Susanna White’s ‘Our Kind of Traitor’

I almost didn’t get round to seeing Susanna White’s Our Kind of Traitor. I find John le Carré’s post-Cold War novels unconvincing, as are their TV and film adaptations, for example, Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man and the recent BBC miniseries directed by Susanne Bier, The Night Manager. Le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor was published in 2010 and the 2016 film adaptation is credited to him and Hossein Amini (adapter and director of The Two Faces of January).

A London university lecturer, Perry Makepeace (Ewan McGregor), and his partner Gail (Naomie Harris) are on holiday in Marrakech and get taken up by a shady Russian oligarch, Dima (Stellan Skarsgård). Dima has fallen out with his fellow Mafiosi and needs a courier to convey intelligence to the SIS (MI6) whose help he wants. Hector (Damian Lewis), the SIS officer who takes on Makepeace’s case, has his own reasons for wanting Dima’s information which may incriminate individuals at the top of the British establishment including a former C (Head of SIS). Acting covertly within SIS, Hector organises an extraction of Dima and his family from Geneva, using Perry and Gail. Things don’t go exactly to plan, particularly for Dima, but at the end Perry unknowingly presents Hector with the MacGuffin which will provide what he needs after all.

For her film, White clearly didn’t have Bier’s budget but I doubt if more money would have made much difference to the creaky nature of the plot. That the main action of Our Kind of Traitor began and ended with scenes reminiscent of Homeland Season 5 (an ambush in a forest and an aircraft exploding after take-off) didn’t help when Lewis had been a stalwart of Seasons 1 to 3. As for the SIS (un)safe house in the French Alps – wouldn’t there have been any precautions taken about the subjects’ mobile phones, and wouldn’t phone coverage be highly unlikely there anyway? As for the bomb … . There are character implausibilities as well: Gail is supposed to be a big earner, yet is practising criminal law which is notoriously badly paid. Despite Hector’s line management having told him to desist, he somehow he manages to lay on resources for an operation in Switzerland of all places.

Le Carré’s work is usually regarded as being on a higher moral plane than, say, Len Deighton’s. Jake Kerridge recently listed in the Daily Telegraph “the twenty greatest spy novels of all time”, one being le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold:

When the young David Cornwell, an intelligence officer working for MI6, published his pseudonymous third novel, it was hailed as the first work of fiction to present the business of espionage as it really was. Le Carré himself would say that this was precisely what the book didn't do. As he once told me: "My service passed it, on the grounds it was not reflective of the truth, and gave away no secrets." It is better regarded as a great feat of imagination. Although le Carré has written many fine novels in the ensuing half-century, he has never quite recaptured anything as thrillingly transgressive as the cynicism of his anti-hero Leamas, who describes the rest of the Secret Service as "people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives".

So taking le Carré too literally is inadvisable, particularly in the case of Our Kind of Traitor, a thinnish film reworking of themes gone over before in the Cold War and after.

Bill Condon's ‘The Fifth Estate’

Being no admirer of Julian Assange, I didn't rush to see Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate when it first came out but recently took the opportunity to do so at the Barn Cinema at Dartington. The film is a docudrama about the emergence of WikiLeaks from the time of Assange's partnering with the German IT expert Daniel Berg in 2007 up to the release of classified US information sourced from Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning in 2010 and their association ending. Assange's seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 forms a postscript.

The film must have had a substantial budget because of the large cast, the number of extras, the CGI and the rapid changes of locale. No location seemed to be used more than twice, usually once, and the numerous sets ranged from Berlin squats to Air Force One (or maybe Two or Three), the action not staying in any of them for long. Benedict Cumberbatch turned in a convincing Assange, and, although the film is a male-dominated nerd and journo fest, it provided a couple of strong supporting roles for Alicia Vikander (Queen Caroline in Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair) as Berg’s long-suffering girlfriend and Laura Linney as a senior level State Department staffer having to pick up the pieces after the Manning disclosures. Peter Capaldi, who is irrevocably the foul-mouthed spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker, from The Thick of It for UK TV audiences (the ones who will see this film anyway) until he becomes Dr Who, is cast as Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.

Unfortunately, in terms of allowing comparisons to be made, the real Rusbridger has been on UK TV recently defending his paper's role in handling the material removed from NSA by Edward Snowden. Snowden and the journalist Glen Greenwald have followed the model Assange pioneered with the initial release of the Manning material by cooperating with mainstream media outlets in the form of the Washington Post (vice the New York Times), the Guardian and Der Spiegel.

Snowden and Co have put material into the public domain of much higher classification than Manning was able to access. The US designation for this stuff is TS/SCI - Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information. Years ago such items might be confined to just a few documents, knowledge of whose existence, let alone accessibility, would be confined to select individuals. But now that kind of data is held on globalised IT systems and system administrators set access permissions for individual users. However, an old question arises: who administers the administrators?

When I last wrote about Snowden, on the basis of the information which had been released at that time (July), I affected what now seems too blasé a view. Earlier this month the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC) took evidence from Sir Iain Lobban, Director, Government Communication Headquarters, Mr Andrew Parker, Director General, Security Service and Sir John Sawers, Chief, Secret Intelligence Service. (Interestingly the second and third of these men had studied science at university level, but not the first, whose responsibilities, one imagines, are the most technological). A transcript of their uncorrected evidence is available, and the impact of the Snowden release is discussed on pages 16 to 18. Sawers mentions Snowden specifically:

… What I can tell you is that the leaks from Snowden have been very damaging. They have put our operations at risk. It is clear that our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee. Al-Qaeda is lapping it up ... and our own security has suffered as a consequence.

Further material appearing in Der Spiegel later in the month underlines his point.

In October, one of Lobban’s predecessors, Sir David Omand, had told The Times that the Snowden leaks “eclipse[s] the Cambridge spy ring as the most catastrophic loss suffered by British intelligence”.

“You have to distinguish between the original whistleblowing intent to get a debate going, which is a responsible thing to do, and the stealing of 58,000 top-secret British security documents and who knows how many American documents which is seriously, seriously damaging,” Sir David said. “The assumption the experts are working on is that all that information or almost all of it will now be in the hands of Moscow and Beijing. It’s the most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever, much worse than Burgess and MacLean in the 1950s.”

Omand chose two names from what are often referred to as the Cambridge Five and didn’t mention Kim Philby, although it was these three who finished up as Russian house guests. Whether there was a Fifth Man, and who he was, has been the subject of speculation, the most-fingered suspect being John Cairncross. If so, he was in some ways the most Snowden-like having worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2. But in those days, although primitive computers were in use they certainly weren’t networked, and the only media he could remove was paperwork taken from only one “compartment”, in the form of one of the famous Bletchley Huts.

And who was the Fourth Man? Sir Anthony Blunt made his confession in 1964 in exchange for immunity from prosecution, though the truth (or some of it) would emerge in public in 1979. The Security Service interrogated Blunt because in 1963 an American, Michael Whitney Straight, had told the FBI that he had been a recruiter for Soviet intelligence at Cambridge in the 1930s. Straight was the son of Willard Straight and Dorothy Payne Whitney. Willard died in the Spanish flu epidemic after World War 1. Dorothy remarried and with her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, came to SW England and in 1925 purchased Dartington Hall in Devon (SW England) where Michael Straight would finish his schooling. Which means this post ends geographically back where it started.


UPDATE 4 DECEMBER 

“The film must have had a substantial budget because of the large cast, the number of extras, the CGI and the rapid changes of locale.” 

But nonetheless it seems to have been the biggest cinematic turkey of 2013, according to Forbes’ Dorothy Pomerantz. The Fifth Estate has earned only $6 million at the box office globally on its $28 million budget, on top of which there will have been marketing costs of as much as $25 million. On average studios receive about 50% of the box office takings, so Dreamworks would be about $25 million down.

Cockerell’s Life of Johnson

On Monday 26th March BBC2 showed Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, a one-hour documentary by Michael Cockerell, the latest in his long series of political profiles. It had been preceded by an interview on Sunday 25th’s The Andrew Marr Show, hosted in absentia by Eddie Mair. The interview was a little abrasive but Mair regularly lurches from the whimsical to the brusque as host of BBC Radio 4’s PM programme. Having revisited some of Johnson’s less glorious moments, Mair asked:

Aren’t you in fact, making up quotes, lying to your party leader, wanting to be part of someone being physically assaulted? You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?

Not so surprising then that the interview generated nearly 600 complaints to the BBC, according to the Press Association.

Before transmission Cockerell provided an account of the making of his programme to the Daily Mail and afterwards he discussed it with Johnson’s Deputy Mayor of London, Munira Mirza on BBC2’s Daily Politics. Having read two biographies (see below) of Boris Johnson, I didn’t feel I learnt very much from The Irresistible Rise. Cockerell seemed to have succumbed to the charm of the Johnson clan and their never-before-seen (or even developed according to Cockerell) home cine-films. The time spent on Johnson’s childhood and days at Eton and Oxford was at the price of only a cursory examination of his time as Mayor of London, and even that emphasised the 2012 Olympics. Whether the “Boris bikes” (Barclays Cycle Hire) have been as good for Londoners as for Barclays, and the value of the “cable car” (Emirates Air Line) never came up.

I did notice that Cockerell referred to Boris’s father, Stanley Johnson’s involvement with MI6 (SIS) which sent me back to the biographies. Andrew Gimson in Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson (2006 and 2012) said:

Stanley took a second degree in agricultural economics, and in the spring of 1965 he also joined the Foreign Office from which he resigned in the autumn of the same year, because ‘by then the World Bank had come through with an offer for me to go to Washington’. (page 14).

Whereas Sonia Purnell in Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition (2012) was slightly more explicit:

… [Stanley] struggled to launch a career that would put food on the table for his new family. He had tried his hand unsuccessfully at teaching and studying for a Masters in Agricultural Economics before apparently being recruited as a spy and offered, according to his own account, ‘the most intensive training in clandestine techniques known to man’. (Chapter 1)

Purnell referenced Johnson père’s Stanley I Presume, (2009) which I haven’t read and probably won’t. However, he seems to be quite open about his time in SIS, for example, to the Exeter and District (Devon, SW England) branch of the English Speaking Union in February 2012:

Stanley Johnson, our guest speaker, gave a highly entertaining account of his life from his days at Sherborne School and Exeter College, Oxford, to the present day. After leaving school he travelled alone through South America and as an undergraduate rode 4,000 miles on a motorcycle along the Marco Polo route to Afghanistan. Having won a poetry prize at Oxford and being award a Harkness Fellowship to the United States, Stanley embarked on a fascinating career, training as a spy with MI6, working at the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union.

In the 2005 general election Stanley stood unsuccessfully as Conservative candidate for the nearby Teignbridge constituency.

Reaction in the media to Johnson’s BBC double exposure suggests that nothing much has actually changed - the enthusiasts’ faith didn’t waiver and the unconvinced remained so. Usually the London Evening Standard is firmly enthusiastic, but Simon Jenkins sounded a sceptical note on 26 March:

London’s golden boy is soaring too near the sun. Boris Johnson has been flapping his Icarus wings on television these past two days in his frenetic bid for the Tory leadership. But Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show and last night’s documentary ignored his achievements — or lack of them — as London Mayor, to portray him as a variously flawed celebrity, oozing ambition. As the cameras glared and the questions grew hot, we saw the wax melt and the feathers start to fall. As they fell, I began to wonder whether any clear political ideology motivated England’s most famous “toff on the make”.

And in the same paper the next day, Andrew Neather was harsher:

He could fudge the awkward timing of his mayoral term finishing in 2016: I expect him to pick up a safe seat in 2015 (Paddy Power is offering odds on which one) and fob Londoners off with the fiction that he can do both jobs for a year. But as Johnson proved when he was an MP, he doesn’t have time for the hard graft or detail of the Commons. He is the opposite of a team player: he failed to build the alliances any leader needs, while proving an embarrassment even in the Westminster McJobs of shadow arts and higher education minister. And the sorts of failings that he manages to laugh off in City Hall, with its minimal media scrutiny and paucity of heavyweight opponents, would quickly ensnare him on the front benches.  

In fairness, some Conservative MPs realise this. He can expect a vigorous “Stop Boris” campaign. That will not prevent plenty of Tories backing his blond ambition: he is the darling of the party’s grassroots and media supporters. But if the Tories think Boris is the answer to their problems, they’re asking the wrong question.

On 28 March the Standard seemed to pull itself together behind its chosen one, with a front page story by Joe Murphy, Voters say Boris Johnson must lead Tories. Boris Johnson would smash Ed Miliband’s lead in the opinion polls if he took over as Conservative leader, an exclusive poll reveals today. Though the poll data below quoted by the Standard (LES) from a YouGov survey of 1,867 adults online from March 26-27 didn’t exactly bear this out:

According to the Standard “A Boris leadership would lure a third of Ukip supporters to the Tories from Nigel Farage’s party” but there were no statistics provided to support this. Another poll of 1867 adults carried out by YouGov on the same dates and reported in the Sun showed the above “Headline Voting Intentions” (for which presumably those polled are not reminded of the current leadership’s names) with the now usual double figure Labour lead. In this poll within the 19% ‘Other’, 13% were Ukip, 4% SNP or Green and 1% other ‘Other’.

One of the shrewdest comments about Boris Johnson that I’ve read so far comes from Rod Liddle in the Spectator (30 March issue):

To give the bloke credit, at least Boris doesn’t pretend that he is One of Us, that he has had to struggle to achieve the position in life he now occupies — i.e., Mayor of London and heir to Downing Street. Because of course he hasn’t — and neither has Clegg, or Cameron, or Osborne or any of them; it has been a gentle and easy elision from top public school to Oxbridge to running the entire country, the passage eased by immense affluence, ready-made connections and, often enough, when all this has proved insufficient, a little bit of -Daddy’s help. This stuff, the Eton-Bullingdon-king-of-the-world business, bothers me, and it may well do for Boris in the end, when the people of the country have had enough of it all. It is not a good way to run a country, as indeed we are now seeing.  

But still, as a person, and shorn of all this stuff — if that’s possible — Boris is a more likeable politician than most we have around at the moment. If the chaotic buffoonery is all an act, then it is a good act, and an endearing act. He seems to me a less nasty piece of work than most of his Conservative political rivals.

What doesn’t seem to have appeared so far is an informed logical analysis of the timing issues. Presumably if the Tories are going to change leader before the 2015 election, they almost certainly have to do it by the end of this year. So how does Johnson get to be an MP before then? If he leaves it any later, he has to wait for the outcome of that election whether he stands as an MP in 2015 or not. 

If Cameron wins in 2015, or even continues in a coalition, he will almost certainly go when he chooses, say 2016 or 2017. And his successor will probably be someone who has played a part in achieving what looks at present to be an unlikely success and will almost certainly be someone who was an MP between 2010 and 2015.

If the Tories lose they will have to choose a leader who has the stamina to be an effective leader of the opposition to a Labour government, or Labour/ Lib Dem coalition, for five years and lead them to victory in 2020 (when Boris will be 56).

Can Johnson be both Mayor and MP at the same time? If he does try that on, would there be a backlash at the next mayoral election in 2016 or even in the London parliamentary seats in 2015? If he stands down as Mayor, who takes over - Munira Mirza? Or does there have to be a mayoral by-election which Labour could end up winning in the run-up to 2015? Mirza, who has a PhD in sociology, to judge from her showing on the Daily Politics (see above) could go far, but has a low profile so far.


UPDATE 2 June

Johnson's two biographers debate his chances in today's Independent on Sunday.

It was David Blunkett, Frank

Tuesday 25 September’s BBCR4 Today programme was enlivened by a revelation from the BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner. He surprised Jim Naughtie when he said that the Queen had told him she had been pretty upset that there was no way to arrest the radical cleric Abu Hamza and had spoken to the Home Secretary about it. The BBC later made a statement saying the conversation between Frank Gardner and the Queen should have remained private and that it 'deeply regretted' the breach of confidence. On Today Gardner said he couldn’t remember who had been Home Secretary at the time. Well, it seems to have been David Blunkett. The BBC’s statement included his response:

Former Home Secretary David Blunkett said "categorically" that the Queen never raised the issue of Abu Hamza with him. "Not surprisingly," he said, "because my views and attitude in relation to this individual were very well known."

I am a proud owner of a copy of The Blunkett Tapes – My Life in the Bear Pit, which I have described here previously as ‘monumental (and monumentally boring)’ - unkind given that it was a find in Poundland. But to make amends I have retrieved the following passage from January 2003:

I was consulted on, and agreed to, the high-risk strategy of the raid on the Finsbury Park mosque which took place at around two a.m. on Monday 20 January. We had been talking about it during the latter part of the previous week, discussing what to do and how to do it and taking advice on handling it from the Anti-Terrorist Branch. … I also attacked Abu Hamza [imam at the Finsbury Park mosque] and all his works when answering questions on the Statement on the previous Wednesday lunchtime. We had been to-ing and fro-ing on this for months and I had been desperate to get across that political backing was there for any action that was needed. There was going to be no political correctness.  

In replaying my tapes, this all seems so close to home. In February 2006 Abu Hamza was convicted of inciting racial hatred and soliciting murder, and many questions were asked about how long he had been active in our country, what had happened over the years from the mid-1990s, what advice had been received and what support had been given by politicians.  

Much has to remain private. Suffice it to say that there were occasions, like any human being, when I got it wrong. With Abu Hamza, I did not. On the one hand I was defending the security services and SO13 - which any Home Secretary would do - and on the other I was creating mayhem inside the system to see if we could get something done (with Tony [Blair]'s wholehearted support). As will be seen, we were to change the law to withdraw citizenship from those with dual citizenship in order to ensure that we could remove them from the country - judges permitting - and three years on, Abu Hamza had managed to manipulate the legal system to continue appealing against my decision at the time he was convicted in the British courts. (pages 436,437)

“Much has to remain private” – perhaps more than we might ever think.

Postmodernising the monarchy

The London Olympics Opening Ceremony on 27 July, masterminded by Danny Boyle, is generally judged to have been a great success, at least in the UK. How much of it people in the other 200-odd Olympics participating countries could understand, one has to wonder. Come to that, how much of the content did people here fail to appreciate, whether they were in the minority at the ceremony or in the millions watching on TV? Only when looking at the BBC website afterwards did I see the two yellow submarines.
 

Apparently French viewers were told that the image of a baby in the children’s hospital sequence was a tribute to the Scottish pioneer of obstetric ultrasound – I don’t think the BBC commentators said that. And apparently viewers in the US were left wondering whether Kenneth Branagh’s Isambard Kingdom Brunel was Abe Lincoln without the beard!

Last November I posted about the V&A Postmodernism exhibition, noting  US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous admission in 1964 that while he couldn’t define hard-core pornography, “I know it when I see it”, and that something similar could be said about postmodernism. Actually the V&A offered the following definition:

The word is notoriously difficult to define, though students may have some sense of its meaning: ironic self-awareness; style that includes historical reference; a turn to decoration and ornament. For the purposes of the show at the V&A, we have interpreted the term quite literally. Postmodernism is simply what happened right after the ‘death of modernism’ – that is, when modernism lost its position as the dominant style in European and American visual culture. The exhibition therefore looks at the moment when certain ideals about architecture and design – represented by Bauhaus objects, International Style buildings, simple and functional clothing, and the clarity of modern graphics and typography – were overthrown in favour of newly permissive, liberated, and expressive tendencies . Because postmodernism comes from this moment of rupture, it feels explosive even thirty years later. It opened up a broad but uncertain terrain, and designers and artists associated with the term tended to be interested in ambiguity and mediation (the reproduction and even the selling of things, not just the making of them).

To me the Opening Ceremony was certainly postmodern. It was full of “historical reference” but not too rigorous about it. For example, Brunel is best known as a mid-19th century railway constructor. But that was at the end of the industrial revolution which had begun about 1750 and had relied on the canal system initially – I didn’t see any bargees. There were plenty of “newly permissive, liberated, and expressive tendencies” – too much Britpop for some tastes possibly, along with the lesbian kisses. And the whole modern Olympiad is up to its armpits in the “selling of things” for sure.

But as a piece of “ambiguity”, the Opening Ceremony’s short film sequence Happy and Glorious (words from the UK and others’ national anthem) directed by Boyle is surely worth some consideration. Bond, played by Daniel Craig, is summoned to Buckingham Palace by Her Majesty (playing herself, HM) to escort her by helicopter to the Olympic Stadium. The helicopter passes over various London landmarks and then Bond and the Queen (played by stuntmen) appear to jump into the stadium with parachutes. As the film ended, HM appeared in the Stadium and formally opened the Games.

On Her Majesty's Service

Most people, once they had got over their amazement that the Queen was HM and not Helen Mirren, seemed to think that it was a wonderful example of the British laughing at themselves, not taking things too seriously and so on. Coincidentally, it was in the year of her Coronation (1953) that the first of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, Casino Royale, was published. The first Bond film, Dr No, appeared in 1962 followed by the sequence which has continued to generate billions ($ or £) in box office receipts. When Bond first appeared as a fictional character, his parent organisation, MI6 (or more properly the Secret Intelligence Service), was not officially acknowledged. So when in 1963 Fleming gave his tenth Bond novel the title On Her Majesty's Secret Service (filmed in 1969), the reference to the sovereign was firmly in the realm of fiction. In 1994 SIS ‘came in from the cold’ and now even has a website. Its Chief (reputedly known as ‘C’, eg in Sarah Helm’s Loyalty) has become a semi-public figure who occasionally gives discreet speeches to select gatherings and briefs notables as varied as Mitt Romney and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on aspects of SIS’s work. Bond and the Queen’s helicopter flight didn’t seem to go near Terry Farrell’s postmodernist Thames-side building at Vauxhall Cross which is now occupied by SIS. A popular subject for holiday snaps by London tourists, it is left somewhat worse for wear during the 23rd Bond film, Skyfall (UK release in October).

In recent Bond films the Chief’s role (called ‘M’) has been played by Judi Dench (above). Fortunately, the only queens Dench has played in her other films are Victoria and Elizabeth I, or it might all have become just a bit too confusingly postmodern for such a pre-modern arrangement as a constitutional monarchy.