MI5's first responsibility since its founding in 1909 has been to counter penetration of UK organisations by foreign intelligence services. It has gained a wider remit covering national security issues, much of its resources today being focussed on Northern Ireland and the fight against the IRA there and on the mainland.Director-General Stella Rimington sought to expand the Security Service's mandate to include organised crime, including drugs, immigration, and even benefit fraud. Despite police objections and fear that MI5 was not an appropriate organisation to be involved in these matters, Parliament supported the widening of their role.
The Security Service recently returned to the old headquarters it occupied a few decades ago in central London, not far from the Palace of Westminster. Today 1,850 people work for MI5, down from 2,150 a couple of years ago, and the agency has a budget of £200M. Stella Rimington, previous holder of the £95,000 post of Director-General, was replaced by Stephen Lander on 9 April 1996.
Information taken from http://www76.pair.com/spook/security/security.htm.
Listmember Tracy pointed out that she thought that perhaps Bob Larbey intended to use the MI5 as a reference to Dame Judi's portrayal of "M" in the James Bond movies. I checked the net and while Larbey may or may not have meant that, it WAS a version of Stella Rimmington that Dame Judi has been portraying in the series.I got the following from the Daily Telegraph Website at http://www.telegraph.co.uk by doing a search for Rimmington:
DAME STELLA GOES FROM MI5 CHIEF TO M&S SPY STELLA Rimington, the former Director-General of MI5, has revealed her new job: spying for the high street chain Marks & Spencer.
Dame Stella now deploying her 27 years' experience of top-level national security to help M&S eavesdrop on customers and find out exactly what they think of its goods. As a non-executive director of M&S since 1997, Dame Stella has introduced her version of customer surveillance to the chain's stores. She walks around the shop floor listening to what customers say and reports back to management.
A spokesman for M&S said: "She is interested in hearing what customers are saying and her eavesdropping is a first-hand way of getting some feedback." The job is one of three non-executive directorships that Dame Stella holds, the others being of a head-hunting company and of British Gas. After running an organisation of 2,000 employees with an annual budget of £150 million, Dame Stella has found life a little flat and unexciting since she left MI5 two years ago.
She said: "The security services occupied my whole life, and when I left it was a problem extracting my private life from it." She worked for the security services from 1969 to 1996, targeting communists and fascists and moving through the departments of counter-subversion and counter-espionage before becoming head of "F5", the branch responsible for combating terrorism. As a reforming Director-General in the 1990s, she was credited with cutting through the obsessive secrecy surrounding MI5, debunking myths of it being run by "fascist swine" and updating its image as a counter-terrorist organisation.
Dame Stella, now in her early sixties, was dubbed the "housewife superspy" by the tabloid press after MI5 decided to name, but not to supply a picture, of its new Director-General. Instead, a blurry long-lens photograph was snatched of an overcoat-wearing Dame Stella with shopping bags, and reprinted across newspaper front pages.
"That terrible snap," she said. "I'd always warned my daughter not to open the front door until she had checked who it was, but she forgot and called me down. There was a flash - which was actually quite worrying in my position, because you're never sure whether someone is trying to take your picture or shoot you."
In the last two Bond films she was portrayed as "M" by Dame Judi Dench. Dame Stella said she found the presentation "startling". It was, she said: "Really very good. Both my daughters said so. One even noted that she holds her hands the way I do."