Like many people, I’ve been bemoaning the woke capture of our security services for some time. In 2024, Sir Richard Moore, then the head of MI6, resigned from the Garrick Club during the row over the admission of women, and earlier this year it emerged MI5 was excluding white people from registering interest for administrative roles due to the ‘under-representation’ of black, Asian and minority ethnic people. You would hope the recruitment of spies would be based on merit, given the vital role they play in protecting the national interest, but apparently diversity targets are more important.
Perhaps I never received the tap on the shoulder because I didn’t have an upper-class girlfriend
Then again, the old ‘tap on the shoulder’ method was far from perfect – and I don’t just say that because of all the communists who ended up working at ‘the Circus’ in the 1930s. Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, recently revealed he’d been approached while studying PPE at Oxford in the 1980s, but turned down the offer on the grounds that he ‘would have made a very bad spy’. Well, yes, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Falling off paddle boards and tumbling down Slip’n’Slides is unlikely to put the fear of God into Vladimir Putin. But wasn’t his unsuitability for espionage work bleedin’ obvious even back then?
