Charles Farr

Early life and education Farr was educated at Monkton Combe School, then an all-boys private boarding school in Somerset. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he completed a DPhil in the philosophy of aesthetics.

Career Farr worked for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in southern Africa and the Middle East. The report provoked protests from various groups which had been identified in the Quilliam briefing as sympathetic or supportive of Islamist extremism, and was described as "McCarthyite" by Inayat Bunglawala, chairman of Muslims4Uk and Fatima Khan, vice-chair of the Muslim Safety Forum. Bunglawala added: "In effect, Quilliam – a body funded very generously by the government through Prevent – are attempting to set themselves up as arbiters of who is and is not an acceptable Muslim." This was characterised in the media as an explanation of how the security services can legally monitor "Facebook, Google and Twitter" usage by UK citizens.

In June 2014, there was a very public argument between the Home Office and Department for Education about alleged extremism in Birmingham schools. The Prime Minister David Cameron intervened and forced Education Secretary Michael Gove to apologise to Farr for briefings critical of him which appeared on the front page of The Times.

On 23 November 2015, Farr was announced as the next Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The JIC is part of the Cabinet Office.

Personality In a profile of Farr, The Guardian newspaper said that: The problem for some is that Farr is not a politician, answerable to parliament, and is certainly not a conventional civil servant. Instead, critics say, he has never stopped acting like a spy. The man who should be assessing recommendations from the security services and offering advice to policymakers, they say, behaves instead like MI6's man in government, driving forward policies that suit his hawkish agenda. In the 2010 New Year Honours, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in recognition of his service as a Counsellor in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Farr received a Knighthood shortly before his death from cancer, aged 59.