I’ve met real spies: Slow Horses gets them just right
The MI5 drama Slow Horses brilliantly captures the truth about the British Security Service – it’s full of ordinary, flawed people doing extraordinary things.
Some years ago I met the cast of Slow Horses. Not the actors from the hit TV series (Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, et al), but the real people who operate in the shadows of MI5, Britain’s security service.
I was in MI5’s London headquarters to give a talk on my latest book, about a successful wartime deception carried out by British intelligence. After going through the rigmarole of security and having my telephone taken away, I delivered the lecture in a large glass atrium that would not have looked out of place in a Dallas hotel. The audience was at least one-third female. This is not the all-male, all-white organisation it once was (of which more later).
At the end of the talk, my minder asked: “Would you like to meet some of the agent runners?” This was like asking Jackson Lamb if he would like a drink. I would. You bet I would. In the lift as we ascended I noticed the day’s canteen menu printed in a frame: “Curry of the day or quinoa salad.”
I was ushered into a windowless meeting room and there, arranged around a conference table, were a dozen of the most unremarkable-looking people imaginable: three women in their 20s, a man in sports kit who seemed to have come straight from the gym, an elderly gent in a blazer with missing buttons, and a tiny, middle-aged Asian woman who said nothing at all. A burly middle-aged man with a forked grey beard and an ear stud introduced himself as “Duane” (not, surely, his real name). I recall a tattoo, but I may be making that up.
“What do you actually do, Duane?” I asked.
“I spend a lot of my time in very unpleasant pubs,” he said. “Talking to very unpleasant people, trying to persuade them to do things they don’t really want to do.”
He might have been a motorcycle gang leader. Or a barman. Or a banker on his day off. Or anything at all. This was true of every person in that room. They were each entirely ordinary, while doing something quite extraordinary: security service officers working under “natural cover”, infiltrating subversive, illegal and dangerous groups, recruiting informants and agents in the grimmest corners of terrorism, perversion and crime.
Agent-running can be exceptionally dangerous, particularly for those enlisted as agents. But if you sat next to any one of them on the bus, you would not remember them a minute later. And that, of course, is the point.
Unlike in Mick Herron’s superb novels or Will Smith’s brilliant adaptations, there is no section of the Security Service reserved for the “losers, misfits and boozers, hanging by their fingernails”. Why would there be? That would be like forming a separate military unit for soldiers who cannot shoot, march or think straight. The foul-mouthed, uncouth Jackson Lamb is imaginary. I sat beside “Duane” for an hour and he never once farted, belched, swore or lit up a cigarette.
There is no unit of “Dogs” standing by to beat up, kill and enforce the dictates of a ruthless leadership. (Though there are plenty of people expert at various forms of breaking, entering and eavesdropping: MI5 renegade Peter Wright was the first to expose how he and fellow security service technicians had “bugged and burgled” their way around London in the 1960s.)
The Diana Taverner character played by Scott Thomas – acidulous, manipulative and dripping disdain for the rejects of Slough House – in no way resembles the two women who have really led the agency in the past. Stella Rimington now writes spy thrillers. Eliza Manningham-Buller has a crisp “head girl” manner, but is one of the funniest and kindest people I know. She is also an expert shepherdess. The present chief is Ken McCallum, a state-educated, glintingly clever Scotsman who has done his time in unpleasant pubs talking to disagreeable and dangerous people.
But in one crucial, overriding respect, Slow Horses does capture some of the essence of the real Security Service. Ordinary, flawed, dedicated people doing their best to get it right in a perilous, murky world that often goes wrong.
With their bad habits, addictions, foibles and variable personal hygiene, the denizens of Slough House are just like the rest of us: the intelligence officer as human being, the everyspy.
The books and series take the James Bond myth of a sexy man in a sharp suit with a licence to kill and turn it on its head. If 007 is a fantasy in which the secret agent is invulnerable, unbeatable, a symbol of unattainable masculine strength, then Slow Horses offers the obverse vision in which everything is a bit crap, broken and British. We cheer for Lamb and his team not because they are perfect but because they are not; not because their duty is clear but because it isn’t.
In so doing it comes close to the real business of espionage, a messy, morally fraught world of high stakes in which nothing goes quite according to plan and the only commodity you can trust is trust. The comedy is also true to life. Bond is never genuinely humorous, whereas real spies often are, alert to the frequent absurdity of the calling. “Bringing you up to speed is like trying to explain Norway to a dog,” Lamb snarls.
As in the real intelligence services, there is a sharp division between those at the pointy and frequently rough end of espionage and those at the top who run the business according to rules and regulations, diversity quotas, budgets and time sheets. This is the gap between the spies and those who joined to become spies but ended up as civil servants.
The Slow Horses crew are recognisably real people; they bicker, whinge and make mistakes. This is not a world of dry martinis and caviar but cheap whisky and grotty takeaways or, at head office, quinoa salad. Everyone is exhausted, which Bond almost never is. Everyone needs a bath. For all their failings, they have a shot at redemption.
As Mick Jagger sings on the soundtrack: “There’s always a hope, on this slippery slope. Somewhere a ghost of a chance, to get back in that game. And burn off your shame, and dance with the big boys again.”
Lamb himself is an extreme version of a figure familiar in many large organisations: a hungover hangover from an early age, the sexist, bibulous nonconformist, a nightmare for HR but too good at his job to fire. He knows where the bodies are buried, because he put them there.
Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), the digital tech wizard with zero human empathy, is another version of the same figure: enormously annoying and supremely arrogant, but the only one who can make the machines work and fully aware of the power this gives him. Ho is the person on the IT helpline who would rather patronise you than actually help.
Intelligence services are increasingly on the hunt for people combining exceptional computer and mathematical abilities with limited interpersonal and social skills. GCHQ and MI5 each have specific recruitment and training programs for neurodiverse candidates.
The Slough House oddballs work as a team because, however much they bitch, moan and mess up, they are loyal to one another, without which no intelligence service can function. MI5, which deals with internal threats, discovered this painfully in the wake of the 1960s Kim Philby scandal when the service tore itself apart in the hunt for another (non-existent) mole within.
MI5 has always been a little more down to Earth than its sister service, MI6 (or the Secret Intelligence Service, as it prefers to be known).
In the past MI6 tended to be public school, upper middle class, with a certain polish and swagger, where MI5 officers were more grammar school, middle class, closer to policemen than spies. MI5 drank beer in the pub; MI6 drank claret in Pall Mall clubs. The Security Service was grateful to be part of government. The Secret Intelligence Service believed it had a right to be. But both organisations were overwhelmingly white and male.
That, too, began to change in the aftermath of Philby, the KGB agent rendered invisible to his MI6 colleagues because he had attended Westminster and Cambridge, had the right accent and old school tie and watched a lot of cricket.
Increasingly, in recent times, intelligence services have gone out of their way to recruit women and ethnic minorities, candidates with an array of different skills, character traits, languages and orientations. MI5 has to deal with all sorts of diverse and challenging people and therefore needs to recruit all sorts of diverse and challenging people.
During the war the service deployed many dodgy individuals including criminals, conmen and double-crossing Nazis. That required, and requires today, a willingness to understand bad people, develop a rapport with some detestable ones. Much of intelligence work is about manipulating damaged or broken people and asking them to make decisions you would not recommend to a loved one.
“First Desk” in The Park, the fictional MI5 headquarters in Slow Horses, is staffed by suited men and women, looking and sounding identical, cool and efficient in an office of glass and steel with banks of screens. The Slough House crew slob around in civilian clothes in a decrepit office of mould and peeling paint. (The set-dressers of Slow Horses arrange real, declassified files in the broken shelving in case the actors look inside, and leave dead flies on the windowsills for authenticity.) When Joanna Scanlan’s new, well-meaning secretary tidies up his office in the latest series, Lamb immediately insists it be untidied again.
“You’re f..king useless,” Lamb shouts at his crew. “The lot of you. Working with you has been the lowest point in a disappointing career.” But, of course, they are not useless. In season after season they turn out be very useful indeed, and frequently better at this strange game than the “big boys”. The slow horses are better bets than the fast thoroughbreds.
McCallum is not out to recruit, as either officers or agents, cokeheads, gambling addicts or alcoholics. But the head of the Security Service will not be unhappy with a tale that shows there is more than one sort of intelligence officer, and more than one way to win the spy war.
The great achievement of Herron and Smith is to reinvent and revitalise the spy world, as Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming and John le Carre did before them, echoing the real world of espionage but imagining it anew.
Early in the series River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) recalls a 12th birthday present from his grandfather, the former head of MI5. “He bought me le Carre’s collected works. I can still remember what he said about them: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true’.”
Slow Horses is also made up. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
The Times
Slow Horses series 4 is on Apple TV+
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