Hugo Rifkind
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What other photos exist, which Lady Sawers has not quite got around to uploading yet? Perhaps there’s a snap of Britain’s actual chief spy pretending to shoot her with his hairbrush. In black tie, obviously. Or maybe he’s in a safari suit. Maybe he’s pretending there’s a laser that comes out of his watch.
‘What, you’re leading on that?’ sneered David Miliband at Andrew Marr, in his usual winning way. ‘The head of MI6 goes swimming? Wow! It’s not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks, for goodness sake. Grow up!’ Hmmm. Isn’t it? Shouldn’t it be? ‘Ah, Sir John!’ his Russian counterpart could one day say, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’ He’d be putty in their hands. It’s downright embarrassing, nationally speaking. It’s like the head of Nasa pretending to have a light-saber. It’s like seeing the Transport Secretary sitting on the loo in a train-driver’s hat, pulling the chain over his head, and going choo-ka-choo.
My first proper job was researching the lives of vaguely public figures for a doomed website. You’d search through cuttings, source a photo, write it up into a wee biography, and publish it online. One of my subjects, I recall, was Sir Richard Dearlove, Sir John’s predecessor-but-one. This was only ten years ago, but you couldn’t find out much about Sir Richard. There was only one photo, and that was from when he was 17. Born somewhere in Cornwall, some minor public school then Oxbridge, and a brief potted career history. That was all you got. After a while, some newspaper tracked him down to Putney. His neighbours were astonished because they knew somebody lived next door, but they’d never really seen him, and had always joked that he must be a spy. ‘Of course,’ they absolutely did not then add, ‘we’ve seen those pictures online, of him almost in the buff, and his wife doing a sexy little dance.’
There was something weird about the Dearlove biography, I seem to recall. It had a glitch. Strange bits of it kept changing, or disappearing. This was because our website was rubbish, obviously, but we used to joke that it was something more sinister. We used to joke that the spooks were hacking in. Because that was plausible back then. You thought of the head of MI6, and you thought, this is probably a person with computer skills at his disposal that are far beyond the ken of mere IT geeks like us. You didn’t think of him as being somebody so adrift with modern technology that he doesn’t even tell his wife it might be a good idea to click the ‘private’ box on Facebook.
Dearlove was only the second top spook to be officially named, after Sir David Spedding. His successor, Sir John Scarlett, was the first to be officially photographed. A decade from now, I suppose, new heads of the British Secret Intelligence Service will have their appointments announced with jaunty Q&A interviews, in the style that once used to appear in Smash Hits! That’s progress, I suppose, and in the name of transparency, I suppose it’s all for the good. One day everybody will be on Facebook, or something like it, head of MI6 or not. The problem, now, isn’t that ‘C’ was up there. It’s that he looked like a total berk.
On holiday this week, in a tropical, unfamiliar and balmy place. I arrived yesterday, stepping off a cool, air-conditioned train into air that was thick and moist. All day the heavy rain switched on and off, almost with a click, like it did on Lost. Walk for more than 20 metres, and you’d grow clammy with sweat. If we’d had a verandah, we’d have eaten on it. I slept under a single sheet, wishing I had a ceiling fan, and woke to the scent of spice, and lush foliage, and unfamiliar insects. It is all deeply, deeply peculiar. Because I’m in Edinburgh. In Scotland.
This morning I lay awhile, breathing, listening to the birds, reminded of something but not sure what. I grew up in Edinburgh and being here doesn’t normally remind me of anything other than childhood, and having a cold, and whisky, and rugby, and my dead cat. Then I got to my feet, opened the curtains, looked out at the heavy, burdened trees, and it clicked. I was in Blantyre. In Malawi.
Or possibly Livingstone, by Lake Tanganyika. Or some genteel suburb in Zimbabwe, or Kenya, or the hills of Swaziland or Lesotho, or South Africa’s Drakensberg, or the Hogsback Hills down south. Or Uganda maybe, but I’ve never been there. I was in one of those higher, cooler bits of Africa that those doughty Scottish explorers found, and fell in love with, and tried to recast as home. Where the scrub on the hillside is just somehow wrong, and the sheep are too thin, and yellowish, and restless. Where you’ll see a startling country house, but made out of the wrong stone, or a man in the sea fog with a stick and a kilt, when it is actually jungle fog and he’s holding a knobkerrie and wearing a blanket. A backwards sort of familiarity. Scotland reminding me of the places that are supposed to remind you of it.
I find it strange that people feel entitled to have views on climate change. Seems straight science to me — either it is or it isn’t. Me, I haven’t a clue. Maybe this was just freaky weather. It felt, though, like a glimpse of the future. One day, the bugs will be as big as your hand. Up here, even by the River Esk, we will all have verandahs.
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