Tag Archives: government

Stone the Fool and others

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Reading Stars and Spies: Intelligence Operations and the Entertainment Business
by Christopher Andrew and Julius Green for the Spectator, 18 December 2021

On 2 October 2020, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard Moore tweeted (*tweeted!*)

#Bond or #Smiley need not apply. They’re (splendid) fiction but actually we’re #secretlyjustlikeyou.

The gesture’s novelty disguised, at the time, its appalling real-world implications: Bond was, after all, competent; and Smiley had integrity.

Stars and Spies, by veteran intelligence historian Christopher Andrew and theatre director and circus producer Julius Green, is a thoroughly entertaining read, but not at all a reassuring one. “The adoption of a fictional persona, the learning of scripts and the ability to improvise” are central to career progression in both theatre and espionage, the writers explain, “and undercover agents often find themselves engaged in what is effectively an exercise in in long-form role play.”

It should, then, come as no surprise that this book boasts “no shortage of enthusiastic but inept entertainer-spies”.

There’s Aphra Behn, the first woman employed as a secret agent by the British state during the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665: reaping no secret intelligence from her former lover, “ASTRA, Agent 160”, she made stuff up.

As, indeed, did “The Man Called Intrepid”, Sir William Stephenson, subject, in 1976, of the biggest-selling book ever on intelligence history. His recollections, spanning everything from organising wartime resistance in Europe to developing the Spitfire and the jet engine, work on the German Enigma code, and developing nuclear weapons, turned out to be the melancholy fabulations of a man suffering catastrophic memory loss.

The authors imagine that their subject — the intersection between spying and acting — is entertaining enough that they can simply start in the England of Good Queen Bess and Christopher Marlowe (recruited to spy for Walsingham while a student at Cambridge; also wrote a play or two), and end with the ludicrous antics (and — fair’s fair — brilliant acting) of US spy show Homeland.

And, by and large, they’re right. Begin at the beginning; end at the end. Why gild the lily with anything so arduous as an argument, when your anecdotes are this engaging? (Daniel Defoe’s terrifying plans for a surveillance state were scotched because the government’s intelligence budget was being siphoned off to keep Charles II’s mistresses quiet; and why were the British establishment so resistant to the charms of Soviet ballerinas?)

This approach does, however, leave the authors’ sense of proportion open to question. They’re not wrong to point out that “the most theatrical innovations pioneered by Stalinist intelligence were the show trials”, but in the context of so many Corenesque quasi-theatrical anecdotes, this observation can’t help but feel a bit cheap.

Once the parallels between spying and acting have been pointed out, the stories told here (many of them the fruit of fairly arduous primary research) sometimes come across as slightly fatuous. Why should the popular broadcaster Maxwell Knight not be a powerful recruiter of spies during the inter-war years? There’s nothing counter-intuitive here, if you think about the circles Knight must have moved in.

We are on surer ground when the authors measure the sharp contrast between fictional spies and their real-life counterparts. In the movies, honeypots abound, still rehashing the myths attaching to the courageous World War One French spy Mistinguett and the sadly deluded Margaretha Zelle (Mata Hari).

In truth, though, and for the longest while, women in this business have been more middle management than cat-suited loot. Recruited largely from Oxford’s women’s colleges and Cheltenham Ladies’ College, women played a more important part in the Security Service than in any other wartime government department, and for years, we are told, the service has been recruiting more women at officer and executive level than any other branch of government.

As for seduction and pillow-talk, even a fleeting acquaintance with men in their natural environment will tell us that, as Maxwell Knight put it, “Nothing is easier than for a woman to gain a man’s confidence by the showing and expression of a little sympathy… I am convinced,” he went on, “that more information has been obtained by women agents by keeping out of the arms of a man, than was ever obtained by willingly sinking into them.”

Fuelled by Erskine Childers’s peerless spy novel The Riddle of the Sands (1903), by Somerset Maughan’s Ashenden stories and by everything Fleming ever wrote, of course the audience for espionage drama hankers for real-life insight from writers “in the know”. And if the writer complains that the whole espionage industry is a thing of smoke and mirrors, well, we’ll find that fascinating too. (In Ben Jonson’s spy farce Volpone Sir Pol, on being told of the death of Stone the Fool, claims that Stone actually ran a sophisticated spy ring which communicated by means of dead drops hidden in fruit and vegetables. Eat your heart out, Le Carré.)

Andrew and Green, who both at different times studied history at Corpus Christi, Christopher Marlowe’s old college, are not really giving us the inside track. I would go so far as to say that they are not really telling us anything new. But they marshall their rare facts splendidly, and use them to spin ripping yarns.

A fanciful belonging

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Reading The Official History of Britain: Our story in numbers as told by the Office for National Statistics by Boris Starling with David Bradbury for The Telegraph, 18 October 2020

Next year’s national census may be our last. Opinions are being sought as to whether it makes sense, any longer, for the nation to keep taking its own temperature every ten years. Discussions will begin in 2023. Our betters may conclude that the whole rigmarole is outdated, and that its findings can be gleaned more cheaply and efficiently by other methods.

How the UK’s national census was established, what it achieved, and what it will mean if it’s abandoned, is the subject of The Official History of Britain — a grand title for what is, to be honest, a rather messy book, its facts and figures slathered in weak and irrelevant humour, most of it to do with football, I suppose as an intellectual sugar lump for the proles.

Such condescension is archetypally British; and so too is the gimcrack team assembled to write this book. There is something irresistibly Dad’s Army about the image of David Bradbury, an old hand at the Office of National Statistics, comparing dad jokes with novelist Boris Starling, creator of Messiah’s DCI Red Metcalfe, who was played on the telly by Ken Stott.

The charm of the whole enterprise is undeniable. Within these pages you will discover, among other tidbits, the difference between critters and spraggers, whitsters and oliver men. Such were the occupations introduced into the Standard Classification of 1881. (Recent additions include YouTuber and dog sitter.) Nostalgia and melancholy come to the fore when the authors say a fond farewell to John and Margaret — names, deeply unfashionable now, that were pretty much compulsory for babies born between 1914 and 1964. But there’s rigour, too; I recommend the author’s highly illuminating analysis of today’s gender pay gap.

Sometimes the authors show us up for the grumpy tabloid zombies we really are. Apparently a sizeable sample of us, quizzed in 2014, opined that 15 per cent of all our girls under sixteen were pregnant. The lack of mathematical nous here is as disheartening as the misanthropy. The actual figure was a still worryingly high 0.5 per cent, or one in 200 girls. A 10-year Teenage Pregnancy Strategy was created to tackle the problem, and the figure for 2018 — 16.8 conceptions per 1000 women aged between 15 and 17 — is the lowest since records began.

This is why census records are important: they inform enlightened and effective government action. The statistician John Rickman said as much in a paper written in 1796, but his campaign for a national census only really caught on two years later, when the clergyman Thomas Malthus scared the living daylights out of everyone with his “Essay on the Principle of Population”. Three years later, ministers rattled by Malthus’s catalogue of checks on the population of primitive societies — war, pestilence, famine, and the rest — peeked through their fingers at the runaway population numbers for 1801.

The population of England then was the same as the population of Greater London now. The population of Scotland was almost exactly the current population of metropolitan Glasgow.

Better to have called it “The Official History of Britons”. Chapter by chapter, the authors lead us (wisely, if not too well) from Birth, through School, into Work and thence down the maw of its near neighbour, Death, reflecting all the while on what a difference two hundred years have made to the character of each life stage.

The character of government has changed, too. Rickman wanted a census because he and his parliamentary colleagues had almost no useful data on the population they were supposed to serve. The job of the ONS now, the writers point out, “is to try to make sure that policymakers and citizens can know at least as much about their populations and economies as the internet behemoths.”

It’s true: a picture of the state of the nation taken every ten years just doesn’t provide the granularity that could be fetched, more cheaply and more efficiently, from other sources: “smaller surveys, Ordnance Survey data, GP registrations, driving licence details…”

But this too is true: near where I live there is a pedestrian crossing. There is a button I can push, to change the lights, to let me cross the road. I know that in daylight hours, the button is a dummy, that the lights are on a timer, set in some central office, to smooth the traffic flow. Still, I press that button. I like that button. I appreciate having my agency acknowledged, even in a notional, fanciful way.

Next year, 2021, I will tell the census who and what I am. It’s my duty as a citizen, and also my right, to answer how I will. If, in 2031, the state decides it does not need to ask me who I am, then my idea of myself as a citizen, notional as it is, fanciful as it is, will be impoverished.

Tyrants and geometers

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Reading Proof!: How the World Became Geometrical by Amir Alexander (Scientific American) for the Telegraph, 7 November 2019

The fall from grace of Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s superintendant of finances, was spectacular and swift. In 1661 he held a fete to welcome the king to his gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte. The affair was meant to flatter, but its sumptuousness only served to convince the absolutist monarch that Fouquet was angling for power. “On 17 August, at six in the evening Fouquet was the King of France,” Voltaire observed; “at two in the morning he was nobody.”

Soon afterwards, Fouquet’s gardens were grubbed up in an act, not of vandalism, but of expropriation: “The king’s men carefully packed the objects into crates and hauled them away to a marshy town where Louis was intent on building his own dream palace,” the Israeli-born US historian Amir Alexander tells us. “It was called Versailles.”

Proof! explains how French formal gardens reflected, maintained and even disseminated the political ideologies of French monarchs. from “the Affable” Charles VIII in the 15th century to poor doomed Louis XVI, destined for the guillotine in 1793. Alexander claims these gardens were the concrete and eloquent expression of the idea that “geometry was everywhere and structured everything — from physical nature to human society, the state, and the world.”

If you think geometrical figures are abstract artefacts of the human mind, think again. Their regularities turn up in the natural world time and again, leading classical thinkers to hope that “underlying the boisterous chaos and variety that we see around us there may yet be a rational order, which humans can comprehend and even imitate.”

It is hard for us now to read celebrations of nature into the rigid designs of 16th century Fontainebleau or the Tuileries, but we have no problem reading them as expressions of political power. Geometers are a tyrant’s natural darlings. Euclid spent many a happy year in Ptolemaic Egypt. King Hiero II of Syracuse looked out for Archimedes. Geometers were ideologically useful figures, since the truths they uncovered were static and hierarchical. In the Republic, Plato extols the virtues of geometry and advocates for rigid class politics in practically the same breath.

It is not entirely clear, however, how effective these patterns actually were as political symbols. Even as Thomas Hobbes was modishly emulating the logical structure of Euclid’s (geometrical) Elements in the composition of his (political) Leviathan (demonstrating, from first principles, the need for monarchy), the Duc de Saint-Simon, a courtier and diarist, was having a thoroughly miserable time of it in the gardens of Louis XIV’s Versailles: “the violence everywhere done to nature repels and wearies us despite ourselves,” he wrote in his diary.

So not everyone was convinced that Versailles, and gardens of that ilk, revealed the inner secrets of nature.

Of the strictures of classical architecture and design, Alexander comments that today, “these prescriptions seem entirely arbitrary”. I’m not sure that’s right. Classical art and architecture is beautiful, not merely for its antiquity, but for the provoking way it toys with the mechanics of visual perception. The golden mean isn’t “arbitrary”.

It was fetishized, though: Alexander’s dead right about that. For centuries, Versailles was the ideal to which Europe’s grand urban projects aspired, and colonial new-builds could and did out-do Versailles, at least in scale. Of the work of Lutyens and Baker in their plans for the creation of New Delhi, Alexander writes: “The rigid triangles, hexagons, and octagons created a fixed, unalterable and permanent order that could not be tampered with.”

He’s setting colonialist Europe up for a fall: that much is obvious. Even as New Delhi and Saigon’s Boulevard Norodom and all the rest were being erected, back in Europe mathematicians Janos Bolyai, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann were uncovering new kinds of geometry to describe any curved surface, and higher dimensions of any order. Suddenly the rigid, hierarchical order of the Euclidean universe was just one system among many, and Versailles and its forerunners went from being diagrams of cosmic order to being grand days out with the kids.

Well, Alexander needs an ending, and this is as good a place as any to conclude his entertaining, enlightening, and admirably well-focused introduction to a field of study that, quite frankly, is more rabbit-hole than grass.

I was in Washington the other day, sweating my way up to the Lincoln Memorial. From the top I measured the distance, past the needle of the Washington Monument, to Capitol Hill. Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant built all this: it’s a quintessential product of the Versailles tradition. Alexander calls it “nothing less than the Constitutional power structure of the United States set in stone, pavement, trees, and shrubs.”

For nigh-on 250 years tourists have been slogging from one end of the National Mall to the other, re-enacting the passion of the poor Duc de Saint-Simon in Versailles, who complained that “you are introduced to the freshness of the shade only by a vast torrid zone, at the end of which there is nothing for you but to mount or descend.”

Not any more, though. Skipping down the steps, I boarded a bright red electric Uber scooter and sailed electrically east toward Capitol Hill. The whole dignity-dissolving charade was made possible (and cheap) by map-making algorithms performing geometrical calculations that Euclid himself would have recognised. Because the ancient geometer’s influence on our streets and buildings hasn’t really vanished. It’s been virtualised. Algorithmized. Turned into a utility.

Now geometry’s back where it started: just one more invisible natural good.