WE SHOULD always be doubly suspicious when unelected state agents — generals, mandarins, spooks — make politically charged speeches.

Too often such interventions are treated as neutral, when the same comments from a politician would rightly be seen as partisan.

This applies to this week’s speech by MI5 boss Ken McCallum, in which he claims — the evidence is, of course, too sensitive to share — that Russia and Iran are bent on causing “mayhem” on our streets.

Britain’s security services have a track record of publicising bogus evidence for political reasons — most notoriously with MI6’s claims of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.

MI5 assisted the Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi to travel to and from Libya to fight for the overthrow of Colonel Gadaffi: this sponsorship of jihadists cost 22 people their lives. Nobody should imagine protecting us means more to MI5 than the service of British state policy.

What state policy is McCallum pushing now? Softening up public opinion for direct conflict — we are already, through our comprehensive support for Ukraine and Israel, in indirect conflict — with Russia and Iran? These could prove wars still more cataclysmic than Iraq.

Or perhaps to use the old liberal bogeymen, foreign puppetmasters, to explain home-grown fascist riots (he mentioned arson) — which gets the government off the hook when it comes to tackling the drivers of far-right hate in our society — or indeed the peaceful mobilisations for Palestine, which many in the corridors of power would still like to ban.

Either way, we should take MI5’s pronouncement with several lorryloads of salt.