Bernard Ingham: Idiocy that ties our hands in fight against terror

There are many layers to the idiocy, so let me peel the onion.

It starts with the idiotic notion that Government should be conducted in a fish bowl. Even in my time I was obliged to advise the then Lord Chancellor to curb his enthusiasm for greater "openness" on the part of judges. Their job was to dispense justice, I said, not to join the chattering classes. I have spoken to more responsive brick walls.

Open government is a contradiction in terms. There are many constraints on the disclosure of information quite apart from defence and security interests – for example, financial, trade and commercial intelligence.

Another is personal information, leaks of which are deplored whenever government rather too frequently mislays a computer disc. One consequence of such a leak is the blanket condemnation of MPs as fiddlers all, which is unjustified.

It may be argued that without freedom of information laws we would not know how rotten our system has become. But those laws have now become a ludicrous battle between vested interests and officialdom, with one side trawling for material to further their cause while the other tries to hold some sort of administrative line in the face of steady allegations of cover up.

All of this has contributed to an unhealthy disrespect for Government, politicians and officials.

It follows that, for everybody's good, government should be conducted honestly and as openly as possible. For 24 years I found it far more honest than open. For the last 13 years it has been dishonest and spuriously open – in other words an institutionalised hypocrisy.

Is it any wonder that the worst is thought of MI5 these days when it is clear the security services did nothing to curb Labour's severe lack of principle in concocting a dodgy dossier over Iraq.

Which brings me to the security services themselves. Call me old-fashioned, but if a secret service is to be of any use to anyone it had better stay secret. I hoped the Master of the Rolls would have the intelligence to see this. Instead, he ordered disclosure of a summary of 42 US documents, which had been handed over confidentially to MI5.

This prize specimen has now prejudiced security co-operation between the US and the UK at a time of severe terrorist alert. Understandably the Sun newspaper wants to know whose side he is on.

This leads on to the idiocy over human rights that now afflicts the nation. The rights of criminals or suspected terrorists aiming to kill as many innocents as possible clearly count for more than their victims or intended victims. On the one hand we expect to be protected from sudden death at the hands of fanatics while at the same time demanding our security services fight pure evil with the deference of Jeeves.

I am astonished – and gratified – how well our security services perform in this idiotic atmosphere. I would be happier if I thought they did put the frighteners on those who would blow us up, as distinct from knocking seven bells out of them.

Nothing I have read so far suggests to me they are involved in torture or condone it – merely that in seeking to do their duty they have, as in foreign affairs, to dabble in a murky world and understandably feel impelled to take advantage of any offers to interview British nationals suspected of plotting mayhem.

The row between the Government and judiciary is the consequence of our wanting our cake and eating it. It is also partly the result of a Government that has elevated our judges into policymakers by printing nearly as many laws as pound notes and has lost the people's confidence through its general behaviour.

We don't trust the Government to tell the truth. We know only too well how it has treated the security services. We don't trust Parliament, through its intelligence and security committee, with overseeing them. We think the judiciary is as wet as a whistle and generally that Government and politicians stink.

This is part of Labour's squalid legacy that awaits David Cameron's attention. If there were less idiocy and more trust around in the body politic, those who should know better would not now be giving enormous comfort to a bloodthirsty enemy.