. Today, when the nose-tapping routine starts, we smell a rat: the public has the need to know.

The Official Secrets Act 1989 removed some of the more absurd and excessive aspects of the old one. The Freedom of Information Act, which came into operation in 2005, reversed the presumption of secrecy in favour of disclosure wherever possible. The National Security Act 2023 modernises the language and definitions of earlier legislation and expands the scope of espionage to include current threats and modern technologies.

But the transformation is cultural more than political. Britain simply no longer reveres secrecy as it did. The apocryphal story of the couple who married after the war but never told each other they had both worked at Bletchley Park strikes a modern audience as weird, even slightly sinister. Where once secrecy was applauded as discretion it is now seen as a lack of honesty in a culture that demands openness, confession and absolute candour.

The pendulum may eventually swing too far, to a point where the genuine benefits of secrecy are eroded, but as a reminder of the old days when chaps operated behind an impenetrable veil of concealment, I offer you another on-screen performance, produced some 69 years before Gary Oldman’s Christmas Instagram cameo.

In 1955 a British civil servant appeared before the television cameras to answer allegations that he was a KGB spy. “No comment,” he purred, with a smooth Whitehall smirk. “I’m debarred by the Official Secrets Act from saying anything that might disclose to unauthorised persons information derived from my position as a former government official.”

The world believed Kim Philby because, back then, our faith in secrets was unshakable, absolute and very dangerous.