The passing of a fine Englishman. Who chose not to be

One event has dominated the British media for days now: the death of Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth.

Personally, I have a lot of trouble understanding the apparent outpouring of grief. After all, the man enjoyed a life full of variety, interest, and extraordinary privilege. And more than any of those things, it was remarkably long. He died at 99. OK, so he missed the milestone of 100 by weeks. But that’s hardly the stuff of tragedy, is it?

Another loss on 12 December 2020 moved me far more. That was the death of David Cornwell, though you may know him better by his pen name, John le Carré.

Some horrible literary snobs regard ‘genre fiction’ as somehow inferior. A genre is something like thrillers, or romance, or historical novels. Le Carré shone above all in his spy novels. 

What a giant he was when he wrote them. They were great books in their own right, as well as being highly entertaining. In fact, it was his attempts to write different books that were disappointing – try The Naïve and Sentimental Lover if you want to see le Carré at his weakest – whereas A Perfect Spy and The Little Drummer Girl are right up there with, say, the best of Graham Greene and Salman Rushdie as outstanding works of English fiction. 

Peter Egan in Le Carré’s highly autobiographical
A Perfect Spy

And ‘English’ is certainly the right word. Le Carré, despite the French sounding nom de plume, was quintessentially English. He spoke for the country with a far more intelligent and elegant voice than the Duke of Edinburgh ever did, even though the Duke was consort to the Queen. 

Le Carré had the background for it. He attended Sherborne, one of those expensive, privileged and unpleasant private schools we English like to call ‘public’. He didn’t attend Eton, the most exclusive and snobbiest of the public schools, which has produced so many of our Prime Ministers, including two of the last three (David Cameron and the present caricature, Boris Johnson), but he did teach there later.

From Sherborne, he did something admirable and daring, clearing off on his own to study in considerable poverty at Berne University in Switzerland, where he sowed the seeds of a lifelong devotion to what he came to call the German muse. He apparently spoke German well enough to pass for a native.

On returning to England, he flowed back into the more normal channel of English upper class character building, Oxford University. Fortunately, he never had the money to emulate Cameron and Johnson, who joined the ranks of the university’s Bullingdon club for entitled and privileged vandals. Le Carré didn’t spend evenings trashing restaurants, expecting his Dad to pay for the damage the following day.

Indeed, his Dad was the other factor that marked him out as different from many in his class. Ronnie Cornwell was a conman, who cheated victims out of their savings and had several spells in prison for his pains. Of course, plenty of others in the English establishment have felonious fathers, though their actions aren’t always of a kind that the law actually classifies as criminal. 

Le Carré spent time in MI5, the British security service tasked with protecting the country from threats to its security, before moving on to MI6 which poses the same kinds of threat, at least at the level of intelligence, to other countries.

This background meant he was ideally placed to write about spying, and about the disillusion of many in the British ruling class who haven’t adapted to having no empire to run. The wonderful, betrayed, disappointed, slightly crazed character Connie Sachs sums it up in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for le Carré’s greatest creation, George Smiley:

Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. Englishmen could be proud then, George. They could... All gone.

Beryl Reid as Connie Sachs in
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Le Carré deeply understood the agony of that class, of those people who perhaps more than any others represent England to the rest of the world, and who can’t cope with the loss of empire. They led the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, promising that it could be a great global power once more. Now, as the reality of Brexit sinks in, the millions who gullibly followed them are beginning to discover how toxic a deception that was.

Le Carré entirely understood that. A character in Agent Running in the Field declares:

It is my considered opinion that for Britain and Europe… Britain’s departure from the European Union… and Britain’s consequent unqualified dependence on the United States… is an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none.

And Le Carré told John Banville, in an interview for the Guardian:

Mob orators of the sort we have, the Boris Johnson sort, do not speak reason. When you get into that category, your task is to fire up the people with nostalgia, with anger. 

England has taken to looking back with nostalgia on a world that never truly existed, and certainly never served the people who turned out in their millions, and in anger, for Brexit and for Johnson. Men like him have pulled off the trick, the hallmark of populists, of passing themselves off as men of the people, deeply encrusted in the establishment though they are. It’s a con trick worthy of le Carré’s father. 

That kind of unscrupulous behaviour is typical of such men, on both sides of the divide over the ‘clusterfuck’ that is Brexit. David Cameron, pro-EU, has been engulfed in an ethics scandal concerning a company called Greensill, for which he lobbied the government he used to head, seeking help that would have made him a great deal of money. Boris Johnson, pro-Brexit, channelled public funds to a mistress and has, since becoming Prime Minister, created an atmosphere in which it is normal to award public contracts to friends or political contributors.

Le Carré knew and understood that world and wrote about it with outstanding skill. Which makes his death far more of a loss than that of a Duke of Edinburgh who took much more than Le Carré in the course of a long life, and gave back far less. 

But what struck me most about Le Carré’s death was my recent discovery that he took Irish nationality just before he died. Just as I took French nationality, and for the same reason, to maintain our links to the European Union. 

The consummate Englishman died Irish. A wonderful irony. And entirely appropriate for a fine man whose loss is certainly worth mourning.