Sir John Sawers is currently the UK's ambassador to the United Nations

Details about the personal life of the next head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, have been removed from Facebook.

The Mail on Sunday says his wife, Lady Shelley Sawers, put details about their children and the location of their flat on the social networking site.

The details, which also included holiday photographs, were removed after the paper contacted the Foreign Office.

Tory MP Patrick Mercer, chairman of the counter-terrorism sub-committee, said security could have been compromised.

He told the BBC: "It raises all sorts of worrying issues about the possibility of the personal life, in particular the location of flats, transport details, movement details, of an individual who is our most senior counter-terrorism officer abroad."

"A great deal of tax payers' money has been spent over the past several decades making sure he and his family are protected from security compromises. Well, it doesn't seem to be very relevant anymore, does it."

'Distressing and worrying'

He added: "It's distressing and worrying therefore that these sorts of details should be appearing in the public domain. I would have hoped these sort of mistakes would not have been made by people like that."

Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesman, Edward Davey, tells the paper he wants Gordon Brown to launch an inquiry into whether the disclosures have compromised Sir John's ability to take up his MI6 post.

Lady Sawers had no Facebook privacy protection, the Mail on Sunday says

Sir John is currently the UK's ambassador to the United Nations and will take up his new post in November.

The Mail on Sunday says the information included the couple's friendships with senior diplomats and well-known actors including Moir Leslie from BBC Radio 4's The Archers.

Lady Sawers revealed the location of the London flat used by the couple and the whereabouts of their three grown-up children and of Sir John's parents, the paper added.

She had not imposed privacy protection on her account, allowing any of Facebook's 200 million users in the open-access "London" network to see the entries, the paper said.

Diplomatic postings

Sir John is due to replace Sir John Scarlett as head of the overseas Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

He has been the UK's Permanent Representative to the UN since 2007.

Before that he was political director at the Foreign Office, an envoy in Baghdad and a foreign affairs adviser to former prime minister Tony Blair.

In that post from 1999 to 2001 he was involved in the Kosovo conflict and Northern Ireland peace process.

Elsewhere overseas he worked in the British embassy in Washington, as an ambassador to Cairo and in South Africa from 1988 and 1991 when apartheid was ending.