Tapped

The Wilson Doctrine has never had any legal force, and there has never been any reason to assume that the relevant agencies felt bound by it. But we all know against whom these actions are not being taken, nor will they be.

They are not, and will not be, taken against those MPs who are satraps of Saudi Arabia, the epicentre of terrorism in the world today. It is those MPs who are the threats to national security. But they come from the party that the spooks, like the hacks, have been brought up to regard as the apolitical default option. The first thing that cuddly old Geoffrey Howe did as Foreign Secretary was to ban trade unions at GCHQ.

After all, to spooks and hacks alike, that party is full of their close relatives, and their old mates from school. They were at university before they met anyone else, and even then they had nothing to do with such peculiar creatures.

To them, those creatures are the threats, simply by their incomprehensible existence at all. They could not name a foreign power with which those might have any connection in 2015; Jeremy Corbyn, already on a roll after having secured the cancellation of the Saudi prison contracts, is demanding to see Xi Jinping face to face in London next week, in order to berate him over his human rights abuses.

But none of that matters, whether to the hacks or to the spooks. They do not care that the present Government is flogging off great tracts of our infrastructure to the Chinese, to the point of paying the Chinese to take over our nuclear energy provision, because that is being done by good chaps from the party than which nothing, by definition, could be more patriotically British.

Such is also their view of this country's governing party's very special relationship with the Gulf tyrannies in general and with Saudi Arabia in particular. It's the Tories, so what could possibly be the problem?

What, indeed?