New Sandman

“Karla is not fireproof because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.”

John le Carré had a way with words. And he was the great chronicler of the skulduggery of the Cold War. I know that he wrote novels not histories, but I would say to him what the French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote to the English novelist Samuel Richardson, “history is often a bad novel, and the novel, as you write it, is a good history”. 

Though Karla is a woman’s name, behind that code stands a man. In the world of George Smiley, le Carré’s extraordinary creation of an outstanding British spy, Karla is the shadowy, dangerous, effective senior figure in the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, where he heads Directorate XIII, also known as the Karla Directorate. He’s Smiley’s antithesis in the series of novels that have come to be known as The Quest for Karla, and it’s Smiley who swore to take him down if he could.

Alec Guiness as Smiley, Patrick Stewart as Karla
A chance meeting before the Quest for the KGB man had even started

We never learn Karla’s real name. But we do learn a nickname, given him, it seems, by General Vladimir, the courageous Russian defector to the British who, even in old age, continues his battle against the KGB chief. The nickname is ‘the Sandman’. You may know the fairy tale, rather a sinister one, in which the Sandman arrives to scatter sand in your eyes so that you fall asleep.

The story behind the nickname is told in Smiley’s People.

“Why did Vladimir call him the Sandman?” Smiley asked, knowing the answer already. 

“It was his joke. A German fairy tale Vladi picked up in Estonia from one of his Kraut forebears. ‘Karla is our Sandman. Anyone who comes too close to him has a way of falling asleep.’”

A way with words, as I said. Gently, almost by implication, le Carré gives us the portrait of a sinister figure. Because this Sandman, of course, puts you into a sleep from which there’s no waking up. 

It seems the KGB was good at producing Karlas. 

One of them, as deadly as le Carré’s creation, has risen to the top of the country he once served. Vladimir Putin is far from being a perfect copy of the original Karla. But he certainly shares some notable characteristics with him.

He has the same deviousness as Karla, so you never know what he’s doing or planning. The difference though, is that when you finally find out what he’s up to, you’re not always left feeling wry admiration for his ingenuity. On the contrary, you’re often left wondering what on earth he was thinking of, since far from improving circumstances he complains about, so many of his decisions make them far worse.

He was terribly upset about the possibility of NATO stationing US missiles on Ukrainian territory, at a time when there were none, and no plans to send any. After invading the country, however, he now faces a Ukraine bristling with such missiles.

He also reacted furiously to NATO expansion that brought the alliance’s borders far too close to his own. But the invasion of Ukraine ensured that Finland joined. As a result, NATO has added 1340 km to its joint border with Russian territory. 

Most self-destructive of all, he complained about NATO when the organisation was at a low ebb, with numerous European countries losing their enthusiasm and the then US President, Donald Trump, publicly declaring it obsolete. The Ukraine invasion has reawakened the alliance and given it a new dynamism. Why, even Trump now says it isn’t obsolete any more.

Putin lacks Karla’s intelligence. Equally he lacks his subtlety. His subtlety is that of an armoured division crossing your border, a gunman standing on your doorstep, or a missile slamming into a crowded theatre.

What he certainly shares with his fictional counterpart, though, is his Sandman qualities. People getting too close to him tend to fall asleep. And their sleep isn’t the kind you wake up from.

Boris Nemtsov had been Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and an early supporter of Putin as President. But, as he saw civil rights being rolled back and the state returning to its old authoritarian ways, he spoke out against him. In February 2015, hours after calling for people to join a march against Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, into Crimea, he was shot four times in the back. Putin announced that he would take personal control of the investigation into the killing, but no one has ever been brought to justice for it.

Alexander Litvinenko was a former agent of the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB. Living in London, he believed for his safety, in 1999 he denounced the service, then run by Putin, for a series of bombings in Russia that prepared the ground for military action against Chechnya later that year. That action was the springboard for Putin’s rise to the presidency. In 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium by visitors from Russia and died three weeks later. The UK authorities have identified two agents from the security service as suspects for the murder, but Russia refuses to extradite them. Putin even decorated one of them for services to the motherland.

Anna Politkovskaya was an outstanding investigative journalist working for one of the few truly independent newspapers in Russia, Novaya Gazeta. She became increasingly convinced that Putin was turning Russia into a police state, and said so in her book Putin’s Russia. She wrote extensively about the abuse of Chechens during the particularly brutal and dirty war the Russian authorities waged against them. In 2006, she was shot dead in a lift in her apartment building. Five men were later convicted of the murder, but the judge said it was a contract killing and at least $150,000 of the fee was paid by someone whose identity remains undiscovered to this day.

This is just a partial list of the people who’ve been put to sleep when they got too close to the Sandman. And now, of course, we can add one more.

A latter day incarnation of Karla
Putin, the new Sandman (l), and Prigozhin, the latest to fall asleep

If Putin is none too subtle, Yevgeny Prigozhin showed what it is to part company with subtlety altogether. His Wagner group has mercenaries in various African nations, where they’ve been accused of murder and torture. In Ukraine too, Wagner soldiers are believed to have taken part in the murder of civilians though, there, it sadly seems that regular Russian soldiers were engaged in the war crimes with them. Not a lot of subtlety among any of this sorry crew, to be honest.

Well, Prigozhin also got too close to the Sandman. And now a plane crash has closed his eyes. He mounted an aborted coup against Putin, which he should never have started unless he was going to see it through: a frightened cobra is even more dangerous than a resting one. A surprising length of time has passed since that bizarre uprising, but it’s possible that the two-month gap was just what it took to lull Prigozhin into an entirely unjustified sense of security.

Putin may not be as clever as le Carré’s Karla. But he’s certainly as dangerous. And, sadly, he too often gets his way.

Like Karla, Putin’s a fanatic, even if he’s only a fanatical Putinist. Let’s hope that Smiley’s view of Karla applies to him too, and his lack of moderation will lead to his downfall. And that we can find a Smiley to make it happen.

Mad dogs and Englishmen. And dogs less mad

“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.”

A good line from a Noël Coward song. Performed as background when we see Coward himself, playing the British – I should say English – spy chief stalking along a Cuban street in the classic film of Our Man in Havana.

It’s an inverted boast, of course. It sounds self-deprecating. The English poking fun at themselves, for walking out under the strongest of suns when everyone is sensibly horizontal for a siesta, or at least under cover in the shade. Crazy, right? Except that it’s an endearing fault. And there’s even a suggestion that it’s proof of a certain rather admirable courage and strength. Unique to the English.

You know, the qualities – if such they are – which made the Empire:

At twelve noon the natives swoon
And no further work is done
But mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun

Indeed, when we see Coward in the film, he’s carefully buttoned up, with tie and hat, in a classic English suit entirely appropriate for the City of London, but rather less so for the noonday streets of Havana.

Noël Coward in Our Man in Havana

I like the film. And I like Graham Greene’s book, on which the film is based, even more. It’s about an intelligence fabricator. When the undisputed master of the spy genre, John le Carré, came to write his own book about an intelligence pedlar, The Tailor of Panama, he had to pay homage to Greene’s Our Man in Havana. It’s the exemplar of this sub-genre, and it sets the bar high. I’m not quite sure that The Tailor of Panama, fine though it is, entirely clears that bar.

However, I digress. It does sometimes occur to me that, implied boast or not, I too sometimes slip into the category of Englishmen who go out in the midday sun. Partly, perhaps, because I was born and spent my early childhood in Rome, and that has left me a constant hankering for heat. Blistering summer? It powers my batteries.

And blistering summer is upon us here in Spain, with the temperatures in the thirties already (no, no, American friends – that’s in real degrees – the nineties in your outmoded system). I revel in it.

Not everyone agrees. Our neighbour Isabel, hearing that our granddaughter Matilda was coming to stay, put all her skills to work to make her a doll. And a wonderful doll it is, too. Then, given the heat we’re experiencing, she decided to make the doll a hat too. It’s much needed in current conditions.

Well, we haven’t tried it on Matilda’s new doll yet. But we have tried it on Matilda herself. It’s maybe not quite her size, but it strikes me as just right for her in every other way. Don’t you agree?

Matilda modelling her doll's hat
assisted by her grandmother

I had a useful lesson in how not everyone sees the heat my way this very morning. I plunged into our local woods with our dogs, striding confidently and comfortably along the paths.

But then I suddenly noticed that Toffee was no longer with us.

This is worrying. Luci, our black toy poodle, never goes too far. Even if she’s put off by a much larger dog (and practically every dog is larger than she is), she’ll just run off a short way into the undergrowth, following along a parallel path, always aware of where we are, so she can rejoin us just as soon as the immediate threat has passed.

Not so Toffee. She can be distracted by many things she shouldn’t go near. A pile of fresh horse dung (yep, we have riders in the woods too). The mouldering remains of a discarded sandwich. Anything she could eat or roll in, to deplorable effect.

The worst is that, being a kind of tan colour – officially, it’s apricot, but basically it looks tan – she tends to blend into the countryside. And since she’s living proof that there’s none so deaf as them that doesn’t want to hear, she can disappear for just as long as she likes, while I rush around searching and calling for her uselessly, in growing panic.

Not this time though. I simply backtracked along the way I’d come. And there she was. She’d found a patch of shade along the sun-drenched path. And she’d simply stretched out in it.

Thus far and no further. Pal.
With Luci in the background, already heading home

The message was clear. “You want to keep walking? Be my guest. But in this temperature, this is more than far enough for me. I want to go home.”

Of course, I went along with her, and took us all three home again. After all, I was in debt to her for an invaluable lesson.

Mad dogs and Englishmen may indeed go out in the midday sun.

But sane dogs don’t.

Getting the public to appreciate the public good

He wished to God the dust would settle. Why didn’t someone complain? Always the same when a lot of people use one place: no one’s responsible, no one gives a hoot.

Ah, I wish I could write with le Carré’s intense succinctness. A few short sentences to conjure up an entire atmosphere. This is Peter Guillam, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, undertaking one of the most terrifying tasks as a spy: stealing information from his own service, in the duty room of its headquarters in London.

But it’s the idea le Carré expresses that struck me. No one gives a hoot for a place that many people use: “it isn’t mine, so it isn’t my responsibility”. I suspect we’ve all come across that attitude at some time or another.

It poses a problem for Socialists. How do you get everyone to take responsibility for something none of them owns as an individual, but we all own as a collective?

The simple way around the issue is to go for nationalisation instead of public ownership. Unfortunately, they’re absolutely not the same thing. A nationalised undertaking belongs to the state, not to the people. The extent to which it serves the public interest depends on who controls the state.

As I repeatedly point out to the fans of nationalisation, it was a nationalised industry, the National Coal Board, that was responsible for the slagheap slip at Aberfan in 1966, when 144 people were killed, 116 of them children. It was that same National Coal Board that broke the back of the miners and, in effect, killed the coal industry in Britain in the 1984 strike. 

‘Nationalised’ is not synonymous with ‘at the service of the people’.

One of Luton’s most attractive places: Stopsley Common

There are, however, instances of common use, if not common ownership. The trouble is, like the duty room in the spy service building where Guillam was at work, because no one owns it, some may well abuse it.

Danielle joined volunteers cleaning Luton streets when we lived there. What’s more, one of the loveliest places nearby was Stopsley Common, its very name underlining that it’s a public asset. Sadly, though, some people felt that this tract of common land was an ideal place for dumping waste. It was repeatedly disfigured by piles of builders’ rubble. Someone had decided that, since it was cheaper to dump the waste on the Common than take it to a tip, and the land didn’t belong to them as individuals, they might just as well leave it there.

It’s an international problem, as we confirmed this weekend. Near us, here in Spain, La Vallesa woods are even more spectacularly beautiful than Stopsley, and just as much a public resource. We joined volunteers there this weekend to clear up junk. It included, once more, builders’ rubble. In some cases, the rubble was in sacks, which had been dragged quite a way from the road, as though the people who left it were prepared to make a special effort to make it more difficult to collect.

Why drag it into the woods?
By the road, it would have been easy for the Council to collect

The woods don’t belong to them. To use Le Carré’s language, they don’t give a hoot.

The encouraging factor, on the other hand, is that there are people who do give a hoot. There were several dozen people there helping to clear up. There’s not a huge amount one can do in a couple of hours, but it was nonetheless a pleasure to see so many show up.

Volunteers cleaning up the rubbish

They represent the spirit that can make common ownership viable. That’s the public at its best.

We just need to educate the waste-dumpers to see things the same way. They’re the public at its worst, least concerned with the wellbeing of all. Make no mistake about it: it’s the biggest blockage to a socialised approach to the public good, and the attitude is by no means limited to the most privileged in society. A mindset change is needed throughout society.

When we’ve surmounted that obstacle, one of the fundamental planks of socialist thinking will stop being just a pious wish and become a feasible objective. But don’t be fooled – it’s very different and far better than mere nationalisation.

Boris Coup: Day 8

It’s day 8 of the Boris coup, and our hero, chief of the Downing Street junta, has suffered his first setback.

A fine setback, too. The very first vote he’s faced since becoming Prime Minister. And he lost it.

Even more toxic than BoJo: Jacob Rees-Mogg, his Brexit sidekick
Showing the full extent of his respect for the Parliament to which he belongs

John le Carré tells us in Smiley’s People that ‘burning’ (blackmail) is a powerful tool for breaking an adversary, but sadly it can have exactly the opposite effect and stiffen resistance rather than overthrowing it.

The idea of cowing Conservative MPs tempted to rebel against the junta’s diktats, by threatening them with losing the whip and effectively ending their careers, probably came from Dominic Cummings, the PM’s hitman, rather than from BoJo himself. Cummings, it will be remembered, is the man whose management style boils down to, “you don’t like my style? There’s the door”.

Sadly, for him and his boss at least, that approach seems to have had the stiffening rather than overpowering effect. Or so we’re told by some of the Conservative MPs who voted again the Conservative government last night. One of them, Sam Gyimah told the Guardian:

For MPs like myself, Downing Street has framed the choice as: speak your mind or keep your job.

It seems 21 Tory MPs had their opposition strengthened, rather than weakened, by the threats. Or, to put it another way, decided that speaking their mind was more important than keeping the job. Some, indeed, might say that a politician’s job isn’t worth having if you can’t speak your mind.

The cause was helped by the behaviour of BoJo’s sidekick, Jacob Rees-Smogg, who has somehow pulled off the trick of being even more obnoxious than his boss. He lay sprawled across the government front bench during much of yesterday’s debate, showing exactly the respect in which he holds the Parliament to which he belongs.

The vote, however, only meant that Parliament wrested control of its own agenda away from government.

Ironically, it was a wonderful application of the principle Cummings has made his own: ‘taking back control’.

That step was necessary for a bill to go forward blocking a no-deal Brexit. The debate on the bill itself will only start today and it has to be completed fast, before Parliament is prorogued (suspended) on Monday.

Prorogation was the central act in the coup, after all. And it was designed to avoid precisely what MPs are trying to do now. One defeat doesn’t mean BoJo’s authoritarian drive is over. Not by a long stretch. As well as being adopted by the Commons, any move to block a hard Brexit also has to get through the Lords by Monday, and it’s clear that BoJo loyalists in the upper House are going to do all they can to delay it there.

BoJo’s bloodied but not yet defeated.

Meanwhile, on the other side, Jeremy Corbyn has let it be known that Labour won’t vote for a General Election until hard Brexit has been blocked. The Fixed Term Parliaments Act means that a snap election – and early one – can only be called with the consent of two-thirds of the House. If Labour votes against, it won’t happen.

It would be a great idea, from Labour’s point of view. It’s true that Corbyn has been calling for a General Election for years – ever since the last one, two and a half years ago – so changing his tune now won’t be easy for him. But, as I argued yesterday, he needs to. An election in the next few weeks would almost certainly return BoJo to power, with a majority. Just as his blackmail of Tory MPs only strengthened their resolve, so his defeat in Parliament will only reinforce his support among that large minority that wants a Brexit and sees him as their champion against the vile manoeuvrings of MPs.

They see strength where in reality there’s authoritarianism. They see a man taking on the establishment where in reality no one is more establishment than he is. And they’re a minority but a big enough one to give him a win.

Corbyn, and Labour generally, would be far better advised to wait, if Brexit happens, until its pain starts to bite. Then, if BoJo’s still Prime Minister and identified as Mr Brexit, Labour will stand a far better chance against him than it does now.

BoJo, however, may not cling on until then. He’s prepared the ground to weather a defeat like yesterday’s. But how many can he handle? If there are several more, he may find it more than he can bear.

Cummings would doubtless be fired first, the sacrificial lamb to save his master. And then he too would go.

That means that there are two ways to be freed of BoJo’s baleful power: an election a while after Brexit, or more defeats in the coming weeks than he can withstand.

A glimmer of hope. Because in either of those situations, he would be gone. And the coup would be over.

It’s not over yet, but at least we can be more hopeful than at any other time in these first eight days of his drive for autocratic power.