The country is under threat so why are British politicians being protected by supermarket security guards?

Almost weekly we have repeated warnings about Russia, Iran and other hostile states targeting people on British soil. Ministers tell us to stay alert. Police tell us the threat is real. Intelligence chiefs tell us that foreign states are recruiting proxies, watching targets and plotting violence here in Britain.

Then you look at how some of our elected officials are actually protected, and it starts to feel faintly ridiculous.

Walk around Westminster and you will see the full range. At one end, there are armed police officers, specialist vehicles, trained drivers, intelligence support and the full weight of the state.

At the other, there is someone in a suit with an SIA badge, a radio and a reassuring expression.

Over the past few weeks, my team has been looking closely at the protection given to politicians in this country. I expected to find gaps. I did not expect the gaps to be quite this wide.

The threats are not new. Jo Cox was murdered in 2016. PC Keith Palmer was killed defending Parliament in 2017. Sir David Amess was murdered at his own constituency surgery in 2021.

Politicians in Britain have been living with real danger for years. What shocked me was the sheer inconsistency in the response.

Some ministers get specialist police protection. Cops with serious training, firearms, police powers, secure communications, access to intelligence and the authority to act when something goes wrong.

Others, including people holding genuinely senior office, get a private contractor whose main formal qualification is an SIA close protection licence.

The letters SIA are supposed to reassure us. They sound official. They sound tactical. They sound like something you'd read on the side of a black van in a television drama.

In reality, the Security Industry Authority regulates the private security industry. It licenses everyone from nightclub bouncers to the store detectives standing beside the self-checkouts at your local supermarket.

A close protection licence involves more training than a basic security licence, of course it does. But it still gives the holder no police powers, no automatic access to intelligence and no authority beyond that available to any other civilian.

It is permission to work. That is all. Since 2022, the close protection qualification has required a minimum of 194 guided learning hours over roughly 18 days. Courses are advertised for somewhere between £2,000 and £3,500.

Eighteen days...

We are talking about people who may be entrusted with the lives of cabinet ministers, senior MPs and other public figures facing threats from terrorists, extremists or hostile states. Yet the basic entry point can be completed in less time than some people spend on a long holiday.

Complete the course, pass the assessments, clear the checks, pay for the licence. You can now legally work as a close protection operative.

What you do not get is experience. You don’t get years of learning how crowds behave, how hostile surveillance looks, or how somebody moves in the seconds before they attack.

You don’t get the judgement that comes from dealing with real violence. You do not learn, in a fortnight, how you will react when someone produces a knife in a packed room and everybody starts screaming.

An NVQ-style qualification is no replacement for real world experience. It never has been and it never will be.

There are very good people working in private security. Some are former police officers. Some are former military. Some have spent years doing difficult, dangerous work. But that rather proves the point. They are good because of what they did before they got the badge. The badge itself tells you almost nothing.

It does not tell you whether the person wearing it has ever protected anyone before. It does not tell you whether they have worked in a hostile environment. It does not tell you whether they can recognise a genuine threat, manage an evacuation, or deal with a catastrophic bleed.

It tells you they met the minimum legal standard. Minimum is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

This is the disease running through so much public sector contracting. Nobody asks whether the protection is actually good enough. They ask whether the paperwork is in order. There is a real reluctance to tackle this.

Does the contractor have the right licence? Yes. Has the box been ticked? Yes.

Is the minister accompanied by someone wearing an earpiece? Yes.

Excellent. Job done.

Except it is not job done. It's security theatre. Worse than that, it is dangerous, because it gives the impression that somebody is protected when they may simply be accompanied.

There is a difference between a bodyguard and a witness.

Some of the people protecting politicians have no stab vest, no protective equipment, not so much as a taser, and no legal authority to do anything beyond what any member of the public could do. They may have a radio. I would quite like to know who is on the other end.

Perhaps it links to a control room. Perhaps it links to another contractor. Perhaps the plan, in the end, is to press a panic button, call 999 and explain what has just happened.

By then, of course, something has already happened. A radio is not protection. A panic button is not protection. An earpiece is not experience.

Good protective security is mostly about prevention. I understand that. The best intervention is the one that never has to happen. Routes are checked. Venues are assessed. Suspicious behaviour is spotted early. The person being protected is moved before the threat gets close. That is how it should work.

But prevention is not magic. Sometimes the intelligence is incomplete. Sometimes the attacker has not spent a week on surveillance. Sometimes someone simply decides, in the moment, to pull out a knife.

At that point, the paperwork no longer matters. What matters is what the person standing beside the politician can actually do in the next three seconds. What tools and training they have.

Can they recognise the threat. Can they get the politician out. Can they physically intervene and stop the knife. Can they treat a serious wound. Can they direct police to the right place.

Or are they simply the nearest person with a radio.

One of the laziest arguments about political security is that politicians enjoy it. In my experience, plenty do not. I have spoken to politicians who dislike having protection intensely: who don't like being cut off from people, who don't like the way it changes how they move through a city, who would rather get on with the job normally.

And let’s face it, nobody wants some chap standing outside the toilet door the whole time you’re inside. But, some of them need it anyway, and that is the point.

Protection is not always a perk demanded by someone with an inflated sense of their own importance. Sometimes it is imposed because the threat is real. Most politicians want to walk into cafes, knock on doors, hold surgeries and get on trains without an officer checking the platform first. Security gets in the way of that. It makes their world smaller. Although when done well, it doesn’t have to.

And, wanting a normal life does not make the threat disappear. Where the intelligence says someone is at risk, the state has a duty to protect them properly, whether they enjoy that protection or not.

At the other end of the scale, I have spoken to people facing serious threats who could get little more than the phone number for their local neighbourhood PCSO.

The government tells us Britain faces terrorism, espionage, foreign interference and state-linked plots. A person becomes a target, and the answer is a phone number. Not a protection officer. Not a proper security assessment. Not a direct line to a specialist unit. A phone number for neighbourhood policing.

That is not protection. It is customer service.

And it exposes the real problem. Britain does not have one system for protecting politicians. It has several, stacked on top of each other with very little consistency between them.

At the top, armed specialist officers and full protection teams. Below that, experienced private operators, but who currently have no legal ability to carry any tools. Below that, contractors who may have little more than the minimum qualification. And, for some, a phone number and the instruction to call if anything happens.

If anything happens. By then, it is too late.

Money has been spent, and nobody can say otherwise. Security funding for MPs rose sharply after Jo Cox was murdered, from roughly £171,000 a year before her death to over £4 million a year afterwards. Operation Bridger gives every MP a named police contact. Parliament has its own security department. The Metropolitan Police runs specialist teams dealing with threats to politicians. A further £31 million package was announced in 2024.

That is not nothing. But money spent on the wrong model does not fix the problem. It just makes the problem more expensive.

A named police contact is useful. It is not a bodyguard. A panic alarm is useful. It does not stop a knife. CCTV is great. It can provide very clear footage for the trial after you’re injured or killed.

The state keeps measuring the things it can count: how much money was spent, how many alarms were installed, how many officers were assigned, how many briefings were delivered. The only question that actually matters is whether the person is safer. If someone has been given a poorly equipped contractor with limited experience and no meaningful connection to police intelligence, the fact that the procurement process was followed correctly will be of little comfort.

Even the SIA appears to understand its qualifications need work. It launched a major review of licence-linked training in late 2025, examining whether close protection courses have enough depth, whether assessments need tightening, and whether training providers have the right expertise. New requirements are not expected to filter through until 2027.

That is a very British response. Launch a review. Hold a consultation. Publish a timetable. Wait. In the meantime, hand out the radios.

What is needed is a change in the law to enable a new tier of private close protection. A new higher SIA qualification. A enhanced Close Protection qualification. A legal framework that allows those that seek this new SIA enhanced tier to train properly and carry basic self defence items such as taser and yes, in some cases where the individuals have the required experience and the protected person warrants it, firearms, to allow proper protection. The state can never provide this to all those that truly need it, and so some kind of enhanced licencing framework for proper private security is now required. It's time, and the UK is one of the few countries that doesn’t allow private security to train to a higher standard and carry the appropriate defensive items. That needs to change.

We still treat security as a dirty word in British politics. Politicians do not want to look frightened. Officials worry about the optics. The stiff upper lip is maintained. People fear that visible protection creates distance between MPs and the public. They fear it might be admitting we have a bigger problem. I understand those concerns. Nobody wants constituency surgeries to look like airport security. Nobody wants every backbench MP surrounded by eight armed officers, three vehicles and a residential security team. Not everybody needs that. But one or two people with enough skills and training to carry a taser would seem sensible and proportionate. Because that could stop a knife.

Assess the threat. Make the response proportionate. But there is a huge difference between saying not every MP needs full armed protection, and deciding that a senior minister can make do with someone whose entire formal training lasted 18 days. There is a middle ground. Space for a new enhanced tier with legal ability to carry something that would make a difference.

I work in central London. I regularly see security teams protecting entertainers, celebrities, executives and private clients. Many of those details are properly staffed and properly equipped, with trained drivers, advance officers and experienced protection teams who clearly know what they are doing. Most are protecting people who carry a fraction of the responsibility a cabinet minister does.

If an entertainer has a better security operation than a Secretary of State, something has gone badly wrong with our priorities.

This is not an attack on every private security officer. It is an attack on a state that chooses the minimum standard, buys it from a contractor, and then calls it protection. It's time to call out the state to allow properly qualified private contractors willing to do a higher level of training to provide proper security with the tools at their disposal to do the job correctly.

A basic close protection licence should be the start of a career. It should not be the only qualification needed to guard one of the great offices of state. We need an enhanced close protection licence tier with real tools and training.

Where the threat justifies a bodyguard, that person should have proper vetting, proven experience, serious medical training, protective equipment, secure communications and a direct link to police intelligence and response. They should be tested regularly. They should be equipped to protect, not simply to walk alongside.

Britain cannot spend the morning warning about terrorists, Iranian plots and Russian proxies, then spend the afternoon sending senior politicians into crowds with a civilian contractor, a panic button and the phone number for the police. That is not proportionate security. It is protection bought on the cheap, built around the hope that nothing happens.

Given the threats we are being warned about, hope is not a strategy. And it certainly isn't a bodyguard.

We need to start taking politicians’ security seriously, with a national protection unit answerable to the Crown, not to the same private contractor handing out tickets for staying too long in my local car park.

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