Alan William John West, Baron West of Spithead, GCB, DSC, PC (born 21 April 1948) is a retired admiral of the Royal Navy and formerly, from June 2007 to May 2010, a Labour Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the British Home Office with responsibility for security and a security advisor to Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

[1] Promoted to lieutenant commander on 1 April 1978,[4] he attended the Royal Navy Staff College that year and then qualified as an advanced warfare officer before being posted to the destroyer HMS Norfolk in 1979.

In 1982 he laid a wreath off Norway, on the spot inside the Arctic Circle where the previous Ardent had been sunk in 1940 by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

[9] In 1986, while working on the Naval Staff at the Ministry of Defence, West left documents detailing large cuts to the Navy on a canal towpath.

[17] In a message to the Royal Navy, West said "We must continue the shift in emphasis away from measuring strength in terms of hull numbers and towards the delivery of military effects...

On 9 July 2007, he was created Baron West of Spithead, of Seaview in the County of Isle of Wight,[32] and took his seat in the House of Lords.

In November 2007 he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that he was not "totally convinced" of the need for 42-day detention (without trial) of terrorist suspects.

[35] In August 2014, West was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.

[37] In the wake of the June 2015 Sousse attack, he said Britain must step up the "propaganda war" against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

He also suggested the West should consider working with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, whom he qualified as a "loathsome man", while he called for Britain to consider joining the US in conducting air strikes against ISIL targets in Syria.

[40] In August 2016, he described the issues facing the MoD post-Brexit as a "perfect storm", insisting that there were great difficulties for the British military as a result of Britain's exit from the European Union.

[41] In April 2018, he expressed doubts as to whether Assad's government perpetrated the alleged Douma chemical attack and dismissed the White Helmets as having "a history of doing propaganda for the opposition forces in Syria".

On BBC Television News he said, "When I was Chief of Defence Intelligence I had huge pressure put on me politically to try and say that our bombing campaign in Bosnia was achieving all sorts of things which it wasn't.

[46] West's commentaries on foreign militaries, such as his assessment on the strategic weaknesses of Russia's armed forces, have been distributed by news agencies such as Times Radio.

[1] West said that during one overseas posting in a foreign country, the bugging of communications and accommodation was so widespread that Rosemary would say "Goodnight everybody" before turning off the light to sleep.