ten downing street

She isn't doing badly though. She spoke out against 42-day detention last month, and this week welcomes the government's climb-down unequivocally. "We shouldn't introduce new intrusions into our civil liberties unless they are absolutely necessary - and nobody had demonstrated that they were necessary. If there isn't any need, then don't move the boundaries." She argues that we should "treat terrorism as a crime, and deal with it under the law - not as something extra, that you have to invent new rules to deal with." She is opposed to ID cards, because she can't see how they could be "a significant counter-terrorist measure", and although she admits she's "had more time to think about it since I left the service", she says her attitude to civil liberties has always been liberal. The big change, she argues, has been not her position, but the politicisation of the issue.

"One of the things I have observed in the last few years, since I left, is that national security has become much more of a political issue. And that parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know," she adopts a mocking playground tone, "'We're more tough on terrorism than you are.' I think that's a bad move, quite frankly.

"After the vote in the House of Lords, one heard the home secretary saying something like, 'Well nobody can say I'm not tough on terrorism'. As though the implication was there are people who aren't. Which strikes me as very odd. Because most of the people in the House of Lords whose contributions to that debate I'd read were serious people, who'd possibly spent a life, as I have, trying to protect the country from serious threats. So the implication that, you know, a politician was going to say 'I'm tougher on terrorism than you are' struck me as ... " and she flicks a wrist, batting away the boast with the back of her hand like a fly. "And it's happened broadly since 9/11."

The response to 9/11 was "a huge overreaction", she says. "You know, it was another terrorist incident. It was huge, and horrible, and seemed worse because we all watched it unfold on television. So yes, 9/11 was bigger, but not ... not ..." Not qualitatively different? "No. That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life, and this was, as far as I was concerned, another one."

Rimington hopes President Bush's successor will stop using the phrase "war on terror". "It got us off on the wrong foot, because it made people think terrorism was something you could deal with by force of arms primarily. And from that flowed Guantánamo, and extraordinary rendition, and ..." And Iraq, I suggest. "Well yes," she says drily. "Iraq."

Jacqui Smith gave a speech this week on international terrorism which rather remarkably failed to mention the war in Iraq at all. I ask Rimington what importance she would place on the war, in terms of its impact on the terrorist threat. She pauses for a second, then replies quietly but firmly: "Look at what those people who've been arrested or have left suicide videos say about their motivation. And most of them, as far as I'm aware, say that the war in Iraq played a significant part in persuading them that this is the right course of action to take. So I think you can't write the war in Iraq out of history. If what we're looking at is groups of disaffected young men born in this country who turn to terrorism, then I think to ignore the effect of the war in Iraq is misleading."

These might not be unremarkable views for most Guardian readers - of whom Rimington is one. But according to Rimington, they are widely held within the intelligence service - much more so than most members of the public, and perhaps particularly Guardian readers, ever suspect.

"I don't think I'm unusual, frankly. It's the general public's, or whoever's it is, view that's out of date." She points out that Baroness Manningham-Buller, another former head of MI5, has been "saying broadly the same things. I think what that reflects is that the caricature of the service is out of date now.

"People [in the intelligence service] are very conscious of the possibility of intrusions into civil liberties - and therefore the importance of restricting that to the extent of what's strictly necessary. I think people are fully aware that the more you intrude into people's civil liberties, the more you set up grievances for people to, you know, encourage people to do all the unpleasant things that are going on." link