British foreign secretary David Miliband yesterday defended the next head of MI6 after details of his personal life were posted on social networking website Facebook.
Pictures and private details of Sir John Sawers, who will take on the post in November, were revealed on an easily accessible profile page of his wife, Lady Shelley Sawers. The page was taken down after the Mail on Sundayinformed the Foreign Office.
Mr Miliband told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show: “What are you leading the news with that . . . The fact that there’s a picture that the head of the MI6 goes swimming . . . It is not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks . . . let’s grow up.”
The Liberal Democrats called for an inquiry into the matter, while senior Tory MP Patrick Mercer said Sir John had left himself open to blackmail.
But Mr Miliband denied that national security had been compromised, saying it was “no state secret” that the MI6 chief wore Speedos on holiday.
Shadow business secretary Ken Clarke said the UK’s enemies “did not wholly rely on the Mail on Sunday and Facebook for their information”. Former prime minister Sir John Major also described the issue as “overblown”.
Lady Sawers disclosed details including the location of the London flat used by the couple, and the whereabouts of their three children and of Sir John's parents, the Mail on Sundayreported.
She put no privacy protection on her account, allowing any of Facebook’s 200 million users in the open-access “London” network to see the entries. Lady Sawers’s half-brother, Hugo Haig-Thomas, a former diplomat, was said to be among those featured in family photographs on Facebook.
Mr Haig-Thomas was an associate and researcher for historian David Irving, who was jailed for three years in Austria in 2006 after pleading guilty to Holocaust denial, the paper reported.
Mr Clarke dismissed the potential security implications of the information – which he said he was certain Britain’s enemies would have already known. – (PA)