Spooks and Hal­loween go together, so the former chief of the Secret Intel­li­gence Ser­vice’s appear­ance at the LSE seemed timely, to say the least. Still, it was an extraordin­ary pub­lic per­form­ance by Sir Richard Dear­love.

The cur­rent Mas­ter of Pem­broke Col­lege, Cam­bridge, was speak­ing on “Intel­li­gence and the Media.” His aim appeared to be threefold:

• to reaf­firm the import­ance of informal media con­tacts, i.e. chummy chats but no press office (no thanks, David Rose)
• to defend the intel­li­gence ser­vices, i.e. exist­ing scru­tiny is just fine and dandy
• to emphas­ize that the Iraq war was not the respons­ib­il­ity of the intel­li­gence services

In the ques­tions after­wards he threw in the bone that 9/11 had noth­ing to do with Iraq.

There were a lot of lines to read between, but broadly speak­ing I think we can guess that he believes:

• there won’t be a ground inva­sion of Iran (you don’t say!)
• if there is any kind of mil­it­ary strike, we’ll get served up with intel­li­gence evid­ence AFTER the event (no dossiers)
• there will be a National Secur­ity Coun­cil with a press spokes­man (you will get a kind of press office)

But why was it an extraordin­ary pub­lic per­form­ance? For starters, his nerves when faced with heck­lers (Sir Richard — you were in the freemasons/Bilderberg Group/Da Vinci Code).

No won­der he was never put before journ­al­ists in pub­lic, a press con­fer­ence would have reduced the poor chap to a quiv­er­ing jelly. At one point, he even threatened to leave the stage.

Then, at a drinks recep­tion after­wards in the SCR,a guy with a video cam­era star­ted shout­ing at poor Sir Richard, accus­ing him of hav­ing the blood of 600,000 Iraqis on his hands.

Given his attempts to drop the politi­cians right in it, you could see how this accus­a­tion was a little unfair. The pro­test­ers called for Sir Richard to be hanged — yes, they were pro-death pen­alty peace campaigners.

At the end of the day part of me felt sorry for him. He had put him­self on a pub­lic stage without any appar­ent secur­ity. The pro­test­ers might have been ter­ror­ists. And another part of me felt that it was a kind of olde worlde agit prop. Good old fash­ioned polit­ical theatre, very Eng­lish and half-arsed.

Oh well.