Intelligent Intelligence

That's not all. In 1999 he was appointed as the UK's first e-envoy.

"In 1999 he was appointed as the UK's first e-envoy."

I can see it now. "Take me to your root server!"

Well, I expect they're going to have to move him into super-secure new premises with all the trimmings, and a secluded, easily-defended location. So maybe he's not that dumb after all... (-:

John Lettice
http://www.theregister.co.uk

John,

Or lock him up in Number Ten's basement!

This just confirms what we have suspected all along. The "intelligence services" were named by someone with a great sense of irony!

They are well trained though. This one will jump through hoops, balance a lump of sugar on his nose and even beg for a biscuit if it had chocolate on it.

"October 14-15, 2007 -- Blackwater training police in American cities and towns"

http://tinyurl.com/37nl3w

They've always been a shower of helpless morons.  Nothing like an expensive, insular, public school education to ensure a complete divorce from global reality.  Certain facts just aren't acceptable within respectable discourse, hence the selective amnesia that pervades the political classes in general - from which the 'intelligence' services do not escape.

Cassandra

Hi Cassandra,

"They've always been a shower of helpless morons."

No Fair! It always tickles me to learn about who 'M' actually was, it reminds me that the govt wasn't always as stupid as well...subsequently.

"Nothing like an expensive, insular, public school education to ensure a complete divorce from global reality. "

I think the only bunch you can possibly be decribing nowadays is the Judiciary! Within the the intelligence community the rot as decribed above (I think) started in "1952 the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, deputed his personal responsibility for the Security Service to the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe". Jobs for the inbred buggered elite, tap on the shoulder types that shag each other. Well we all know how well that turned out. That kind of rot was checked when almost all branches of government were subject to public choice theory (neo-connism) started by Thatcher, finished by Bliar. Just check the bio of Stella Rimington less masonic dick in door more checkbox and PC.

"Certain facts just aren't acceptable within respectable discourse, hence the selective amnesia that pervades the political classes in general - from which the 'intelligence' services do not escape."

If you are suggesting that artificial target driven responses to political objectives with layers of political correctness in public services lead to the converse to what they are intended, then even I don't want to talk about it :)

This is the kind of openness we should praise, no? It's not as if the job is itself secret, and the crap of denying that MI5 and SIS existed and not naming the chief was abandoned some years ago. Alex Allan got an incredible amount of shit from the press when he was running the E-Envoy thing because he had a...WEBSITE!...and he windsurfed!...and he'd lived in <em>Australia</em>!...and therefore he was unserious, or something. I see no reason to add to it.

Yes Tio, what a successful bunch of pragmatists our intelligence experts are...!  Picking one example, just take a look at what Winston Churchill described as the 'worst disaster' and 'greatest capitulation' in British history: the Japanese WWII invasion of Singapore.

British intelligence failures were at the root of Japan's decisive military success. UK intelligence estimates rioted in racism, concluding that the Japanese were unable to use high calibre rifles due to their limited physical stature, and lacked the intelligence required to deploy contemporary military technology.

Safely cocconed in a carefully constructed imperial fantasy, reassured of their innate superiority, and buttressed in their implacable ignorance by lashings of pink gin and the blandishments of the intelligence services,  British officers just knew the army had nothing to fear from the little yellow men armed with little more than pop guns and tropical syphilis.

The Japanese destroyed the entire British garrison in less time than it takes to get an appointment with your G.P. Has anything really changed....?

Meow pussycat!

Let's not confuse Imperial intelligence or military intelligence (a contradiction in terms) with actual intelligence. Permit me to counter with the son of a brick layer, one Tommy Flowers, what they called in the day as one of "tomorrow's men", the father of what you're sitting in front of.

I am now giving myself the special handshake and have the bedroom door open in anticipation. In my advancing years I have found that a tea cosy is preferable to the foil hat I had relied on earlier. Put down the somerset maugham and step away from the nietzsche & imbibe of the pink gin as you're G.P. cannot be as bad as mine.

ttfn
tio

Permit me to counter with the son of a brick layer, one Tommy Flowers, what they called in the day as one of "tomorrow's men", the father of what you're sitting in front of.

Except, of course, that Tommy Flowers worked for the GPO and built the first Colossus out of his own pocket and on his own time because TPTB couldn't see the use of it.

Bah, takes half the fun out of it.  It's much more fun reading the coy ones that say 'After studying at Cambridge, so-and-so moved to the Cheltenham area'...