In most of the circles I move in, the Guardian is regarded as something of a red under the bed. The feeling is that if this country was left in the hands of its editors we would be governed from Bonn, overrun by asylum seekers and buggered on Sundays. My friends wouldn't buy it if you paid them.
But they do read the Sunday Times. Well, if they haven't noticed yet, I have news for them. The Sunday Times supports traitors, while this paper is a pillar of patriotic rectitude. I know which I'd rather read.
The traitor the Sunday Times is supporting is, of course, Richard Tomlinson, the lying inadequate who was sacked by MI6 and wrote a book designed to inflict maximum damage, which they are now serialising.
But he didn't go to them first. He came here. A couple of years ago, before his book found a publisher that appears to be a front for the brutish Russian intelligence service the FSB, it was offered to the Guardian. Doubtless Mr Tomlinson took the Colonel Walrus Moustache view that this paper is staffed by people who want nothing more than to do Britain down.
But, according to my moles in the office, the Guardian did his book down instead and informed him that they didn't want it. The editorial view was that publishing Tomlinson's entire exposé would not be in the public interest and, unlike the Sunday Times, they gave that a higher priority than making a fast buck. Good for them. It makes me proud to work for this paper, pinko lefties and all.
It's not that I think MI6 should be a no-go area for newspapers. Last year I described to readers how I was interviewed by MI6 when I was a student. I broke the Official Secrets Act. I'm not an angel. I'm a journalist. But while I have teased people at MI6 and, I'm told, earned their disapproval, I would never do anything that I suspected would harm them or their work (and that kind of information has come my way over the years, quite unsolicited).
I appreciate that we pay for MI6 out of our taxes, that their job is to protect our freedom and if their job is made more difficult it threatens us all. To my mind British spies and British journalists are on the same side (or should be) and while I have never met the editor of this newspaper, he seems to thinks the same thing.
Being on the same side does not, however, mean doing the same job. Tomlinson's stories included the claim that Dominic Lawson, currently editor of the Sunday Telegraph, was used - unknowingly, he says - in his former position as editor of the Spectator to help out MI6 by providing journalistic cover for MI6 agents. The Guardian wrote that such MI6 behaviour is irresponsible and would risk lives. I think that is right. Just as British journalists have duties to MI6 operatives, so they have duties to us. Foreign correspondents, like double agents, are not protected by diplomatic cover. To expose them to the accusation that they are spies would be to put them in very real danger.
But there are other duties too. British newspapers are renowned for their nastiness to celebrities. But they are equally renowned for their freedom from government interference. MI6 officers may despise journalists, just as some hack writers buzzing with conspiracy theories despise them. But to compromise the integrity of British journalism is to compromise our standing in the world. In short, the reputation of its journalism is as important to British interests as that of MI6.
The Sunday Times, unfortunately, has damaged both. Tomlinson's' book tells us nothing new we need to know. It is a mixture of fact and fantasy, the facts centering on the detail of training and operational procedures. But its effect will be far from trivial.
According to Oleg Gordievsky, the highest ranking KGB officer ever to have defected to MI6, the book undermines "MI6's most potent weapon: its reputation for being able to keep secrets". It was, he says, "that reputation which persuaded me to take the gigantic risk of working for the organisation. Now that reputation has been seriously damaged." No wonder the FSB's employees have been grinning with delight over Tomlinson's book. "The (Sunday Times) has always insisted that it is loyal and patriotic," Gordievsky notes, "But in its obsession with mere sensation, which led the paper to publish Tomlinson's shameful story, it seems to have forgotten those two words."
I have cancelled my order for the Sunday Times. I hope others will do likewise until its editor, John Witherow, goes the way of other journalists used by the Russian intelligence services and is sacked. His paper is now mere bumph, not to be compared to this upstanding, patriotic journal, our Guardian.