Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, will not face contempt of court proceedings over false information supplied to London’s High Court, judges ruled on Tuesday.
The court said it would not be in the public interest to start contempt proceedings against any individual officer, against the agency’s director general, or against MI5 itself. The ruling brings to a close, for now, a case that has raised uncomfortable questions about candour by the security service towards the courts.
The dispute centres on a man referred to in court only as Agent X, a covert human intelligence source who was also a right-wing extremist. A BBC investigation found that he had abused two former partners and had told one of them, known only as Beth, that he worked for MI5 in order to intimidate her.
When the attorney-general sought an injunction to stop the BBC from identifying the man, an MI5 witness told the court that the agency had relied on its longstanding policy of neither confirming nor denying the identities of its sources. In fact, an MI5 media officer had already confirmed to a BBC journalist that Agent X was a covert source, meaning the court — and a tribunal in which Beth had sued MI5 over her treatment — had been misled.
Giving a false statement to a court can in principle be punished as contempt, and the question before the High Court was whether proceedings should follow. The judges decided against that step, while leaving another route open: if police believed they had enough evidence of an offence such as misconduct in public office or perverting the course of justice, the matter could be passed to prosecutors.
MI5’s director general, Ken McCallum, who apologised last year after the misleading information came to light, repeated that apology on Tuesday. He said the judgment underlined the agency’s serious failures in the case and the additional distress they had caused to Beth.
The ruling does not erase the underlying findings. It decides only that contempt proceedings are not the right response in the public interest; any question of criminal liability would be a separate matter for police and prosecutors to assess on the evidence.
Sources: Reuters, “UK spy agency MI5 will not face contempt case for misleading evidence, court rules” (https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/uk-spy-agency-mi5-will-not-face-contempt-case-misleading-evidence-court-rules-2026-11-03/).
The featured image is a file photo of the Royal Courts of Justice in London, taken in April 2019, not of Tuesday’s ruling itself.
