How Lady Justice Hallett stood up to secretive MI5

What do Muhammad Ali and Lady Justice Hallett who presided over the inquest into the 7/7 bombings have in common? They both dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Similar in looks to the Hollywood actress Glenn Close, and with the elegantly dry forensic style of the French finance minister Christine Lagarde, she has proved more than a match for the public sector vested interests keen to avoid scrutiny about their performance on 7/7 - the day of the London Tube bombings in 2005.Her no-holds-barred report will make the UK a safer place. At a stroke she has made a number of public bodies including the police, the emergency services and MI5 much more accountable to the taxpayers who pay for them.They have 56 days, including the day on which they receive the report, to respond in writing to her recommendations.Much of the report looks at how the emergency services could improve their shambolic response next time round. But the first third deals with 'preventability' - ­ whether MI5 could have headed the bombers off at the pass before they struck.Broadly, she accepts that given the number and seriousness of the threats faced by MI5 in the run-up to the bombings they would not have been able to stop them. There was too much other bad stuff going down and not enough spooks to go round. But she is still uneasy."I am concerned about the fact that the Security Service's other commitments prevented a more intense investigation of a possible terrorist, who made long and suspicious journeys to meet known terrorists at a time when they were obviously planning an attack."Quite. Although she's just sharpening the stiletto at this point. MI5 used every legal means to avoid public scrutiny on their shortcomings.One of the most powerful arguments made by their top legal team (paid for by us, the taxpayers) was that there was no need for an inquest to look at 'preventability' because this had already been done by Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC).But during the proceedings it emerged that there were "inaccuracies" in what MI5 had told the ISC, including "confusion" about surveillance photographs."I remain concerned that in 2010, I was addressed on the basis that a statutory body had conducted, effectively, the very exercise upon which I was being asked to embark. I then discovered that the statutory body, the ISC, may have been inadvertently misled and thus that its reports may not have sufficiently addressed some of the central issues before it."Ouch!Among those surveillance photographs was an image that will remain one of the most haunting what-ifs of the whole affair.One of the best chances MI5 had of getting on the trail of two of the bombers came in April 2004 when a surveillance photograph of Mohamed Siddique Khan (the Edgware Road bomber) and Shehzad Tanweer (the Aldgate bomber) was shown to an informant then in US custody in New York who had trained with both men the previous year at an al-Qaeda camp in Malakand, in Pakistan's remote and mountainous North West Frontier.The surveillance photograph, taken in a branch of Burger King off the M1, was in colour and of high quality. But the version faxed to the Americans was in black and white and so heavily cropped that neither man was recognisable. As you would expect, according to MI5 this was for security reasons. Who knows what might have happened if the informant had identified them as trained al-Qaeda men?In one of the most sarcastic exchanges of the inquest, Hallett's own counsel, Hugo Keith QC (who represented the Queen at the inquest into Diana, Princess of Wales), remarked to a senior MI5 officer giving evidence: "I am bound to observe, if you will forgive me, that one of my children could have done a better job of cropping that photograph."Lady Justice Hallett's efforts during the five-and-a-half months she presided over the inquest into 7/7 answer at least in part Juvenal's famous question Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodies? - Who will guard the guardians?Unlike Lord Hutton and Lord Butler, she has tried to. She deserves the remaining single vacancy in the Order of the Garter. ·