It is bleakly symmetrical that Tony Blair’s tenth anniversary as Prime Minister should have fallen in the same week as the Scottish, Welsh and local elections. But it was no less apt that the PM should have passed this milestone the day after the conviction of five British Islamists who plotted to blow up a crowded nightclub or shopping centre: the fruits of Operation ‘Crevice’ by the police and security services in 2004.
The contrast between the sunlit expectations of 2 May 1997 and the angry mood of the electorate this week could scarcely be sharper. The Blair decade has been one of dashed expectations. But it has also been a period of geopolitical and cultural transformation. Who could have predicted ten years ago that Mr Blair’s premiership would be defined and, to a certain extent, disfigured by a battle on many fronts against fundamentalist Islam?
In the wake of the Crevice trial, attention has focused on the alleged negligence of MI5 who were aware of links between the gang convicted on Monday and two of the men who went on to commit the 7/7 atrocities: Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. There are certainly questions to be answered. Why, for instance, did the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee not see all the surveillance photographs linking Khan to the (now-convicted) militants? Was West Yorkshire Police kept appropriately informed by MI5 of its suspicions about Khan? The survivors and bereaved of 7/7 are richly entitled to pose these and other questions and to demand satisfactory answers.
Yet it is depressing that the first and most energetic response to Monday’s verdict at the Old Bailey was to insinuate that MI5 had blood on its hands because it had failed to thwart the 7 July bombings.
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