The UK can’t claim to take national security seriously at all after these Mandelson revelations
Britain’s rulers and civil servants have shown themselves to be incompetent guardians of national security; The UK, meanwhile, faces a vibrant hybrid war from Russia, economic and security contagion from the Middle East, and a cunning invasion by Chinese intelligence and business interests.
Our allies will be talking with fear when the late Sir Olly Robbins of the Foreign Office tells MPs that the UK Cabinet Office does not appear concerned about whether Lord Mandelson has passed security clearance for the Washington ambassador post.
Add this to his seeming lack of curiosity about whether Sir Keir Starmer’s appointment to the most sensitive job in British diplomacy can be trusted, and he signals that Britain does not know what it is facing.
The laundry was washed and overall remained very dirty.
The country’s generals complained about a $28 billion shortfall in funding for the armed forces. He warned spies that he was under attack from Russia’s hybrid warfare.
Defense secretary John Healey recently boasted about how the Royal Navy was chasing Russian spy submarines collecting information from the seabed via cables, the arteries of information that keep us alive.
The government cried about how Russian oil tankers in the ghost fleet should be boarded. But cables continue to be monitored, tankers sail up and down the Channel undisturbed, the UK armed forces continue to be beset by massive technical glitches costing billions of dollars – and the UK government does nothing.
The fundamental problem is that Britain’s current leaders see this debacle as a political problem. Not. This is a matter of security and underlies the UK’s belief in how seriously the taking of other people’s secrets can be taken.
Five Eyes, the system that shares intelligence between the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is already under pressure. Trump cannot be trusted not to spill secrets on social media and in meetings with foreign officials. We know this because he did this; He put his intelligence asset (a man) at risk during his first administration when he told Russia’s ambassador to Washington about a bomb plot against ISIS.
American cabinet officials were found to be using unsecured signals for top-secret communications. Volatility is so prevalent in the White House that Trump himself has been kept away from live briefings on his war with Iran.
British authorities and spy masters have been dealing with this for a year. But the same level of recklessness when it comes to who has access to the UK’s most important secrets is a new level of stupidity that will be horrified by the UK’s Anglophone allies and others.
In terms of soft and hard power, one of the UK’s best exports is its security services and special forces. The UK buys its credibility through the bravery of its real-life men and women working in the shadows and the worldwide perception that James Bond will be the one to save it in the end.
The truth that emerges from No 10 and FCDO is that mandarins and politicians do not think national security is really important; They don’t really believe that Russia will one day cut our cables and blow up our undersea pipelines.
They don’t care or believe that China has been plundering our intellectual property, infiltrating our businesses, buying up our real estate, and harvesting our data through sites like TikTok for decades.
A quick search of the internet at any time before sending Mandelson to Washington would have revealed his close ties to Chinese business and that he was on the board of a Russian arms company until 2017 (three years after Russia invaded Europe in Crimea).
Robbins said there was pressure from Number 10 to get Mandelson’s security clearance as soon as possible.
It was foolish and putting so much pressure on civil servants for a candidate who was clearly unsuited for a job that would give him access to secrets beyond secrecy shows a staggering indifference to the security of the UK on the part of the prime minister and his cabinet.
It was also a failure for the civil service to highlight the dangers posed by Mandelson. They risk losing their own careers and pensions if necessary. We want this from the soldiers, too, but when they pay the price, it will be with their lives, not their salaries.
Where were officials from the government, the security services, and the foreign office when Mandelson was being briefed on top-secret matters even before he was granted passage? They were in the room, telling him things he had no right to hear.
In Evelyn Waugh’s journalistic satire, war preparations in Aden were reported to be inadequate and, in the abbreviated language of the telegrams, “non-war”.
This week England was shown to be just as “war-free” but Scoop was fiction; The threats facing Britain were real.
