A bland paragraph in the government's Spending Review 2000 masked the retreat. Andrew Tyrie, Conservative MP for Chichester, who claims that spending on intelligence has doubled since the end of the cold war, believes there is now a strong case for an inquiry by the National Audit Office. The spies' success seems to lie partly in their ability to play politics. They are, for instance, said to have purloined the briefing papers prepared for the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, before the Maastricht negotiations. Mrs Thatcher was apparently so enthralled by all this that she treated intelligence briefings as though they were enjoyable bedtime reading.
Insiders have doubts.
David Bickford, a former legal adviser to the intelligence and security services, has publicly criticised the three agencies' costs as excessive and called for a merging of their operations. One piece of spending became a public scandal. The overrun was concealed from Parliament for nearly seven years. The new top-secret GCHQ surveillance centre appears to be going the same way. For the most part, though secrecy makes it hard to judge whether the spies offer value for money, for they are not properly held to account.