Well, that's a fine how-do-you-do!

Spies lose licence to kill after drunken agent opens fire

Not ours. And since it's the Telegraph, you're thinking it's the British.

Nope, it's the Belgians.

The civilian agents of the Sûreté de l'Etat, the equivalent of Britain's MI5, are already among the most powerless intelligence operatives in the Western world, with no right even to tap telephones.

Now, they have had their handguns confiscated on the orders of their general administrator, Koen Dassen, a Belgian newspaper reported. A working group has been established to work out who is armed and why, after Mr Dassen realised that controls were "worse than approximate".

Tsk tsk.

They'll have to start thinking like MacGiver. Hopefully they've got a lot of magnesium lying around for those daring escapes they'll be doing so much more of.

Maybe I should send over my flint and steel.

Oh, why, you ask?

"For the moment, everybody has had to hand in their guns because we had this incident, in October or November last year, during which an agent shot at another."

Mrs Onkelinx was reportedly distressed that she only learnt of the incident, in which no one was hurt, from the press four months after it took place in Brussels.

The agent suspected of firing his gun in the general direction of his colleague's head was said by the media [? They knew this before his employers did? What is this? Euro-Affirmative Action?] to be an alcoholic with a dependency on anti-depressants.

I'm sure you'll be shocked to discover that I don't think this guy should have been employed in a gun carrying profession. I don't want people like this packin' anywhere.

I like their collectivist reaction: one nut goes off and they disarm all the sane trained, government agents. Actually, that's an idea!

Belgium's internal security arrangements have proved a source of frustration for their Western counterparts.

We had a Belgian in our school. He was a sorry excuse for a human. But, then, he's always said the same of me. I tried to like the guy, but I couldn't. I couldn't hate him even though he seemed to consider me his nemesis. He just seemed so cuddly.

[You realize that I hope he reads this.]