HENRY DEEDES: Pure Tinker, Tailor… all it needed was Smiley with a filterless Senior Service
As a cast of characters goes, even that masterful spy scribe John Le Carre might have struggled to improve upon it.
Three nondescript men with greying hair wearing dark suits and stern faces: Julian Lewis, recently shorn of the Conservative whip, Labour’s Kevan Jones and Stewart Howie of the SNP.
The venue, too, was pure Tinker, Tailor: a darkly lit library off Pall Mall lined with well-thumbed volumes. Battered leather chairs. Lime-green curtains swiped firmly shut.
It was as though at any moment George Smiley might stroll in, remove his trilby and spark up a filterless Senior Service.
But then there was always likely to be a strong flavour of drama and intrigue to the Intelligence and Security Committee’s long-awaited report on Russia.
Drama: Intelligence and Security committee members, from left, Stewart Hosie, Julian Lewis and Kevan Jones during Tuesday’s meeting
Nine months we’ve had to wait for its 18-month investigation into Moscow’s meddling to be published. Jeffrey Archer completes a couple of best-selling pot-boilers and half a dozen self-publicity tours in less time.
The Prime Minister was behind the publication’s delay, something at which Jones was eager to voice his displeasure.
With Lewis – the committee’s controversially appointed new chairman – so new to his position, it was Jones and Hosie who did all the talking.
For the next hour, no cliche went amiss. We heard how the Government had ‘taken its eye off the ball’ over the Russian threat, how it had been reluctant to touch the issue of electoral interference with a ‘ten-foot barge pole’, and so was ‘still playing catch-up’.
Hosie was the more intense of the two. He wore cruel specs and spoke in long, overly ornate sentences. There was a slightly fastidious air about him. He gave off strong vibes of a man who colour codes his sock drawer.
On the Russkies, he was unstinting. They were an ‘all-encompassing security threat’ fuelled by ‘paranoia of the West’, who were ‘desperate to be seen as a resurgent power’. I don’t know where the Hosie family is holidaying this summer but it’s safe to say it won’t be the Urals.
Some of the report’s juiciest offcuts concerned wealthy oligarchs, whom successive governments – Jones said – had ‘welcomed with open arms’. He described how they had used the capital ‘like a laundromat’ to clean their dirty money, aided and abetted by PR firms and estate agents happy to accept their ill-gotten cash.
Were there a few damp armpits among Knightsbridge’s property sharks yesterday? Certainly should have been over in the House of Lords when Hosie claimed there were a number of peers with ‘major interests’ in Russia. Which ones? ‘That’s all I’m going say.’ Bor-ring!
Questions from the media were agonising. Half the queries were inaudible. Laura Kuenssberg from the BBC sounded like she was speaking through an old British Rail tannoy.
The Intelligence committee meeting held on Tuesday ‘was pure Tinker; Tailor’, writes Henry Deedes in reference to John le Carre’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, pictured above in the adapted film by the same name
Being the Intelligence and Security Committee, you’d think they’d have the technology working. Perhaps it was hacked.
The Guardian asked whether any links had been discovered between the Russians and Brexit donor Arron Banks ahead of the EU referendum. Jones replied the only reference in the report to Banks was in a footnote.
Cue radio silence. Uh-oh. The Guardian and other anti-Brexit zealots are adamant wealthy Banks and the Russians are in cahoots. Informing them otherwise is almost crueller than telling a child that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
More titters when a reporter from north of the border asked about the report’s criticism of Moscow propaganda channel Russia Today. Did that make Hosie’s old boss – and ex-RT presenter – Alex Salmond a de facto Russian agent? Hosie replied that they were not going to make criticisms of individual presenters.
After remaining largely silent throughout, Lewis piped up at the end to have a final moan about the delay in publishing the report. It must never happen again, he said, adding that the sooner relations between the Government and the committee improve, the better.
Mr Lewis has been committee chairman for less than a week. I suppose we must marvel at the speed at which he’s discovered his self-importance.