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But 'Securing the State' by Sir David Omand was a much better bet. Affordable even. Partly because it is a rather cheaply produced book from India. Sufficiently cheap that the Sienese fresco which Omand uses as a framing device for the book is reproduced in diagrammatic rather than colour photographic form.

Omand is a well educated person. The sort of person who likes to introduce quotes ancient and modern into his text. So we learn, for example, that Robert Frost wrote a poem involving the idea that good fences make for good neighbours. He is also very well qualified to write about state security having worked his way up through the ranks of the securocrats of the UK and served at the very top of the tree for quite some years. But, sadly, he is not a writer and he has not been well served by his publishers. The text smells of Powerpoint, is stodgy and repeats itself - sometimes word for word. But despite these last faults, I learned a lot from this book.

I should perhaps say that I started from the lefty/libertarian position that gentlemen do not read each others' mail and that public business should be conducted in public. This despite the appalling record of the Soviets in such matters.

So I learn from Omand, that states spy on each other because they do not trust each other and that states spy on their own citizens because of the criminals lurking in their midst. Criminals who are determined, dangerous and devious and who are hard to root out by other means. Including here terrorists both of the religious and the animal rights persuasions. And the own goal of the criminals who make a living out of those drugs which we elect to make illegal. Both sorts of spying entail secrets and secrecy, whence grows a large part of the secret (surveillance) state.

He is very keen on how to organise the secret state. And on how to join the secret state up with the rest of the state. Such as the manager of a key warehouse in the Tesco Corporation, loss of which would bring half the country to its knees in days. All of which is clearly a problem as he gives it a lot of air time.

He is also keen on the moral hazards involved in work of this sort, on proportionality and on the difficulty of carrying the public with it. Part of his answer is that all the sharp end work in this country is done by the police. They might be acting on information from the secret squirrels but it is the police, with their separate organisation and accountability who do the dirty work. Another part is that we have various trusted public figures, neither secret squirrels nor part of government themselves, with oversight of secret affairs. Another part is that secret affairs might be dirty and secret but they are, nevertheless, now subject to the rule of law. They are no longer arbitrary, covered only by the Royal Prerogative.

Another topic is the international character of much of the crime we are talking about. Dealing with it has to be an international venture. So a lot of terrorism is mixed up with Pakistan and dealing with that has to involve dealing with the Pakistani security services. We cannot afford to say that their standards - say on the treatment of their detainees - are not ours and so we cannot work with them.

And lastly, it is all very difficult. Despite all the money and all the secrets, mistakes will be made and the bad people will get through, from time to time. I offer a simple example, drawn from the fiction of Houellebecq. One has a horrible crime, involving the use of a sort of laser powered carving knife, the sort of thing a surgeon might use for an amputation. I assume that such things really exist. So the police write to the two or three hundred organisations in France who have such a thing to ask whether they have one missing. Generally to rattle the cage a bit. One of the organisations is a clinic in Cannes, which submits a nil response. Some years later it turns out that the owner of this clinic is the villain of the piece and that his clinic is a cosmetic surgery outfit which had no need of such a carving knife. So on a good day it might have occurred to whoever processed the nil return from this clinic that it was the wrong sort of clinic. But is it reasonable to expect the average busy detective to spot such a thing?

The lesson being that the bad people can slip through fine nets. So they had better be fairly fine to keep the level of risk reasonable.