Counterintelligence failures highest counter-intelligence officers, with severe effects on morale. Peter Wright, while later extremely controversial about revelations his 1987 book, "Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer", also developed techniques that allowed the UK to track numerous Soviet clandestine agents, and agents under diplomatic cover . James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA director of counterespionage and a poet himself, used T. S. Eliot's term "an infinity of mirrors" to describe the intricacies of agent to double agent to triple agent so common in counterespionage, with works describing him as paranoid, while others described him as brilliant. Perhaps the truth
Iain Wright come from the "usual suspects". One subsequently apologised, and another was expelled. During the campaign, Wright highlighted the Labour government's controversial policies for tackling anti-social behaviour as well as the Liberal Democrats' refusal to support such measures in Parliament and stressed his local origins, in contrast to his main rival's. On polling day (30 September 2004), Wright was elected with a majority of 2,033, reduced from Mandelson's majority of 14,571. The campaign was unusually long for British by elections, effectively having begun on 22 July (the day Peter Mandelson announced his intention to become a European Commissioner), seventy one days