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    Lyra McKee’s forthcoming  book may raise questions of the State-sponsored assassination of a sitting Westminster MP by an MI5 agent inside the Provisional IRA.

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    The British Establishment transformed itself into a lightning conductor to harness the visceral anger generated by the senseless killing of Lyra McKee in Derry on 18 April. It then redirected that energy  as a debilitating shock into the heart of the New IRA. No less a figure than Britain’s PM Theresa May turned up for Lyra McKee’s funeral in Derry to highlight the disgust felt by the UK. Leo Varadkar performed the same task for the people of the Republic. Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill were given a dressing down from the pulpit for not getting together, before shuffling up next to each other on a pew at the funeral and a new lease of life was injected into the talks to reinstate powersharing at Stormont. The much derided Secretary of State for NI must have thought all her birthdays had come as one. Lyra’s courageous friends took up her cause and were much admired on TV screens around the world as they daubed the walls of the political offices associated with the New IRA in Derry with blood red palm prints. An anti-paramilitary slogan was sprayed across the famous Free Derry mural. ‘Not in our name. RIP Lyra’, it read. While the New IRA reeled in shock, the  PSNI and MI5 reaped a propaganda windfall they could never have dreamt of. All told, the riot on the night of 18 April not only failed to goad the Northern State into an overaction likely to alienate Nationalists in Derry as the New IRA hoped, it resulted in the latter organisation shooting itself in the foot. The fact that Lyra McKee was a LGTB campaigner hoping to marry her partner was seized upon by the mainstream media, and raised her international profile to higher levels.  The fact she came from a state where gay marriage is not permitted, generated more headlines. No one anywhere had a single bad word to say about her. Her friends have kept her LGBT flag flying. They recently appeared on Channel 4 News where they criticised the failures of the NI state to do anything to advance LGBT rights (aside from spend a miserable few hundred pounds). On a professional level McKee was deservedly lauded on all sides for her journalistic instincts.  She was described as an award-winning writer chosen  as one of Forbes 30-under-30 most promising young journalists. It couldn’t have looked better from an anti-paramilitary propaganda perspective for the Establishment until suddenly this week news of the content of her book began to leak out. While no one at Village has seen it yet, it looks very much like it is going to open a door on the clandestine links between the Robert Bradford MP murder and the Kincora child sex abuse scandal. What an irony therefore that the British Establishment is going to have to tear Lyra McKee’s reputation apart or weather the fallout from her book. It is sure to become a bestseller. Will the Tory yeomanry who came out to defend Ted Heath after the Wiltshire police exposed him as a child abuser in 2018 now form up to villify Lyra as a gullible  conspiracy theorist? The Bradford murder may yet prove to be every bit as egregious as the infamous State sponsored murder of the solicitor Patrick Finucane in February 1989. Why was Bradford really murdered? Lyra McKee’s book may be about to shine a light over British State involvement in the killing and add a gruesome new chapter to the Kincora scandal. Kincora is arguably  the most atrocious British excess of the Troubles. It is a hydra-headed monster that incorporates a multitude of crimes including decades of child abuse, blackmail, proxy terrorism and the perversion of justice. In more recent times MI5 and MI6 have lied to the Hart Inquiry (which swallowed the lies whole). Kincora is a scandal that will not go away.  Will Lyra McKee’s forthcoming  book raise uncomfortable questions of the State-sponsored assassination of a sitting Westminster MP by an MI5 agent inside the Provisional IRA? We have only weeks left to find out precisely what Lyra McKee discovered, or more precisely what she unravelled about the lines of inquiry  Bradford was probing. What was it he found out that led to his death? All of the plaudits heaped on Lyra McKee may soon turn out to be an underestimation of her talent.

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    Lyra McKee to expose Kincora-driven murder. By Joseph de Burca

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    Lyra McKee’s book on the assassination of Robert Bradford MP is to be released within a matter of weeks. The book will explore the deeply sinister  links between the slaying of Bradford and the Kincora Boys Home scandal. Village readers will be familiar with the scandal on account of the  reports we have been publishing about it since 2017. While we await the publication of the book, readers are invited to scour our archive to view our revelations about  Kincora. The archives of Ed Moloney’s ‘Broken Elbow’ blog are also well worth a visit. Moloney was crucial in breaking a series of revelations about Kincora in the 1980s and has never lost interest in the scandal. A recent entry in his blog concerns the death of Valerie Shaw who tried to end the suffering of the children at Kincora by telling Ian Paisley about it. Paisley did nothing for the boys and lied about his knowledge of Kincora to his last breath. The work of the late Liam Clarke in the Belfast Telegraph provides further insights and is readily available online. Further details about Kincora can be found in the following books: Who Framed Colin Wallace by Paul Foot The Kincora Scandal by Chris Moore Also of note is Martin Dillon. He is the author of a series of books which are worth their weight in gold for anyone who wants to learn about what really happened in the shadows during the Troubles including Kincora. His book, The Dirty War, is essential reading. Village will be posting further short articles on the ramifications of Lyra McKee’s book, ‘Angels with Blue Faces’  over the next few weeks.

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    Extremism has become normal

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    Dump neoliberalism and build the just society optimising liberalism and equality envisaged by Rawls, Dworkin and Declan Costello by David Langwallner   In April 2015 I was asked to present a paper on ‘Towards A Just Society 2017’ to the West Cork Bar Association which, to my considerable surprise, was very well received by an audience encompassing a number of judges. I was then later that year asked to re-present it to the Irish Association of Law Teachers. After that presentation a prominent legal academic came up to me indicating how much he had enjoyed it and that I should publish it. There was then a remarkable exchange where he took me aside and said you are saying what we are all thinking but not saying to which my incredulous response was, “why not?”. The “why not” is of course in ever restricted economic times driven by a culture of compliance, keeping the head down and not rocking the boat. This craveness is now also becoming a feature of academic life which should be the last holdout for sophisticated criticism. Such clichéd (non)-motivations as not rocking the boat I hear now on a daily basis so here is my response. Torpedo the boat. We need to build a new one. This is the guts of what I said. It is an elaboration on an earlier piece in Village on the Rule of Law. (March 2016). The most important book of political philosophy since Karl Marx is John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’. The Rawlsean idea is that people are placed in an original position behind a veil of ignorance where they do not know their personal characteristics or the state of the civil society they are in but they know all about politics and economics. In the light of this veil of ignorance how would they choose a just society? Rawls suggests they would first choose the maximum number of liberties, as they would be risk averse and would not like to end up in a society where civil liberties are not adequately protected – in case of course their rights were oppressed. Second, that they would choose the difference principle, some measure of the redistribution of wealth in favour of the disadvantaged members of the community. After all as you might end up yourself poor in sub-Saharan Africa you would want some measure of social protection. This principle was the one Nozick and neo-liberals despised. Third, Rawls argues for equality of opportunity and the elimination of self-advancement based on birth, family ties or social position, a view also echoed by a modern ‘liberal egalitarian’, Ronald Dworkin. Rawls has been chastised on the left for not addressing social and economic rights – as opposed to political and civil rights. If you look at the recent text by Amartya Sen, ‘The Idea of Justice’, the fundamental critique is that Rawls posits a one-size-fits-all theory of justice and thus fails to address the reality that the achievement of a Rawlsean society is resource-dependent. Of what value is the freedom of speech when you cannot afford a meal? Sen thus contends thus we should be focused on the worst off and build a just society based on our capacities and needs. ‘Anarchy, State, Utopia’ (1974) was the most subversive reaction against ‘A Theory of Justice’. Robert Nozick suggested that redistributionist taxation that is not geared solely for the enforcement of contracts and the control of crime is akin to slavery or theft. I own my body, he argues, so I own everything my body produces and if the state takes way from me that which I produce it enslaves me or – more elegantly – “socialism forbids consenting acts between capitalist adults”. The egregious fault with his argument is of course that it does not follow that because you own your body you own everything you produce. It also allows for no understanding of the human condition other than one based on radically disaggregated and individualistic human behaviour devoid of co-operation and communitarianism. Now at the time many thought that Nozick was daft and that his ideas could not be implemented and would lead to a radically socially dislocated society. There is some suggestion that “Anarchy, State; Utopia’ was a form of intellectual joke or game perpetrated by Nozick. He was fond of conceits and subsequently wrote a further book with a radically different thesis, so perhaps he did not take what he fully said seriously. It certainly should never have been taken seriously. It tends to indulge what underpinned Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women”. Thatcher was a decided fan of Friedrich Hayek who disapproved of the notion of ‘social justice’, an “empty phrase with no determinable content”. He compared the market to a game in which ‘there is no point in calling the outcome just or unjust’. He generally regarded government redistribution of income or capital as an unacceptable intrusion upon individual freedom. Thatcher once banged a copy of Hayek’s ‘Road to Serfdom’ on the table at a Conservative Research Department meeting, intoning: “This is what we believe in”. The subversive set of arguments evoked by these stormtroopers has led to a number of unpleasant social developments and neo-liberalism. It was taken up by Thatcher, Reagan and in Ireland by the PDs and led to the veneration of the free market, economic liberalisation, and in practice to the breakdown of regulatory structures to favour the interests of multinationals. The consequences have been economic collapse surging inequality, the gradual destruction of the middle classes, the privatisation and diminution in health care as a right, the lack of funding in social services, mass homelessness and evictions. A modern variant of neo-liberalism is the truly disturbing and obnoxious “Law and Economics” movement out of The University of Chicago with two highly placed judges in Easterbrook (dangling for a Supreme Court judgeship) and the truly nefarious “most cited” legal scholar in the world

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    State land could provide 114,000 dwellings

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    Both NAMA (The National Asset Management Agency) and Local Authorities have been criticised for ‘land-hoarding’, ‘sitting’ on sites particularly in Dublin and the Greater Dublin Area (GDA) and not developing land that could be used to address the current housing crisis. Despite the amount of land under their control, Minister Eoghan Murphy has recently asked the Attorney General if powers to effect Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) could be upgraded to encourage those with vacant homes and land to sell quickly. The enhanced powers are part of a new strategy on vacant homes and land due to be announced by Government in June (1). The Minister’s strategy is puzzling given that the State itself has been using less than one percent of its current zoned development land-banks for housing every year. Public land potential: Local Authorities, NAMA and Government A year ago the Department of Housing pub- lished ‘the Rebuilding Ireland Land Availability Survey’ which included details of State-owned land. This report confirmed that Local Authorities own zoned residential land with capacity for 37,950 dwellings (on 1,211 hectares) and that this represented just a portion of State-owned land (2). However, based on individual returns from seven Local Authorities, the figures are much higher. Local Authorities own zoned land with capacity for 48,724 dwellings nationwide (1,317 hectares). Dublin City Council owns zoned residential land with capacity for more than 18,000 dwellings and in County Dublin there is the potential to build 29,278 dwellings. When it comes to the NAMA, the picture is similar. It currently controls the loans on enough development land to build 65,399 dwellings (1,691 hectares); in County Dublin NAMA controls land with the potential for 43,075 dwellings. (3) Nationwide the State controls development land with the capacity for 114,123 dwellings (3,008 hectares) – more than 17% of all zoned residential land by area and more than one quarter of the potential housing capacity in the country. In addition, according to the Irish Times, at least 334 sites or buildings controlled by the Government are lying idle across the State, some of them for more than 30 years. The worst offender is the Health Service Executive with 137 unused buildings or sites. The other 197 sites are shared between nine Government departments, and include Garda stations, courthouses, military barracks and customs posts. Almost half of all County Dublin residential development land is State-controlled and between NAMA and Local Authorities there is the capacity for 71,425 dwellings (1,212 hectares). These figures exclude holdings owned by the Housing Agency and other State and Semi-state bodies. In Dublin City three out of every four vacant residential zoned sites are either owned by Dublin City Council or NAMA debtors. REFERENCES  1. “Government ponders increasing compulsory purchase powers” Irish Times, 14 May 2018; https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/government-ponders-increasing-compulsory-purchase-powers-1.3185489 2.“Almost 40,000 social homes could be built by local authorities” Irish Times Nov 2017; https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/ almost-40-000-social-homes-could-be-built-by-local-authorities-1.3301442 3. NAMA Residential Delivery Updates (December 2017): https://www.nama.ie/development-funding/nama-residential-delivery-updates/. There is a reduction of 238 hectares from end-2017. There are number of factors for the reduction, including: the land has been built on, The land has been sold, the land has been re-zoned, the debtor has repaid or refinanced their debts and their loans are no longer in NAMA. In 2017, 2,503 were completed by debtors/ receivers funded by NAMA. 7,200 since counting began in 2014. Public Housing: Demand and Supply In the four years since 2014, 7,200 new dwellings have been completed by NAMA debtors and Local Authorities built 818 social homes. In the past twelve months 17,914 new households experienced rental distress and signed-on for Housing Assistance Payment (HAP). Official figures report that Local Authorities built 780 social homes (4) and a further part-State funded 1,078 were built by not-for-profit Approved Housing Bodies (5). However, when ‘turnkey’ units purchased from the private sector from developers are removed, Local Authorities built just 394 homes last year. 11 Local Authorities including South Dublin County Council built no (zero) homes. Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs) built only 270. In contrast in 2017 10.5% of all new homes sold were purchased by AHBs or Local Authorities nationwide as social housing. One year’s supply of purpose-built social housing is meeting less than two weeks of subsidised housing demand. Last year eleven Local Authorities built no social housing, including South Dublin County Council, which has more than 7,500 on housing waiting lists. Dublin County Council built just 232 homes and have more than 40,200 on housing waiting lists. Official targets for 2018 social-housing builds and acquisitions have been increased by just 11% on last year’s levels(6) (expect less than 450 Local Authority builds this year nationwide. By the end of 2018 one in three tenancies will be in receipt of some form of State rent assistance, making up almost 1950m. At current rates of increase by 2019 this annual spend on rent assistance will increase to over 11.1bn per year. In addition to zoned residential development land, the State owns massive landbanks, significant parts of which may be suitable to be re-zoned to residential use in the longer term. Even if a large percentage of the land controlled and owned by the State is not suitable for development, there is still more than enough to build 10,000 social homes per year, a recommendation of the All Party Oireachtas Committee on Housing and Homelessness in 2016 (7). The price of local authority housing (in Dublin City) should be 1175,000 for one-bed units, 1183,000 for two-bed units and 1200,000 for three-bed units. According to Simon Coveney: “The St Michael’s estate regeneration team proposal, ‘Our Community a better way: campaign for fair rental homes’, [launched on 26 April in Buswell’s Hotel] comprised 300 homes, of which 150 of which were social and 150 were cost-rental. The State would fund the capital cost of all units at a cost of 156 million. There would be a mix of one, two and three-bedroom apartments costing on average 1175,000, 1183,000 and 1200,00, respectively. Average monthly rent on a cost-rental basis would be 1900”. REFERENCES 4. Overall social housing provision | Department of

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    Neoliberalism cloaked as modernity

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    Ireland should brace for market worship dressed up as equality of opportunity and favouring those who get up early by David Langwallner and Ben Harper   Leo Varadkar consistently asserts that he does not believe in equality of outcome but in equality of opportunity. He sees himself as “right” or “either centre right or a higher class of liberal… some-body who believes in personal freedom, someone who believes in a political economy and in a free market as the best way to create wealth”. He wants to lead a party, and we infer a coun-try, for “people who get up early in the morning”. His highest-profile initiative came in late April, when as Minister for Social Protection he launched the fractious ‘Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All’ advertising and online campaign. It aims to encourage the reporting of suspected fraud to the Department of Social Protection anonymously. The image Varadkar, who was always going to win anyway, cultivated in his long tilt at the Fine Gael leadership is that of champion of equality of opportunity, liberalism… the right… those who get up early in the morning and aren’t part of the class responsible for welfare fraud. But above all Varadkar speaks the language of markets. However, the markets are a dead end. Neoliberalism is defined as “a modified form of liberalism tending to favour free-market capitalism” (Oxford). Like Scientology or some of the madder dogmas of religion, it is pseudo-science or bad science and it has been, as we shall see, comprehensively discredited. But this is too tart. Of course it has been discredited, but its hold on us grips our lives still, grips our incoming Taoiseach. So let us try and whisper in the world’s ears, and in the ears of the Taoiseach, why it is wrong and dangerous and pushing us to the edge. For a start there are better economic theories. John Maynard Keynes was in Saul Bellow’s phrase a man of “clairvoyant intelligence”. Keynes was prophetic in his great work ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ that predicted that the dire economic conditions forced on Germany after the war would lead to its economic collapse and political upheaval throughout Europe. It resonates in our times. Keynes’ ideas fuelled recovery after recovery after the mistakes which followed 1929. Recovery was needed after the market was shown in every instance to be deficient in providing macroeconomic efficiency, let alone broader societal goals. Keynes argued that aggregate demand determines the overall level of economic activity. Inadequate aggregate demand can lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Time Magazine has said of Keynes: “his radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism”. Keynes himself was reportedly disparaging about capitalism itself: “Capitalism is the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds”. The stagflation of the 1970s with the shocks to the Keynesian system generated by oil prices opened sowed dissent. Keynes fell out of fashion with the stranglehold of unionism and welfarism and the imposition of socialist dogma. It created ‘a market’ for the work of the Chicago School and trickledown economics characterised by fetishistic privatisation, deregulation and the elimination of State subsidies. In the late 1970s much of this made superficial though never profound sense. The market may have seemed like a score counter that could be tamed for human purposes. No longer. It is the recipe for inequality leading to intolerance. After the Depression which started in 2007, Keynesianism actually underpinned some of the measures implemented in some countries – notably by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown in the US and UK. This was not the case in most of the world, particularly in Germany, which has learnt, and insisted that others learn, the wrong lesson from its own hyperinflation-driven catas-trophe – or the EU, including Ireland which was an incubator for austerity. But it is Greece that was the laboratory. When the Greeks decided the ignominy was too unfair and pointless and elected a government firmly opposed to the hopeless conditions imposed upon them they were forced into an astonishing U-turn to accept further self-destructive bailout packages. Not even the IMF thinks that Greece can comply with these terms and successfully pay back its debt, especially when coupled with crippling austerity conditions. The latest figures show Greece’s debt stands at 179 percent of its gross domestic product, or about €315 bn. Naomi Klein in her bestseller ‘The Shock Doctrine’ analyses the growth and development of Neoliberalism across the world. An economic paradigm dubbed by the author ‘disaster capitalism’. Klein particularly homes in on how these crises and others are used to justify further disaster prescriptions. She quotes Hayek’s mate Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable”. This describes the Greek decade. Moreover, Neoliberalism has contributed to the world order approaching a collapse at a startling velocity. As shown by Thomas Piketty decades of inexorably widening inequality lead to economic instability and social unrest. Trump, Le Pen and Brexit are the predictable fruits. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, intolerance, antienvironmentalism and disdain for the truth are their imperatives and their currency. It isn’t hysterical to fear that the end of human civilisation is glaring us in the face while most people look away. Established parties of government in nearly all major countries have subscribed to the Neoliberal agenda and merely quibble about its implementation. A wild ballet of madness. Neoliberalism’s imprimatur for austerity has ineluctably led to social instability and fragmentation, the destruction of pension and welfare entitlements, poorer and often

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    Dial MI5 for Murder

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    HAS SPOOK-TURNED-THRILLER WRITER DAME STELLA RIMMINGTON FORGOTTEN WHAT IS IN MI5’s TOP SECRET FILES? Dame Stella Rimmington has just published another of her bestselling Liz Carlyle spy yarns The Moscow Sleepers in time for the Christmas market. In it, the redoubtable Liz is set against some  very nasty men from Russia. This has all been done ten thousand times in one guise or another. This is all rather a shame because Stella Rimmington, a former Chair of the Judges for the Man Booker Prize, could probably produce a novel of real substance if she really put her mind to it. After all, she was theDirector-General of MI5, December 1991-1994, and spent a career knee deep in all sorts of skulduggery, including snooping on perfectly respectable MPs, trades unionists, civil rights groups and journalists. Since she joined MI5 in the late 1960s and left it in 1996, she must know virtually all of MI5’s most pitch-black secrets, especially those of the Troubles, though you certainly wouldn’t suspect this from her fictional output or her double-whitewashed 2001 memoirs, Open Secret, which may as well be a work of fiction. Rimmington is a dab hand at transforming fact into fiction; whether at a conscious or sub-conscious level is best left to the experts. Incredibly, she believes no one in MI5 ever lifted a finger to thwart the Labour PM Harold Wilson, seen by some in MI5 as a dastardly KGB stooge and traitor. This, despite the fact back that no less a figure than Lord John Hunt, the mighty and all-powerful Cabinet Secretary, 1973-79, acknowledged that it had indeed happened. In August 1996 Hunt told a Channel 4 documentary that, ‘There is no doubt at all that a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5, people who should not have been there in the first place, a lot of them like Peter Wright who were right-wing, malicious and had serious personal grudges, gave vent to these and spread damaging malicious stories about that Labour government.’ THE FORMER TOP SPY WHO DRAWS NO INSPIRATION FROM THE REAL SPY WORLD Unless she was sleep-climbing during her ascent to the top of MI5’s blood-soaked pole, Dame Stella must have heard something along the way about: MI5’s collusion with Loyalists hoods in Northern Ireland such as the Glennane Gang; The MI5-RUC shoot-to-kill scandal that John Stalker, the honest, admirable and principled Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, investigated in the 1980s, only to be vilified as he edged closer to the truth about MI5’s complicity in the murder of a string of people including Michael Tighe, a 17 year-old with no links to any paramilitary group; The deeply sinister framing of Colin Wallace by Ian Cameron (Wallace wanted to stop MI5-protected child rape at Kincora Boys Home and other dirty tricks) and the pernicious vilification of Fred Holroyd – again perpetrated by Cameron – (Holroyd didn’t want to murder people for MI5); The brutal assassination of the Belfast solicitor Patrick Finucane in 1989 in front of his wife and young children by acknowledged British agents; The setting fire to the offices of that other honest, admirable and principled cop, Sir John Stephens in Belfast in 1990. His office was torched during his investigations of MI5’s exploitation of the UDA as proxy assassins with the aid of Brian Nelson, the Head of the UDA’s Intelligence department; MI5’s network of contacts inside Garda Intelligence; The print journalists in Dublin who were fed stories by HMG’s spooks. Since MI5 co-operated with MI6 in the Republic, Dame Stella must know which journalists had their noses in the trough and who just was rewarded with a pat on the back at meetings of the British-Irish Association or over dinner at the Dublin Embassy; The MI5-Red Hand Commando (RHC) attempt to place a bomb on Charles Haughey’s boat in Dingle harbour in the summer of 1981 when the RHC was led by a serial killing MI5 psychopath called John Dunlop McKeague. Did Stella ever read McKeague’s file? And while we are at it, what about Haughey’s file? Surely Stella she had read it by the time she became D-G at the end of 1991. Haughey didn’t retire as Taoiseach until 11 February 1992. Why hasn’t Stella drawn on any of this remarkable source material for her hitherto run-of-the-mill fiction? Has she forgotten everything in the files? In Open Secret, she wrote – merely in passing it must be stressed that – ‘Loyalist terrorists too had developed their operations and were constantly looking to increase and upgrade their arms and equipment.’ (211) That’s all very fine Stella, but please:   what part did Ian Cameron and all the other psychos in MI5 who served in NI play in helping them; in directing them; in covering-up for them? THE CORRUPTION OF THE SOUL Regrettably, like that other spook-turned-author, John Le Carre, formerly of MI5 and MI6, Stella steers well clear of what HMG’s real-life spooks got up to in Ireland in both her fictional and factual outpourings. For his part, Le Carre has managed to convince himself that he has attempted to ‘explore’ Britain’s ‘psyche’ and that in so doing, ‘it’s Secret Service [was] not an unreasonable place to look’. Regrettably, he never set any of his – admittedly brilliant – novels in an Irish setting. Does he not believe the Troubles had an effect on the British ‘psyche’ or were the crimes of HMG’s spooks just too much to deal with? Anthony Cavendish, who served in both MI5 and MI6, certainly wasn’t afraid to confront the truth. He described in his memoirs, Inside Intelligence, how as ‘the years go by, the lies take over from the truth and morality accepts the other demands which are made on an [intelligence] officer to get the job done’ and that ‘theft, deception, lies, mutilation and even murder are considered if and when necessary’. So, just what is the point of promoting Rimmington on the cover of her Liz Carlyle books as the ‘Former Head of MI5’, if she

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