Is Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, a pocket dictator? Is there no drop of liberalism in her veins, no concept of personal freedom, no fear of a repressive state? Or is she just another home secretary?  

This month she apparently felt obliged by dark forces beyond her control to add another weapon to the armoury of illiberal power.

She wants to record at her Cheltenham communications headquarters every mobile phone call, text and internet message of every Briton living.

This is close to madness.  

Home secretaries always speak with forked tongues.

Like Augustine they cry, “God make me liberal, but not yet, not while someone is watching.” They explain their latest click of the authoritarian ratchet by wailing, “You can’t imagine the pressure we were under.”

On leaving office they tend to patronise some civil rights charity, as if in penance.  

This year’s Privacy International survey put Britain bottom of the European league for surveillance and civil intrusion, a miserable state of affairs for the home of Magna Carta.  

Smith’s GCHQ “interception modernisation programme”, reportedly at a staggering £12 billion, will run alongside the ID card register, the driving licence centre, the numberplate recognition computer and the CCTV network in a “pentagon” of control. 

Its data bank will one day and for sure fuse with banking and employment records and that stumbling giant, the National Health Service personal records computer, each polluting the other with crashing terminals, uncorrectable inaccuracies and false trails.  

My Farewell Plea To MPs: Defend Liberty