Cobra, the Government’s emergency committee for dealing with everything from bird flu to bombs, is a nonsensical system that drags people away from the serious job in hand to attend a crisis meeting.

It slows everything down, making it difficult to respond with immediacy to a crisis and can blur the lines between what’s operational and should be left to the police and other experts and what’s political.

Cobra meets in a windowless room in a fortified cellar beneath Whitehall, between the Houses of Parliament and Trafalgar Square. It’s linked by corridor to Downing Street, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Cabinet Office. Its dramatic name is an acronym for the venue: Cabinet Office Briefing Room A.

On a summer’s day it is a stifling place to be stuck in for several hours — especially when no one knows how to switch on the air-conditioning. The door sticks, whether or not you have the requisite security pass, and like all office kitchens there is milk turning sour in the fridge. It was usually the last place I wanted to be. There’s a bomb attack and all hell breaks loose. Everyone scrambles — emergency services, police, intelligence agencies, government departments — and rushes around trying to deal with it. But within an hour we’re pulled off the job and summoned to Cobra.

Of course a meeting should be called to co-ordinate the response, and the role of senior people is to detach themselves from the detail and plan ahead. But in my experience, Cobra fails to do that. The first time I attended, I was in awe. There were more knights there than at the King Arthur’s Round Table.

But as time went on, I found myself at meetings with a lot of people I’d never set eyes on. It was like being asked to play in a Cup Final with team-mates I had rarely trained with and who in some cases were playing out of position.

At the time of the Haymarket and Glasgow bombs in June 2007, for example, some of the key players had never even entered the Cobra room before, let alone chaired or participated in one of its meetings.

It was not unheard of to find key participants wandering the underground corridors, trying to find out where to go. I’m not talking about when, by a twist of fate, someone finds themselves dealing with a crisis on their first day in a job. That is rare. I’m talking about those who’ve been in a job for a while: surely they should familiarise themselves with Cobra as soon as they are in the role. It’s essential preparation.

Of course politics has a role to play, butpolitical considerations tended to dominate much of the thinking and decision-making when we should have been focused on the operational response to the crisis. Some people felt it more important to make a decision that put them in a good light than one that was truly for the good of the nation.

During the July 2007 crisis, I became increasingly frustrated with Cobra meetings. There was so much jockeying for position, and politics was always close to the surface. I wondered if politicians should be making these key decisions about terrorism — would you want the chief executive of a hospital to operate on you, or the surgeon?

Take Alistair Darling, who was then Transport Secretary. One minute he’s in a Cabinet meeting discussing Terminal 5, the next he’s in Cobra making decisions about protecting us from terrorism. He was on my case all the time, telling me the Underground needed to be reopened. And I kept asking: “Do you want me to secure the crime scenes and get the evidence to prosecute the terrorists, or do you want me to get the traffic moving?”

I remember wasting precious time during another meeting because we had to explain to a minister why we couldn’t take up their interesting idea of carrying out a forensic examination (gathering untouched evidence) at the same time as doing the clear-up operation (cleaning and clearing the site ready to reopen it to the public).

Sometimes the meetings worked but more often they didn’t. People would jockey for position in front of influential ministers, squabbling over their places at the table. At times Cobra appeared to be little more than a stage for those looking to impress — or a forum where government can be seen to be doing something. I wondered if it was just a photo-opportunity for elected members to be seen walking into the meeting and thus appearing to be in control.

Meanwhile, junior colleagues are out on the front line — some risking their lives — waiting for guidance. I question whether we (the law-enforcers, the emergency responders, the intelligence officers and the investigators) were taken seriously enough.

One Whitehall official told me after a particularly uncomfortable Cobra session meeting: “Mr Hayman, you must remember we are coming to the party with the brains, the cops are simply operational.”

Well, I disagree. It’s time to form a committee in which real experience is the criterion for membership — rather than that you happen to be the elected politician or his or her civil servants. We need something radically different. Leave the politicians and their cronies to get on with general policymaking; when it comes to life-and-death decisions we need a body separate from government with the real expertise and knowledge needed to deal with the crisis. This would ensure that the right group of experts comes together, thrashes out the operational imperatives, reach agreement and present specific operational plans to politicians and others at the main meeting.

Cobra could then meet, chaired by a minister or the Prime Minister, to deal not with operational planning but with the political repercussions. It’s surely better to have all the expert opinion sorted and focused in advance, than a free-for-all in which operational chiefs and politicians vie to get in their pennyworth of opinion.

— Terrorist Hunters by Andy Hayman with Margaret Gilmore is published by Bantam Press. RRP £18.99 and offer price £17.09. Books First: 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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