Tinker Tailor Tory Traitor

How “doomist” Conservatives betrayed their country

Who is the author of this passage describing?

He hated the EU very deeply, he said. For a while, he had remained content with Britain’s part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was. In the historical mayhem of his own lifetime, he could point to no one occasion: simply he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing.

“The political posture of the United Kingdom is without relevance or moral viability in world affairs.”

It’s not Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Nigel Farage, or a columnist for a Conservative paper writing circa 2015. It’s from the final scenes of John le Carré Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where Bill Haydon tells George Smiley why he betrayed England to serve the Soviet Union.

I substituted “Europe” for “America.  It’s not the EU Haydon hates, it did not exist in 1974, when le Carré published his masterpiece, but America whose global role as the superpower successor to the European empires Haydon loathes. (The magnificent 1979 dramatization Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is now on the BBC iPlayer, incidentally. If you’ve never seen it, I envy you.)

Haydon represents a recurring deformation of English life: radical Tory despair. It moves from doom-mongering to outrage to treachery, as conservatives convince themselves that modernity is so repulsive the only course is to smash it to pieces.  

Le Carré was writing in the 1970s, a time of decline and paralysis like our own. Modern academics try to project contemporary obsessions onto his work, and miss the conservative impulse behind Haydon’s betrayal. One even sees Tinker Tailor as   “an anti-imperialist jeremiad”, though it contains no reckoning with the crimes of the British Empire. Le Carré became ever more despairing of the West in later life, but in the 1970s, he made Haydon’s treason credible and the pessimism that suffuses his novel believable by emphasising establishment resentment at how little England became after it lost the empire and fell “out of the game”.

When Smiley interviews the retired MI6 analyst Connie Sachs she rheumily reminisces about the great days when Britain was still a great power.

“Look at me. It was a good time, do you hear? A real time. Englishmen could be proud then. Let them be proud now.”

“That’s not quite up to me, Connie.”

She was pulling his face on to her own, so he kissed her full on the lips.

 “Poor loves.” She was breathing heavily, not perhaps from any one emotion but from a whole mess of them, washed around in her like mixed drinks. “Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone."

This isn’t the leftist anger of the 2020s at the crimes of empire, but the elite despair of the 1970s at the loss of status. Smiley concludes that Haydon wanted to make himself a powerful figure in the world that was ignoring England by betraying the secrets of Britain and, crucially, of the new global power, America.

Bill had loved it, too. Smiley didn’t doubt that for a moment. Standing at the middle of a secret stage, playing world against world, hero and playwright in one: oh, Bill had loved that all right.

For all his professed devotion to the foreign creed of communism, Bill Haydon is a recognisable figure from the establishment. The Tory driven by despair to wreck the society he cannot abide. As our generation of Conservatives have done.