Spy bosses don't hold back their best secrets from their political masters or political mistresses

Priti Patel,the UK Home Secretary, is having a tough old time at the moment. Stories are doing the rounds, accusing her of bullying her staff, plotting to rid herself of her permanent secretary - her top civil service adviser - and being excluded from receiving the most sensitive intelligence from MI5, the Security Service which comes under her political wing as Home Secretary, because the agency's most senior officials don't trust her. I know nothing about the bullying charges other than to point out that a woman running the Home Office is always going to have a huge challenge from certain sniffy senior males who won't and don't like having a female boss. It's the oldest cliche in the Whitehall book. Senior male civil servants who are members of men-only clubs can never quite come to terms with having a woman in charge. Of course that's a massive generalisation. But I can envisage Priti Patel facing a battle every day to persuade her male top advisers to get the hell on with doing what SHE wants done and not what THEY want done. Women at the top of their political careers in government always face the risk of sexism. Priti Patel I bet has this every day, and Amber Rudd, a former Home Secretary, probably faced the same problem. And I'm sure Theresa May did when she was Home Secretary. Maggie Thatcher, who was never Home Secretary, was the exception. She was as tough as nails and men quailed before her, but a lot of very senior chaps, British and foreign, fell for her. Maggie could be quite flirtatious and men always adored that! I somehow doubt Priti Patel is flirtatious and I'm sure neither Amber Rudd nor Theresa May ventured down that path. They just battled with men every day and got angry when the male species smiled patronisingly and failed to carry out their orders. Remember that wonderful moment when Mrs May confronted the most patronising politician of all, Jean Claude Juncker, when president of the European Commission, and ticked him off in public after he had accused her of being "nebulous". Anyway, sexism is alive and well in the corridors of Whitehall and Mrs Patel will have to struggle with it while she remains in government whether at the Home Offie or elsewhere. But the latest development about MI5 bosses refusing to tell her everything she needs to know because they don't think she's capable of listening or understanding, that's a bit of bitchy sexism gone too far. MI5 is not some private organisation that does what it wants. It's fully accountable to parliament and to its political boss, the Home Secretary. I suppose in the most extreme of cases, if MI5 had evidence that the Home Secretary was a Russian agent or was working for Beijing, they might hesitate about revealing all, but then they would have already passed on their "evidence" in a special file to the Prime Minister. Other than that, no MI5 director-general nor his senior staff would hold back what the Home Secretary of the day needed to know and I am absolutely sure that the current one, Sir Andrew Parker, tells Mrs Patel everything she needs to know. How can she do her job properly if she is kept in ignorance of key intelligence material? So I think this particular spicy story is based on the briefing of a very bitchy individual who doesn't like the Home Secretary or has taken against her for some reason or who thinks he (she?) is far superior to Mrs Patel and wants to keep her in her place. The only thing that the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ DO hold back are operational details, including sensitive sources, unless there is a specific and urgent political requirement to pass this sort of stuff on. Some home secretaries and foreign secretaries have had the attitude: "Well don't give me the details, just the broad brush stuff." I don't know how Mrs Patel works when she chats to Sir Andrew Parker. But if, for example, she asks him to tell her exactly how an MI5 surveillance team discovered a Russian spy working in a defence company, he probably would be reluctant to give precise chapter and verse. But that wouldn't mean he was withholding vital intelligence. That's the way the intelligence services work, and Mrs Patel will be treated no different from any of her predecessors. I remember the same sort of stories were appearing in Washington about the US intelligence services and Donald Trump. It was claimed the president wasn't being told anything sensitive because the intelligence services hated him and distrusted him. That was nonsense too. Trump, like all his predecessors, receives his daily intelligence brief which spells out all the carefully analysed intelligence picked up by the 17 agencies but without going into operational detail. Whether Trump takes any notice of the presidential briefs is another matter, but he gets everything he should get whether he likes it or not.