(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 42)  | |||
| Winter 2001/2 |
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Issue 42 | |
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Spooks and the House of Commons
An interesting piece by Mark Hollingsworth appeared in Punch of 23 May-5 June 2001, 'Spooks in the House', on intelligence and security personnel who become MPs. Some of the material was familiar but less well known were Raymond Fletcher, and Le Cercle. Fletcher was a Labour MP who was witch-hunted by MI5 as a KGB asset when really an MI6 agent. New information on Le Cercle (aka the Pinay Circle: see Lobster 17) from Hollingsworth is the role of former MI6 officer Geoffrey Tantum as Le Cercle UK secretary and Jonathan Aitken's erstwhile MI6 contact:
'Punch can reveal for the first time that his chief contact was Geoffrey Tantum, an MI6 officer since 1969 who had served in Jordan, Aden and Kuwait. From 1992 until his retirement in late 1995, Tantum was head of MI6's Middle East section. The two met every six weeks. The minister and the MI6 officer traded information and contacts candidly about the Middle East as Aitken had maintained close contact with his Arab business associates.'
Ken Livingstone's questions
Not mentioned by Hollingsworth in his piece about Parliament and spooks is the curious case of Ken Livingstone's parliamentary questions. In 1987/8, fed by Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd via Livingstone's then (unpaid) researcher Neil Grant, new (1987) MP Ken Livingstone put down hundreds of written questions in the House of Commons about the war in Northern Ireland, IRD, and the cases of Holroyd and Wallace. In Lobster this was discussed in issue 16. But I also wrote about this is the now defunct magazine Cut (August 1988) and made the following comment:
'Livingstone appears to have hidden allies within the bureaucracy of the House of Commons. He has had astonishing luck in the lotteries for oral questions to the Prime Minister and the opportunity to speak in debates: in less than a year, four PM's questions, two to Ministers, an adjournment debate, and the chance to speak in the debate on Northern Ireland. The odds against an MP getting all this by chance are enormous. It looks as if someone inside the House of Commons is rigging the system to allow Livingstone to run his Wallace/Holroyd material; and as most of his questions are ultimately hostile to MI5, one assumption is that the rigging is being done by an enemy (or enemies) of that agency. No, not the KGB. MI5's number one enemy is not the KGB but MI6. On the evidence available at present, the best hypothesis is that MI6 is rigging the House of Commons procedure in favour of "Red Ken".'Quite soon after this article appeared Neil Grant, then a schoolteacher, was offered and accepted a job at the BBC with Panorama, where he is now a producer, and ceased to supply Livingstone with questions about the British spooks and Northern Ireland.
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