The new head of MI5 met senior MPs on the Commons Home Affairs Committee privately yesterday and was questioned on the agency’s counter-terrorist priorities.

Jonathan Evans, who took over the post of Director-General of MI5 from Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller in April, was the first head of the agency to appear before members of the committee as part of a formal inquiry.

In the early 1990s Dame Stella Rimington, one of Mr Evans’s predecessors, declined to give evidence to the committee on the advice of Kenneth Clarke, Home Secretary in John Major’s Government. But she arranged for six MPs on the committee to be taken by car to a restaurant for an informal meeting.

Mr Evans’s session with Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, and other selected members, was also informal. But he faced specific questions as part of the committee’s inquiry into the Government’s counter-terrorist proposals.

Mr Evans has already ventured into the public eye by making a speech in Manchester this month in which he revealed that MI5 was monitoring 2,000 individuals suspected of being involved in terrorist activities Mr Evans and other key figures in Whitehall involved in counter-terrorism are now working more closely than ever before on getting the message across to Muslim communities in Britain that they are not being specifically targeted, although renewed efforts are being made to prevent young Muslims from becoming radicalised.

A new section in the Home Office, called the Research Information and Communications Unit (Ricu), is focusing on how counter-terrorist policies are seen by the public and, in particular, by Muslims who might feel that they are being singled out unfairly.

Ricu’s aim is to forge a counter-argument to the propaganda peddled by al-Qaeda, and, thus, to try to persuade young Muslims to reject the extremists in their midst who are attempting to recruit them to become terrorists.

Although Mr Evans and the heads of MI6 and GCHQ, the Government’s signals intelligence agency, are left alone to pursue their covert operational objectives, Ricu is focusing on ensuring that everyone involved takes care of the language they use when talking about counter-terrorism issues.

The phrase “war on terror” has been dropped and no one now talks about a “battle of ideologies”. Admiral Lord West of Spithead, the Security Minister at the Home Office, spoke last week of terrorists being “criminals”, a word expected to be used more often in the future. One senior Whitehall source said: “For us to talk about a war on terror and military action and detention without charge is not going to have the right impact when what we’ re trying to do is to stop people in this country from becoming terrorists.”

Ministers are being drawn into the same search for the right language when referring to counter-terrorism. They are being advised to guard against using words that might translate negatively in Arabic or Urdu, providing ammunition for al-Qaeda propagandists.

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