The Spies Who Love Us

For a government allegedly obsessed with presentation, appointing John Scarlett as head of MI6 is such terrible politics (making the job for Caligula's horse look like crowd-pleasing meritocracy) that it encourages conspiracy theories.

Needing to appoint a bloody-minded non-Blairite to run the BBC - to avoid accusations of a stitch-up - the government got hands clapping for being hands off in approving Michael Grade. For the top job in spying to go to a man who saved Tony Blair at the Hutton inquiry by confirming that the dodgy intelligence came from a Scarlett letter (rather than a Campbell one) is such disastrous PR that it can only be assumed the appointment was unavoidable. Scarlett may not have found WMD but he knows where the bodies are buried.

The key moment in the Hutton evidence, when Alastair Campbell described John Scarlett as "my mate", exposed the apparent mutual admiration between the Blair administration and the security services. This represents a striking historical shift and means that the two major Labour governments of the past 40 years - Harold Wilson's and Blair's - offer an enlightening comparison.

Both were elected after a long period of Tory rule as youthful versions of a revered US model (Kennedy and Clinton). Each squandered public goodwill on an issue of personal trustworthiness: Wilson on the devaluation of sterling, Blair on Iraq.

Yet on two issues - America and intelligence - the two saviours of Labour interestingly differ. Many recent commentators have used Wilson's refusal to send UK troops to Vietnam as an example to the present prime minister of how the fabled special relationship can survive dissent - although Wilson was motivated far less by his geopolitical vision of south-east Asia than by the knowledge that he couldn't get this military commitment past the government.

It's on their attitude towards the spooks, though, that these Labour PMs cease to share any political DNA. When Wilson first came to power in 1964, he had been for at least a decade the subject of gossip, almost certainly spread by M15.

Although care is needed because our main sources are books by men trained in disinformation - intelligence whistleblowers Peter Wright and Colin Wallace - it seems clear that a faction of fanatical anti-communists in MI5 mistrusted Wilson because of his links with Russia as a trade minister. Wright even believed Wilson ("Henry Worthington", as MI5 codenamed him) was a Soviet agent running a communist cell in No 10.

In fact, Wilson's main secret, which he kept from the Labour left, was quite how much of a capitalist and monarchist he was. Even so, his reaction to MI5's paranoia was to respond with a similar mindset to MI5. His relationship with intelligence became so strained that he spent his final year in office trying to turn MI5 against MI6 and demanded a personal visit from the CIA director (George Bush the elder, as it happens) to reassure him that the Americans had not conspired with British spies to undermine him. Wilson has been called paranoid, but it seems clear that some intelligence figures were acting against him.

In contrast, the relationship between Blair and spook HQ seems to be one of reciprocated admiration. Whereas Wilson trusted nothing our spies told him - leading him to dismiss the entire case against the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe as malicious invention - Blair shows signs of treating all memorandums in invisible ink as gospel. The most charitable explanation for the content of what is now known as the "dodgy dossier" justifying the attack on Iraq is that No 10 overtrusted intelligence and believed too strongly in Alastair Campbell's "mate".

This faith in secret agents presumably comes from the fact that Blair is less suspicious then Wilson was, but also that he is less suspected. While the current PM was once a member of CND, there is no real equivalent in contemporary culture to the libel of communist ties that would routinely be turned against Labour politicians during the cold war. Another factor is that Blair and Campbell systematically studied the issues that had brought down Labour governments and deliberately behaved against the stereotype.

This led them to court the Daily Mail and the Sun and to flatter bankers and businessmen. Perhaps another part of the rebranding was to prove that they were "sound" on intelligence.

The problem with this strategy is that a politician tends to be exposed to his own potholes rather than those into which predecessors fall. And so, where Wilson's administration was destabilised by his distance from the espionage establishment, Blair's has been rocked by his closeness to it.