Like many people, I’ve been bemoaning the woke capture of our security services for some time. In 2024, Sir Richard Moore, then the head of MI6, resigned from the Garrick Club during the row over the admission of women, and earlier this year it emerged MI5 was excluding white people from registering interest for administrative roles due to the ‘under-representation’ of black, Asian and minority ethnic people. You would hope the recruitment of spies would be based on merit, given the vital role they play in protecting the national interest, but apparently diversity targets are more important.
Perhaps I never received the tap on the shoulder because I didn’t have an upper-class girlfriend
Then again, the old ‘tap on the shoulder’ method was far from perfect – and I don’t just say that because of all the communists who ended up working at ‘the Circus’ in the 1930s. Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, recently revealed he’d been approached while studying PPE at Oxford in the 1980s, but turned down the offer on the grounds that he ‘would have made a very bad spy’. Well, yes, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Falling off paddle boards and tumbling down Slip’n’Slides is unlikely to put the fear of God into Vladimir Putin. But wasn’t his unsuitability for espionage work bleedin’ obvious even back then?
I should confess to a smidgen of bitterness here, because I studied PPE at Oxford at around the same time, but was never tapped up. That may be due to the fact that I was an ‘out’ right-winger, and I don’t recall anyone of similar leanings ever being approached. It was explained to me years later by an ex-intelligence officer that they avoided recruiting people who were eager to become spies for ideological reasons, because ideologues have a tendency to change their minds. One minute they’re wearing yellow cords and waving Union flags; the next they’re leading protests outside US military bases.
That prompted an interesting discussion about whether patriotism itself is a form of ideology, with the former spy vehemently maintaining that it isn’t. Rather that, I suppose, than admitting that the informal ban on ideologues included people who love their country – although it might explain John le Carré’s intellectual journey. He seemed to be a patriotic young man, spying on left-wing students at Oxford after National Service in the Intelligence Corps, before joining MI5 as an intelligence officer in 1958. His first few books – by far and away his best – betrayed a healthy revulsion for the Cambridge spies, with George Smiley, the mole-hunter, embodying several quintessentially British virtues. But by the end of his life le Carré was churning out turgid left-wing agitprop and seemed to have as much dislike for the country of his birth as Kim Philby.
Alternatively, perhaps the reason I never received the tap on the shoulder is because I didn’t have an upper-class girlfriend. A close friend of mine who was approached at Cambridge relayed a bizarre conversation several stages into the process in which an MI6 officer asked him if he had a girlfriend and – ‘excuse the impertinence’ – what social class she belonged to.
When Richard responded that he did and she was middle class, the man told him that might be a problem. ‘If you do end up working for the service,’ he explained, ‘your job title is unlikely to reflect your importance. You might be the head of the regional directorate in Central America, but, officially you’d just be a lowly second secretary at the British High Commission in Belize. In our experience, the upper-class wives find this quite amusing and don’t mind the other embassy wives looking down their noses at them because of their husband’s lowly position in the office hierarchy. But the middle-class wives cannot cope and end up bragging about their husband’s real job. And that will never do.’
I did have an upper-class girlfriend in New York in the 1990s, but no cultural attaché at the British Consulate ever sidled up to me at a party and invited me to the office for a chat. Probably just as well, since that particular girl was eventually taken off my hands by my roommate, whose father was a deputy director of MI6. Caroline, whom I ended up marrying, is probably too middle class for the snobs at the secret service.
I too would have made a hopeless spy. Not because my patriotism has become any less fervent, but I would have struggled to hide my light under a bushel. It would have been me letting the embassy wives (and husbands) know what a big cheese I really was, not Caroline. Still, at least I would have been asked. I suspect the real reason I never was is because I didn’t even cross the recruiters’ radar.
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