Sharon and I are big fans of the spy series Slow Horses, which has just concluded its latest run on Apple TV. Gary Oldman presides over an outpost of MI5 near the Barbican in London, filled with ‘losers, misfits and boozers’ as Mick Jagger describes them in the theme song. 

But for those of us of advancing years, the pinnacles of spy entertainment on television are the BBC series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People, produced in 1979 and 1982 but still available to buy or stream. Both star the late Alec Guinness, a brilliant actor who was offered $150,000 for his 20-minute appearance as Obi Wan Kenobi in the first Star Wars movie – which he dismissed to friends as “fairy-tale rubbish” – but ended up making $95 million by negotiating a share of the box office take.

The two series are based on novels by John le Carré (real name David Cornwell), who I used to see from time to time walking the streets of Hampstead or taking coffee at Kenwood House at the top end of the Heath. There is a fantastic exhibition dedicated to his life and work currently running at the Bodleian, which I visited with a friend of his last week.

Cornwell read English at Lincoln College in the early 1950s (where, to his later regret, he spied on left-wing activists for MI5). He based George Smiley, the character played by Guinness, in part on his tutor the Rev Vivian Green. After leaving Oxford, Cornwell taught at Eton and then worked successively for MI5 and MI6 before becoming a full-time writer. His early novels were set during the Cold War, but following the fall of the Berlin Wall, he pivoted successfully to themes such as dubious drug companies and illegal arms traders (in ‘The Night Manager’, another fine TV adaptation).

Several former intelligence officers have successfully turned to fiction, among them Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and Stella Rimington. So too John Bingham, a colleague of Cornwell’s in MI5 and another inspiration for Smiley. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 in the early 1990s, disapproved of Le Carré’s writing (for emphasising distrust and treachery within the services) and suggested I read Alan Judd instead. 

I am reliably informed (and hardly surprised) that some current Trinity alumni work – or have worked – in the intelligence services. In earlier times, our most notable spook was probably John Cecil, a Roman Catholic priest who offered to spy on the Scots (while ostensibly working as a missionary) for Lord Burghley, chief adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. This was on condition that he would only be required to expose people who were engaged in subversion. As far as I am aware, he never wrote a novel.