UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order (International Relations Committee Report)

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, last month, I learned what was for me a new concept when for the first time scientists managed to photograph the rim of a black hole. The astrophysicists called it an “event horizon”—an interesting term.

Thinking about today’s hugely timely debate, it occurred to me that that is exactly what the UK is living through in terms of its foreign policy and its place in the world. However, the metaphor is not exact because I gather that what lies inside the black hole is quite unknowable. By contrast, and partly thanks to this fine report from your Lordships’ International Relations Committee, we have a good idea of what might lie beyond the rim of Brexit if only we can reach and cross this accursed event horizon in reasonable order.

In his memoir Memory Hold-the-Door, John Buchan, statesman and incomparable spy novelist, wrote that:

“in the cycle to which we belong we can see only a fraction of the curve”.

It is a line I know the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, also likes to quote. The curve described in his committee’s report is jagged and alarming in so many ways.

In big-picture terms, what shines through for me is that the great prize in future could be, would be and should be to draw China more and more into the international rules-based system, not least its humanitarian elements. It is also plain that the same prize is probably beyond the West’s reach in terms of doing the same for Russia. The thrill of being a disruptor state with a talent for a wide spectrum of hybrid aggression appears to have an addictive quality for the current management in Moscow, as they continue to assuage the hurt of losing the first Cold War. As for the West itself, the International Relations Committee rightly and strongly stresses that:

“The UK should continue to resist US challenges to the multilateral system, and seek to strengthen key institutions particularly the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organisation”.


The other tocsin which rings out from this report is the rapidity of technological advances that can swiftly overturn familiar nostrums of statecraft and place ever more the means of asymmetric conflict into ever smaller numbers of hands—sometimes even a single pair of hands. These kinds of developments will not slow down and wait for us to catch up with them once Brexit has at last ceased to siphon off the bulk of our energies. What we need to do is make a virtue of the uncertainty that the Brexit event horizon is bringing us and build on this excellent report by persuading Whitehall to take a fundamental look at our place in the world and the resources we deploy on its sustenance.

A few weeks ago, I fell into conversation about Brexit with a very old friend in the other place, Frank Field MP. “Everybody keeps saying this is the worst event since Suez,” Frank said. “We need to see how parts of the British constitution did or did not work.” It was an intriguing thought about a stretching task, which is not one susceptible to an investigatory instrument such as Franks on the Falklands or Chilcot on Iraq. That is probably a theme for another day, but Frank Field’s idea stimulated me to take a look at the scattering of post-Suez views that Whitehall undertook. They were all secret, by the way, and there was no Select Committee inquiry into Suez.

I counted a quartet of quite substantial internal reviews: a politico-military one for the chiefs of staff in 1957; the first-ever cost-benefit analysis of the British Empire in 1957, which I have always thought was rather late; a Cabinet Secretary-led inquiry in 1957-58 on The Position of the United Kingdom in World Affairs; and finally a Prime Minister-commissioned Future Policy Study undertaken for Harold Macmillan in 1959-60 on where the UK would be by 1970 on unchanged current domestic, economic and foreign policies. That report in particular spared its readers in Whitehall nothing about the starkness of the economic prospects, not least in comparison to the six founding member countries of the European Economic Community.

The report before us today is offered as,

“part of a constructive debate”.

It should be more than that, triggering a review—in public this time of course—as broad-ranging in scope as those post-1956 inquiries. Perhaps Parliament should direct the process using a Joint Committee of both Houses. A royal commission, as suggested yesterday by the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, might be a good idea; once an instrument of high utility, but now out of fashion, perhaps one could be created specially for the purpose. Or possibly the next Prime Minister could authorise a review as Macmillan did with his sequence of inquiries as he scrambled into the premiership across the rubble left by the Suez affair and the resignation of Sir Anthony Eden.

In my judgment, it is a first-order question that rises above and reaches beyond the usual range covered by the five-year cycle of strategic defence and security reviews. It needs to be a truly national conversation that starts with the fundamental question of whether we should still strive to be a considerable player in the influence markets of the world. There may be those suffering from post-Brexit exhaustion, as we all are to some degree, even though we are not there yet, who think that a period of reticence on our part would be fitting. It has been distressing to discover that we seem to have lost the second part of our genius for muddling through. At “muddling” we have been excelling ourselves; it is the “through” bit that appears to be beyond us.

I profoundly hope that nerves will not be lost, which would leave us in a condition of resentful torpor. A wide-ranging inquiry could be a partial antidote to that, especially if it makes a convincing and realistic case for our remaining a substantial player in the world with verve and conviction. As that great economic planner and institution builder Jean Monnet, who knew us Brits very well, put it when we were experiencing another bad patch in the 1970s, the British have not “stepped aside from history”. Monnet was right. We have not, we should not and we will not.

United States: Foreign Policy

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I am truly honoured to follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton of Richmond, who is such a welcome recruit to your Lordships’ House—on what one might call the warriors’ Bench.

I was honoured to serve as a member of his strategic advisory panel when he was Chief of the Defence Staff. I always associate the words “strategy” and “strategic” with the noble and gallant Lord. He has, in the language of quantum physics, a real gift for discerning both the waves and the particles that go into our nation’s defence posture, and the foreign policy and influence in the world that our Armed Forces support. He is, too, as we have heard, a son of Yorkshire, so we can expect an enduring and welcome injection of directness and common sense in our future deliberations. I congratulate the noble and gallant Lord on a very fine maiden speech.

I will concentrate this afternoon on what one might call the hidden dimension in diplomacy, foreign policy and international affairs, by which I mean intelligence, particularly the intelligence-sharing arrangements that have served the UK so well for more than 70 years. I refer especially to the so-called “Five Eyes” network, embracing the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which the most recent report of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament rightly calls “the closest intelligence partnership in the world”. It is also the most enduring, because in essence the “Five Eyes” is the World War II intelligence alliance, which has run on right through the 40 years of the Cold War and into the age of multiple threats that has followed. The UK-USA element within it, privately but not officially called the “two eyes”, is what gives our country its genuine global intelligence reach. Only two other nations possess that: the United States and Russia, with China coming up fast.

This intelligence reach is of critical value to the UK in a fragile, volatile and often scarcely readable world. For all the skills of our intelligence agencies and Defence Intelligence inside the Ministry of Defence, without the “two eyes” and the “Five Eyes” we would slip instantly into the second rank of intelligence powers.

This most special of special relationships rests on an array of agreements and one treaty—the so-called UK-USA treaty of the late 1940s. Participating nations are, however, not obliged to pass on or share intelligence that they garner. Anything that happened, on either side of the Atlantic, to staunch the flow would be a blow of considerable proportions on many levels, because we are an intelligence-trading nation as much as a diplomatic trading nation—to borrow a phrase used by my former Times colleague, Geoffrey Smith. What is of some immediate concern to the secret world is whether Brexit could impact on the skein of valuable bilateral intelligence and security arrangements we have with our European partners, to which other noble Lords have alluded.

The ISC caught this anxiety well in its report, published just before Christmas. I should point out that I have an air of regret about the ISC because we have got out of the habit of debating its annual reports in this Chamber. That is a great pity and we should restore that debate. The ISC said just before Christmas:

“Whilst none are as deep as the Five Eyes, the Agencies nonetheless have significant relationships with other countries. In particular, several areas of obvious shared intelligence interest exist with our European allies—primarily on International CounterTerrorism but also on other Hostile State Activity and Serious and Organised Crime”.


In that context, Parliament and Her Majesty’s Government should take the ISC’s concluding recommendations deeply seriously. It said:

“European mechanisms play an essential role in the UK’s national security, particularly at a time when the Agencies have all emphasised the importance of enhancing their cooperation with European counterparts. We urge the Government to be more forthcoming with its assessment of the associated risks of the UK’s impending departure from the European Union, and the mitigations it is putting in place to protect this vital capability”.


It went on to say:

“Once the UK has left the EU, intelligence cooperation is an area where it can continue to be a leader amongst its European allies”.


I say amen to that.

Such matters come perhaps into what one might call the hidden wiring capacity of our international relationships, but the value we can bring as a top-flight intelligence power, not just to ourselves but to our allies, must not go unheard amid the fractious cacophony that Brexit has brought to our politics and our national conversation. Good, carefully assessed intelligence is where hard power, soft power and so-called sharp power meet. As a country, we need it to shape our actions, our precautions and our strategy-making as much as we ever have in peacetime before.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Thursday 28th May 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my membership of the Chief of the Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel but I speak in an entirely personal capacity this evening.

Whenever I contemplate the task faced by the framers of the forthcoming national security strategy and strategic defence and security review—whether they be Ministers, officials or the chiefs of staff—I experience two things: first, a genuine pang of sympathy; secondly, an echo of some words of Winston Churchill’s to a group of Conservative politicians with an interest in foreign affairs in 1936. This is what he said, and I promise not to slip into an impersonation as the sentences roll:

“For four hundred years, the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent … Thus we preserved the liberties of Europe, protected the growth of its vivacious and varied society, and emerged … with an ever-growing fame and widening Empire … Here is the wonderful unconscious tradition of British foreign policy”.

Why the sympathy? If the drafters of the NSS and the SDSR 2015 suggested opening their documents with resolute paragraphs like that, they would be offered either gardening leave or counselling at the very least.

More seriously, the implication of the Churchillian insight is that while we like to think of ourselves as being guided by the drumbeats of our past which make us natural strategists, I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it takes a Kaiser, Hitler or Stalin to give us a malign threat against which we can organise and plan, shaped by Churchill’s “unconscious tradition”. Without that external mind-concentrator, we are prone to drift, laced with a tendency to preach above our weight in the world, which on occasion can so irritate other nations.

I am among those who still wish our country to punch heavier than our weight in the world where and when we sensibly can, with our allies—and so are the majority of the public, if an Ipsos MORI poll of last autumn is a guide. When asked whether the UK should still try to punch above its weight in the world, 52% of respondents said yes while 36% said no. Why am I with the 52%? It is not because I am suffering from an atavistic post-imperial spasm or from an itch after the amputation, as a friend of mine in the secret world likes to put it, but for practical reasons, based on a belief that most of the time our special blend of hard and soft power can be of benefit to the world, as well as reflecting how we see ourselves as a people sculpted by a singular past, with special and valuable contributions still to come.

What might a swift audit of our assets look like? An array of superb Armed Forces—tributes have been paid to them from across the House today, quite rightly—seriously stretched, but studded with some world-class specialities. We have a top-of-the-range nuclear deterrent based on a very special set of deals with the United States. We have a considerable overseas aid programme; a top-flight Diplomatic Service; a position as one of only three powers with global intelligence reach; and a P5 seat on the United Nations Security Council—all this plus a rich barcode of cultural and soft power. There is the BBC World Service and the British Council and a goodly number of world-class universities, as well as a scientific research output out of all proportion to our size and wealth. That is still a very formidable list. Yet we may be drifting without prior thought towards a rim beyond which the world, and our allies especially, will realise that we are no longer the deployer of the influence that we like to imagine ourselves to be.

There was hardly a whiff of foreign policy or defence debate in the recent election campaign, as many noble Lords have pointed out; there was a howling silence. The great 19th-century historian, JR Seeley, noticed that we had acquired the imperial version of our great power as if in a fit of absence of mind; we could be about to lose what remains of our post-imperial influence with an equal absence of mind. Certainly, if we start to spend less than 2% of our GDP on defence, we will experience what my friend Professor Paul Cornish of the RAND Corporation calls “mission uncreep”.

I finish with a few thoughts about a very real threat to our country that will appear in neither the national security strategy nor the strategic defence and security review, because it is simply too difficult. It is the possibility that by 2025, in just two general elections’ time, we will be out of Europe, shorn of Scotland and a very different country strategically, economically and psychologically. I fear that an exit from the EU would trigger another Scottish referendum that would result in a vote to separate. Were that to happen, we would have shredded ourselves. That could be the kingdom to come, but we must not sleepwalk into it. The first people whom we have to defend ourselves against are ourselves.

EU and Russia (EUC Report)

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to be the first to congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, on his very fine maiden speech. Given his deep immersion in the questions before your Lordships this afternoon, it is a tad anxiety-inducing to be the next in line on the speakers list.

The noble Earl carries one of the most lustrous and resonant names in British political history. His great-grandfather, the last Liberal leader to preside over a wholly Liberal Government, has occupied a special place in our shared historical memory since those of us of a certain age first read Roy Jenkins’s excellent biography of HH Asquith in the mid-1960s. The noble Earl’s immensely distinguished Crown service has been rather more in the shadows than that of his great ancestor, but he has done the state some very considerable service in his diplomatic career. Although I know that he is too discreet to mention it, the noble Earl possesses a special place in intelligence history as the officer who spirited that remarkable and brave man, Oleg Gordievsky, out of Russia and into Finland in the boot of his car. I am sure that his maiden speech this afternoon is but the first flow of a cataract of wisdom and judgment to come in future debates, which we anticipate with keenness and enthusiasm.

Like so many of your Lordships, I am a child of the Cold War. Born in the late 1940s, ours was the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the bomb. We knew what those mushroom clouds over Japan in the last days of the Second World War meant—an entirely new era in international affairs. We did not need a degree in theoretical physics when we read about the H-bomb tests in the 1950s to understand that these new thermonuclear weapons were over 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That the Cold War ended without general war and nuclear exchange was and remains the greatest shared boon of our lifetime. Yet here we are, in the spring of 2015, a generation after the Cold War ended, debating Russia’s capabilities and intentions, trying to read the mind of the man in the Kremlin, and worrying about the dangers inherent in escalating tensions and about the condition of the critical Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, signed for the UK almost exactly 66 years ago by the magnificent Ernest Bevin.

There is a school of thought that the Cold War did not die, rather that it went dormant for a time. There is something in this argument. For example, the Queen’s most secret servants will tell you that the Russian intelligence service has exactly the same number of officers operating under diplomatic cover in London as it did in the mid-1980s; around 34 the last time I looked. With its deep and traditional faith in human intelligence, the Russians also keep a string of “illegals” living under deep cover in our islands, who are fiendishly difficult to detect unless they make a slip. The Queen’s underwater servants in the Royal Navy Submarine Service will tell you that the deep Cold War never really ceased and has picked up noticeably over the last few years. Indeed, I experienced a whiff of it myself in the Atlantic off Florida when witnessing a test launch of one of the Royal Navy’s Trident D5 missiles following the mid-life refit of HMS “Vigilant”. I was on board the survey surface vessel, just two and a half miles from where the missile would burst from the ocean. Another three miles beyond me, a huge Russian spy vessel dripping with electronics could be seen trying to get into the test area and being prevented from doing so by the US Coastguard. When it was all over, the captain of the Russian spy vessel came across the open channel to congratulate all of us, in a perfect Oskar Homolka English accent.

The finely judged and carefully calibrated report on the EU and Russia before us today stimulated a range of deeper memories for me and aroused one particular current anxiety. My most vivid memory is of a study of unintended East-West escalation produced by the Cabinet Office’s Joint Intelligence Committee in the weeks following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when we truly neared the nuclear rim in a crisis that pretty well came out of the blue—Berlin rather than Havana being the place where we thought the greatest tensions would be played out. In November 1962, the JIC defined “escalation” as,

“the process by which any hostilities, once started, might expand in scope and intensity, with or without the consent of Governments”.

There followed a passage in that JIC assessment, which the report before us today summoned from my memory. It read like this:

“Once any hostilities had started agreement on a cease-fire would involve one side or the other accepting a tactical defeat or both sides a stalemate on what must be a highly important issue. The chances of such an agreement would be better if the attacking side realised that it had miscalculated the importance to the other side of the interests involved or the will and ability of the other side to resist”.

This is exactly what happened after Mr Khrushchev covertly placed his intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles on Cuba.

I am not a “history repeats itself” man, but I am with Mark Twain when he said that history may not repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes. In the context of Russia, Ukraine, the EU and NATO, I think that it is the possibility of unintended escalation—of a misreading of minds, intentions and possible responses—that most worries us. In Bevin’s time, Article 5 of the NATO treaty was as powerful as it was simple. It says:

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”,

and that the parties individually and in concert will take,

“such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area”.

It was that clarity and simplicity that helped keep the Cold War cold.

The framers of that treaty almost exactly 66 years ago could not have foreseen the end of the Cold War, Poland and the Baltic states as full members of NATO, and a range of unimaginable new instruments at the disposal of the Kremlin. Stalin may have possessed what we thought were 175 divisions and, from August 1949, an atomic weapon, but Putin has a gas tap and he has cyber. What kind of attack and what magnitude of damage inflicted on a near-neighbour Article 5 country would be deemed to have activated Article 5 in current circumstances?

We live in an age of what is called “ambiguous warfare”. Mr Putin is a skilled player of this; it is what he does best. His currency may be falling, his GDP shrinking and the hydrocarbon clock may be ticking long term against his oil and gas position, but this is an activity at which he excels, and it is, I suspect, a near-constant temptation for him. Yet Mr Putin, too, is a child of the Cold War. He, too, grew up in the shadow of the bomb. He knows full well what a serious Article 5 incursion would mean.

Nerves need to hold within the NATO alliance. A new containment strategy needs to be pursued for as long as is necessary. I share the Select Committee’s conclusion that firmness combined with a pursuit of a new, more co-operative relationship with Russia when possible is the way forward to prevent current anxieties and crises,

“deteriorating into something resembling the Cold War”.

It might be fraught; it will not be edifying; it will not be swift; but it is what has to be done.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I will concentrate this afternoon on the future of the United Kingdom—the first order question whose significance trumps even the weightiest Bills announced in the gracious Speech.

Of what do nations consist? They possess a physical geography and a political geography. Languages, too, are powerful shapers, as are shared memories—yet nationhood is not just a tangible, practical matter, but a thing of the imagination as well.

Out of all the ingredients that bind, there comes an emotional geography. It is the quality and timbre of the emotional geography of the United Kingdom that exercises me most about 19 September and after—if, as I fervently hope, Scotland has voted to stay together with the rest of us. We may well—I am sure we will—breathe a huge sigh of relief on the evening of 19 September, if such is the outcome, but the “us” question will remain live and testing in the aftermath. My greatest fear is that our islands will experience a creeping estrangement on the part of Scotland, which the further devolution of substantial powers, as proposed by all three mainstream parties, will do little to assuage and may even encourage.

What we will need from Friday 19 September, literally, is a sustained effort devoted to nation rebuilding—and by “nation” I mean the United Kingdom. We must apply every ounce of ingenuity to find ways in which to work together even more effectively as a union to pursue a new unionism, as the noble Lord, Lord Lang of Monkton, put it with great eloquence during our debate on 30 January—a sentiment echoed powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, in his introduction to the recent report from the Conservative Party’s Commission on the Future Governance of Scotland. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan of Rogart, has long urged a constitutional convention to examine our wider constitutional arrangements—a view I firmly support. I welcome warmly the new All-party Group on Reform, Decentralisation and Devolution, created by the noble Lords, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock and Lord Purvis of Tweed, of which I am a member.

In the event of a decision to stay together, there will be a chance for those of us who cherish the union and love Scotland but are without a vote there to join in fully the national conversation about the future of our islands and the development and refinement of our constitutional arrangements for the purposes of ever better union. I would like to think that your Lordships’ House could have a substantial input into such a conversation. We have, if I can put it tactfully, been around the block a bit, given our average age. We bring together in this Chamber all the constituent nations of the union and a deep reserve of accumulated experience of all parts of the UK, with great swathes of the rest of the world. I am confident that our fine Constitution Committee will be in the vanguard, but it might be useful if we thought, too, in terms of creating a special ad hoc Select Committee on refreshing the union.

Much will depend on the tone and pitch of reactions to a vote to stay together in these crucial days to come in September. There should be no trace of crude triumphalism and great respect shown to those who voted for independence. The yes vote, of course, would settle the Scottish question for ever; a no vote will not, even if the margin is substantial on 18 September. The Cabinet has forbidden Whitehall to draw up any contingency plans for the aftermath of a vote to separate. I ask the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, for whom I have a mighty respect, to urge his colleagues on the Cabinet’s Scotland committee to prepare for the months and years after a no vote a rebuilding and refreshing of a still United Kingdom with a special sense of that crucial emotional geography.

European Union (Referendum) Bill

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Friday 10th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, the European question was sent to try us. It has succeeded mightily in doing so ever since that week in May 1950 when Jean Monnet turned up in London and sprung his and Robert Schuman’s plan for a Coal and Steel Community upon a suspicious and resentful Attlee Government and what was then a deeply sceptical Treasury and Foreign Office. The Bill before us today is but the latest instalment in what is so far a 64 year- old psychodrama.

Standard British political boundaries have never been able to cope with the European question. The divisions are as much within parties as between them, as the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, reminded us. The particular fervour of our great and perpetual European debate is fuelled, too, by deep individual as well as collective questions about who we are, what kind of country we wish to be and how best we can engineer for ourselves a decent and effective place in the world. Our free trading instincts jostle against our protectionist impulses. Our maritime, open-sea instincts cut against excessive continental commitments.

All the time, though it is little spoken of, the question of Europe arouses a sense of our specialness; our quirkiness; our suspicion of grand schemes and their dirigiste implications; our refusal to contemplate life as a medium-sized power folded inside a huge European grouping; and our absolute belief that we are not and never can be just any old country. All these factors leave a profound emotional deficit for many of our people with the idea of a deeply integrated federal Europe. This deficit has not eased over the four decades since accession. On the contrary, I think the deficit has steadily accumulated.

In my judgment, all these impulses and feelings swirl through the Bill before us, short though it is. Europe is undeniably a first-order question for our people and for our place in the world. Therefore, it is necessary that the consent of the British people to our membership of the European Union should be tested every couple of generations or so. The bulk of the British electorate has not been asked the “in or out” question, as the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, stressed in his eloquent opening speech. The time is approaching when they need to be—but how soon? Is it desirable now to fix a deadline and set the clock ticking? Here, for me, the reservations set in.

The negotiating climate today is far less manageable than in 1975, with our current EU of 28 members, several of whom deeply resent their experience of the UK as the permanent awkward squad in Europe, emitting a constant drizzle of complaint within the Union’s councils. The climate is different, too, at the very top. It is not the era of Schmidt and Giscard. To borrow from PG Wodehouse, if you are a 21st century German Chancellor or French President, it is always easy to distinguish between a ray of sunshine and a British Prime Minister bearing a request to renegotiate.

I accept that there is never an ideal time for a renegotiation followed by a referendum. Our economy was in terrible shape in 1975, with inflation rising above 25%, deindustrialisation proceeding apace and stagflation everywhere—but the road to a 2017 referendum would be hard, stretching and sloggy, even if unforgiving and unforeseen events do not add to the wear and tear of high diplomacy and political manoeuvre. To legislate now for a date three years away and the other side of a general election strikes me as not just undesirable but immensely risky for our country.

Only one thing is certain: even a meaningful and successful renegotiation followed by a referendum in which the British people showed a continuing desire to remain within the EU would not settle the matter. There were those nearly 40 years ago who thought the 1975 referendum had done just that. How wrong they were. Even if the UK is still an EU nation in 2020—I profoundly hope that it will be—we will remain the awkward squad over the channel, while for us at home the European question will always retain its own special talent to torment.

Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report for 2010-11

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, for securing this debate. Sir Colin McColl, a former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, was asked some years ago to encapsulate the purpose of British intelligence. He replied that its job is to provide,

“cats’ eyes in the dark”,

for its customers. I regard the Intelligence and Security Committee in a similar light, for it provides Parliament and the public with an indispensable pair of cat’s eyes into the necessarily dark world of our secret state. I therefore welcome the committee’s new remit, reach and status as a committee of Parliament and support the words of the noble Marquess about the need for extra resourcing.

Last Thursday, I found myself on the 2.30 from Paddington—to give the occasion a Miss Marple-ish touch—with the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, the founding chairman of the ISC, who guided the committee through its first seven years of life after its creation by the Intelligence Services Act 1994, during which, as the noble Lord, Lord Butler, has already said, great strides were made. The noble Lord, Lord King, told me not only how much he regretted the short notice of our debate today and that he could not alter his travel arrangements and be here but also that he, to use his own words, “always thought that the ISC would be a Select Committee one day”, and that this would be, “a natural progression”.

In my judgment, the committee’s work over the past 17 years represents a significant constitutional development alongside its regular functions of inquiry, scrutiny and report. We have come a very long way on the openness front. In 1982, when I was working for the Economist, the Falklands War erupted as if out of the blue. In the Economist the following week I produced a chart of what we called the “Falklands war machine”. In it I put the Joint Intelligence Committee in the hierarchy of the Defence and Overseas Committee of the Cabinet, and so on, and what was going to be the War Cabinet, and mentioned the weekly production of the summary of intelligence, the Red Book. The reaction in Whitehall was astonishment; it was if I had held a crucifix to Dracula. We have, indeed, come a very long way, and quite rightly. The ending of the Cold War made it so much easier as well in terms of admitting to all of the agencies and the structure of Cabinet committees and assessment staff and so on beneath.

Perhaps I may concentrate today on the terrain covered by section 5 of the ISC’s 2010-2011 report—the configuration and the working rhythms of the central intelligence machinery. Since the committee reported and the Government replied, we have had the report to the Prime Minister prepared by Paul Rimmer of the Cabinet Office’s assessment staff, and Kieran Martin, then of its Security and Intelligence Secretariat, on the future workings of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

In essence, the Rimmer-Martin report recognises the new reality—that the JIC has become partially eclipsed by the work of Mr David Cameron’s highly significant innovation on the first day of his premiership when he created the National Security Council. As the National Security Adviser, Sir Peter Ricketts, expressed it during an International Institute of Strategic Studies seminar on 30 November—at which the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, was also present—the NSC has become,

“the uber customer for the intelligence product”,

which, he explained, has resulted in a,

“big change in the landscape of the JIC”.

The Rimmer-Martin report, which the Prime Minister has now signed off, declares that,

“The NSC’s priorities should be the lead driver of the JIC agenda”,

and that,

“The NSC (Officials) meeting”,

each Wednesday morning,

“is best placed to oversee the tasking of the JIC, in line with its core role of setting strategic direction for the NSC. The NSC(O) should therefore task the JIC. However”,

Rimmer-Martin continues,

“the JIC must retain the latitude to provide early warning on issues outside the immediate cycle of the NSC agenda”.

As a result, from next month, January, JIC meetings are to divide into two: into a monthly gathering of principals at four-star level, including the heads of the agencies, as has been the norm, to take the more strategic and longer-term papers prepared by the assessments staff; and weekly meetings in the interim of sub-principals, “to agree papers in between”.

I recognise that these arrangements reflect the new reality. Over the past few years, even before the creation of the National Security Council, it has sometimes been hard to entice busy grade 4s to JIC meetings. For a while they fell to fortnightly rather than weekly, which was a mistake. Indeed, I have heard the JIC described by an initiate as, “the most highly paid re-drafting committee in Whitehall”. I am reassured by the fact that the assessments staff reports are very much a part of the NSC’s meetings and that the assessments staff continue to produce each morning the daily highlights of intelligence summaries for the Prime Minister and those Ministers inside the inner intelligence loop. I note, too, that the JIC will continue to set the annual requirements and priorities for the intelligence and security agencies.

However, I am concerned that some key elements of the JIC tradition might fade under the new dispensation. The most crucial and lustrous elements of that tradition emerged from the experience of the JIC during the Second World War, after Winston Churchill brought the JIC fully into the Whitehall sun—and after a pretty feeble first four years of life following the committee's establishment in 1936. It was the working assumption that the painters of the intelligence picture would keep firmly separate from those who decide what to do on the basis of it, and that the intelligence providers and the JIC analysts do not fall into the trap either of advocacy or of telling their customers what they wish to hear, rather than speaking truth unto power. I have always believed truth unto power to be the gold standard of all Crown service, but especially those of the secret servants of the state. There have been lapses during the history of the JIC, but that tradition has always been restored and remains much admired by allied intelligence nations.

Early in the new year, a chairman of the JIC will be appointed to replace Alex Allan, for whom I have the highest regard. I hope that his successor, whoever he or she may be, will be steeped and marinated in that great tradition. I hope, too, that the Intelligence and Security Committee will keep a close watch on the new arrangements, to protect the JIC as best it can from further marginalisation and to report to Parliament next year how the NSC's pace-making and task-mastering has played out in real terms, both within the central intelligence machinery and in the work of the secret agencies. As ever, the ISC must be Parliament’s cat’s eyes in the dark.