Liberal Vision

Lib Dem MP ‘responsible for losing world cup’

Might be one way in which the BBC show Spooks could spin today’s revelations that assistant to Portsmouth MP Mike Hancock, Katya Zatuliveter, is facing deportation as her presence is deemed “not conducive to national security”. This based on an implication she and Hancock vigorously deny, that she is a Russian agent.

All the ingredients are there. The glamorous Russian assistant. A Coalition government MP who looks like a cast extra from Fiddler on the Roof, already compromised by arrest on unrelated allegations, serving a City whose struggling football team was once owned by a Russian oligarch, and still owes him money. The episode might close with the Home Secretary ringing her Russian counterpart saying:

“You may have won a £5bn tournament, but we are not powerless, see we have already expelled your work-experience placement student.”

Or is it all an elaborate conspiracy to eliminate a crucial no-vote against the government’s tuition fees policy and secret leader of student agitation in one foul swoop…

Outside the realms of fantasy, the serious side to this story, true or not, apart from the personal devastation to the individuals involved, concerns knee-jerk calls to examine the way MP’s interns are vetted.  Already subject to enhanced criminal record checks the implication appears to be that people who largely spend their time reviewing publicly available Parliamentary documents and handling constituency casework on drains should be treated like recruits to GCHQ.

This is bonkers.

The first and most obvious point is that MPs should not be sharing sensitive documents pertaining to national security with anyone unauthorised, let alone their researchers. That the last government made a case for war using a graduate’s thesis somebody found on Google, might suggest such malpractice is commonplace, but that is the issue, not a failure of external oversight.

Second it is hard to know what additional vetting would reveal. Either MI5 know someone is a security risk or they don’t.

If they do, we’d like to think they’d act as they now have. If not, they’re hardly resourced to start running case files on an endlessly rotating group of over a thousand young professionals across the Parliamentary estate, on the off chance one might take a suspicious holiday in Cuba and come back with more than cigars and a tedious tale about not seeing any poverty and how great the hospitals are.

Third, in the case of the accused, her pro-Russian sympathies were hardly concealed, she had already written a think-tank piece critical of NATO and pro-Kremlin in respect of the South Ossetia dispute in 2008. Agent Triple-X she is not.

The story gives the life of politicians far more glamour, power and prominence than is actually the case. No change of policy is required, just the drudgery of good old fashioned intelligence work, and MPs following protocol.