There is nothing to make one feel more insecure than having a head of the security services become the leader of a country – just ask the Russians.
The most recent is Egypt’s ex-General Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi. The austere former director of military intelligence was ‘elected’ in May 2014 in a landslide victory in which he gained a suspicious 93 per cent of the vote. These dictator-style numbers hide the fact that just 38 per cent of Egyptians bothered voting at all – well below the 51 per cent that in 2012 voted for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, the man el-Sisi so successfully plotted to overthrow.
