Episode Info
- Season21
- Episode5
Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
James Naughtie
James Naughtie is one of the BBC's longest-serving political presenters who has covered every United States and United Kingdom election since the 1990s.
Episode Summary
In this week's episode, we talk to one of the BBC's longest-serving political presenters, James Naughtie, who has covered every United States and United Kingdom election since the 1990s. We hear his observations on the recent implosion of the Scottish National Party, the stunning downfall of Nicola Sturgeon, one of the longest-running political leaders in the UK, and the 2024 American presidential election and why he thinks Donald Trump appeals to the electorate. Naughtie is one of many journalists who have written espionage thrillers, so our resident spymaster, Sir Richard Dearlove, gives his verdict on what these novels get right and wrong. Sir Richard reacts to Israel's landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's controversial judicial overhaul plan.
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Mcfarlane: You're listening to One Decision. I'm your host, Julia McFarlane.
Dearlove: And I'm Richard Dearlove, former chief of British intelligence, otherwise known as MI6.
Mcfarlane: Together, Richard and I look at the key strategic choices and decisions that have global impact. We hear from the key decision makers, players, and experts how they arrive at the choices they face and how they impact us all. This week, we have a wonderful conversation with veteran BBC broadcaster James Naughtie. He's one of the most familiar voices you can hear on the radio in the UK, and we're talking to him about the recent meltdown of the Scottish National Party that you may have seen last year, as well as his observations on the upcoming US election. He's anchored, I think, on 10 American elections so far and every British election since the nineties. So he has some very fascinating insights on those two big elections coming up this year. And he's also been busy writing spy thrillers. So Richard, you obviously had a lot to talk to him about. But first, some important news developments in Israel this week that I wanted to hear your thoughts on Richard, And namely that Supreme Court ruling that some observers in the country, and I quote a former Supreme Court judge here, the most important ruling since the foundation of the state. Now, what happened was the Supreme Court overturned a law that was right at the heart of Netanyahu's judicial reforms. Remember those that the nation was protesting against earlier in 2023. And so the judges have thrown out one of those laws that aimed at limiting the court's own powers. And they said that it would severely damage Israel's democracy. Richard, how problematic do you think that ruling is for Netanyahu right now as he primarily deals with a war against the Palestinians?
Dearlove: Well, it's a really big deal politically in Israel, and it is a significant blow, I think, to Netanyahu's political position. Look, it was always massively controversial. We saw the huge demonstrations against this law that were mounted across all the major towns in Israel. And the people that I know, or the one or two people I've talked to about it, okay, I won't hide the fact, sort of senior Mossad, retired senior Mossad officers, they were generally outraged by what Netanyahu was trying to do. So the fact that you have a clear court ruling which knocks the law down and re-establishes a clear separation of powers, a clear role for the judiciary which is not compromised by Netanyahu's attempts to sideline them in certain political situations is huge. Coming on top of the catastrophe of October 7, the fact that the intelligence failure, to an extent, is going to be blamed on Netanyahu, or let's say Netanyahu's management of Hamas and the Hamas issue and the whole Gaza issue, and it looks now as though there was a certain complacency about that in his entourage and in Netanyahu himself. So you've now got two major strikes against him and you know in baseball terms I don't think we necessarily need a third one. His innings looks to me extremely powerless and he's coming, you know, to the end of his political life. But let's face it, Netanyahu is a political cat with nine lives, He's survived the most extraordinary situations already, and maybe there's some way he'll string along and keep going, but I doubt it.
Mcfarlane: I think that's a really good point. We are certainly nearing the end of Netanyahu's political life, but the question is which life? As you say, he's like a cat, he's got nine lives. Which particular life is he at the end of? I think for our listeners to know Israel, quite like the UK has no written constitution, but they don't even have an upper house. So the stakes were incredibly high.
Dearlove: Well, think, you know, they're in a very parlous and difficult position. You know, they've got a huge problem in the West Bank. They've got an unfinished war in Gaza and it's going slowly, and to achieve Netanyahu's stated objective is a very big ask. You have got problems with the Houthis, which have international ramifications in terms of the safety of ships going into the Red Sea through the Bab al-Mandab, and you've got a whole range of difficulties. And it doesn't look to me as though Netanyahu politically in the medium term is well equipped to cope with them. No one's going to turn the government over in the middle of fighting in Gaza. But as soon as Gaza reaches some sort of destination, some sort of conclusion, then I think watch out for very significant political initiatives.
Mcfarlane: Let's turn now to our guest this week, James Naughtie. Now he'll be very familiar to listeners in the UK who hear him regularly on the BBC. But for our international listeners, a brief introduction. For a long time, he was one of the main presenters of the BBC's flagship radio news show, the Today programme. He is Scottish, in fact, from the same area as myself. And so will be filling us in on the dramatic turn of events in Scottish politics in the last year. Now dramatic and Scottish politics, even I can admit, have rarely been caught in the same sentence until in late 2022 when events started to unfold that would lead to this stunning unraveling of the political career of one of our most successful leaders in decades, Nicola Sturgeon, who announced her sudden resignation last spring, just weeks after insisting in broadcast interviews that she was nowhere near done. But apart from being a keen observer of Scottish politics, Jim's also anchored BBC coverage of US elections for decades. And so we talked to him about his thoughts on 2024 and the upcoming race for the White House as well. And lastly, in recent years, since stepping back from the anchor seat, Jim has been writing spy novels. So Richard will get your thoughts on that and the long running trend of journalists writing about spies, what they get wrong and what they actually get right. Richard, you've known Jim a long time. I love this conversation so much. He's such a thoughtful observer. And of course, these days it seems like politics everywhere is so unstable and volatile and he's witnessed so many changes in the years that he's been doing his job. I mean, listeners probably don't realize unless they follow UK politics closely, what a big deal the implosion of the SNP is.
Dearlove: It's not just an issue that relates to Scotland and Scottish independence or the movement for Scottish independence, it really seemingly affects the next UK general election because Labour, who as it were leading in the polls, need to capture a significant number of Scottish seats, which traditionally they always held, but they've lost them over the last decade to the SNP, to the Nationalists. But you know since the implosion of the SNP as Julia's described it, there is now a very strong prospect of Labour getting back a number, they won't get more back but they will get back I think some of the urban seats in Glasgow in particular which you know the SNP has as it were walked into over the last five to seven years. So you know this is going to weigh heavily in 2024. Rishi Sunak is obliged to call a British general election because it's got to be done, I think, the end of the year more or less, or maybe it's January 2025 is his absolute deadline, and no one has ever run that late. So probably we can have a general election in September, October, November in that period, and watch what happens in the Scottish seats. That's, and it's really a big deal for the shape of British politics for the next five to ten years.
Mcfarlane: Richard, I couldn't have summed it up better myself. Let's get to the conversation.
INTERVIEW: JAMES NAUGHTIE
Naughtie: Look. I think anybody who's spent a journalistic life dealing in part, at least, with Scottish politics and the politics of the United Kingdom as a nation over the last forty plus years, really would be bound to come to the conclusion that nothing is static. There's a question as to whether the devolutionary arrangement between Scotland and Westminster at the center of power remains something along the lines of what it is at the moment or is perhaps deepened in some way with more powers going to Edinburgh, or whether it goes radically towards some kind of independent solution. We just don't know what's going to happen there. But, you know, the fundamental thing before we move on to your next point on this, the rather obvious one to anyone sitting here and watching politics at the moment, which is that the nationalist bandwagon has come to, if not a shuddering halt, certainly has hit a very, very big bump in the road for all kinds of internal problems, which I'll discuss if you want. But the SNP, the Nationalist Party, for the first time really in more than twenty years does not seem to be inexorably on the rise and indeed is in, for the moment anyway, a retreat. The spoils being taken by the Labour Party and in turn that makes it, I think, easier, although it's still not easy, for the UK leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, to hope to have an overall majority at Westminster at the next election. Because I think that instead of having one seat out of the 59 in Scotland, which is what Labour has got at the moment, it's quite likely to have 20 or more.
Dearlove: Recently, I was surprised by this, saw an interview on the internet with one of my successors as the chief of MI6 saying he thought that one of the biggest threats to UK national security was the separation of Scotland, which is a pretty surprising point to make. And it surprised not just me, but a lot of other people. Do you think now that this has definitively gone away? I mean, just looked at at a parochial level, for example, if you take my old service, and maybe we talk about your espionage a bit later, A massive number of the members of it are Scots. Indeed. And they always have been because of, you know, Scotland's international tradition. So, you know, beneath this issue, there's some quite tangled, James Bond, famously half Scottish. Well, there you go. There's some quite tangled and sinister issues.
Naughtie: Well, I don't know about sinister, but tangled certainly. Look. A couple of things. First of all, I agree with you that straight out to say that the biggest, one of the biggest threats to national security is some kind of Scottish independence, I think, is jumping a lot of fences. I mean, if it were to happen, I think it would happen over a long period, and we don't know what form it would take. And I don't think you can jump to that kind of conclusion, first of all. But the other thing I will say is that when you use the word definitively in terms of whether it's gone away or not, I certainly wouldn't say that. And for the following reason, that I think that what has become very clear in Scotland in the last fifteen years particularly, the SNP first took power in the Edinburgh parliament in 2007, have been in power ever since there, Is that among younger Scots, and I mean, let's say people 35, independence is still overwhelmingly popular as a concept. Now the detail is another question. But as a concept, when you go to a university campus in Scotland and say, do you want Scotland to be independent? It is a bit like going on to a campus in 1986 and saying, do you want Nelson Mandela to be released? I mean, it's in the air. But, and it's a very, very big but. The moment, and we saw this in the independence referendum, which was held in 2014, which produced a substantial majority against independence despite the SNP pushing for it and having negotiated with the government to get a referendum. What we saw was the minute that you get into detailed arguments, particularly about currency and the financial implications of who pays for pensions that have to be divided up from the old solid UK and all that kind of thing. Suddenly, this sort of airy fairy feeling about a wonderful independent Scotland starts to take on a slightly more craggy look. And a lot of people, not all by any means, but a lot of people start to edge away from it. And I don't think the SNP have solved that problem yet. And, curiously, although they use Brexit, which they were dead against, as an argument for independence saying, look, Scotland could go back into the arms of the European Union. We'd be welcomed, big question mark there. But anyway, we'd be welcomed with open arms. All that money would come back in, would be part of the family of nations again, all this stuff. There's a slight problem here. The minute you emphasize Brexit, a lot of voters say, well, hang on. We were told that Brexit would be simple. Not only would they deliver great financial benefits, but it would be a very simple decoupling. Now the opponents of independence say, well, if you think uncoupling the UK from its constituent parts is going to be simpler than Brexit, you must be off your nut. And so you say, well, that was five years. It was messy. It was difficult. Did the Brexiteers get what they want? Clearly not, they say. What makes them think that pulling apart the UK, Richard, you made the point about people in your old service coming from right across the UK. I mean, it is an embedded country in a way that is fundamental. You know, every Scottish family, almost without exception, if you go back just a little bit, is a cross border family. I mean, we exist across the border. And I think that the minute you start talking about a serious border, which post Brexit, of course, it would have to be because Scotland's aim would be to be back in the European Union. So there would be a border with Europe between Berwick and Carlisle in the North of England. And people look at Northern Ireland, the difficulties between north and south there as a consequence of Brexit. So the SNP have got a very difficult balancing act in saying Brexit is a good reason for us to push for independence. We didn't go into the detail of this, but there's been huge internal problems inside the SNP, which exacerbated this.
Mcfarlane: Right. I mean, do you think the SNP's inability, I don't think this is unfair of me to say, but do you think their inability to square that circle has perhaps been why the shine has really come off in recent years? Sort of part to that, I do want to ask about Nicola Sturgeon specifically, because I think for countries around Europe and the wider world, I'm sure a lot of people will be familiar with the name Nicola Sturgeon. She's been such a presence on the international stage. I wouldn't be surprised if many of our international listeners would know Nicola Sturgeon and not, for example, Keir Starmer. And I mean, what happened to her? She was, what a stunning political story.
Naughtie: The short answer to your question is I wish I knew. But I can tell you what the outcome was. Look, there has been for nearly three years now, a police investigation in Scotland going on into the finances of the SNP. And the details of that investigation that targets the potential wrongdoing that they've uncovered, we simply don't know. That has not been made public and wouldn't be in the normal course of events until charges are laid, if indeed charges ever are laid. But it did involve, and just to fill this in for people who haven't followed it in detail, it did involve the arrest without charge of Nicola Sturgeon's husband, who was really the chief executive of the party. And Sturgeon herself, seven hours of questioning, no charges. She, of course, is insistent that she's unaware of any wrongdoing and participated in no wrongdoing. Her husband says the same. But clearly, the prosecuting authorities in Scotland, who rather like the French system and unlike the English system, keep a very close eye on police investigations. And given the public nature of this, arresting the recently resigned first minister publicly, taking police officers to the house with spades to dig up the back garden, for goodness sake, it was such a public event that the effect of it, of course, has been seismic. And the problem that the SNP face is one of enormous uncertainty because if there are charges, whatever they are, given what Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell and the treasurer of the party who was also arrested have said, they will deny any wrongdoing absolutely. But if there are charges, there will be a trial. And in all likelihood, it will not be like a Trump trial, which will go off into, you know, the far distance. It would happen fairly smartly. In other words, before the general election. Now in any political party's lexicon, that's a huge problem. And so it's playing out. But look, there's something else here, which is worth saying, and I don't want to get into too much detail about it. But there was an enormous bust up between Nicola Sturgeon, first minister from 2014 until earlier this year, and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, who had been first minister from 2007 to '14. They were bosom buddies. Salmond brought her into the party. He, as it were, trained her up. She was in his shadow as his deputy. They then had a court case involving him, in which he was cleared, involving personal matters, which he denied from the outset. There was an enormous bust up, a real falling out among friends. And I think the difficulty, just to finish on this, the real difficulty they've got is that both Salmond and Sturgeon, whether you're for them or against them, are both extraordinarily potent and talented figures as leaders, quite charismatic in their own way. Of course, they irritate their opponents to kingdom come, but they're very charismatic to their supporters. And I think the SNP thought, well, when Nicola Sturgeon goes, we'll just get another one. We'll find there'll be somebody else. Well, her successor Humza Yousaf, now first minister, elected to that position, of course, without an election in the parliament, just by the party, is not of that caliber, and I think that's widely accepted. And so they've got that on top of it. And, you know, for a long time, the SNP traded on the idea that whether you were for or against independence, you had to admit they were competent. They didn't appear to have that sort of one party state old labour in the West of Scotland feeling, possibly even in some places corrupt, buggins' turn, you know. It was a kind of one party state in Glasgow for years and years and years. The SNP came in and shook all that up, and a lot of people said, oh, well, at least they get things done whether you're for or against independence. The problem with the situation they're in now is people have started to look at the policy outcomes a little more closely and said that in education and health and transport and so on, there are difficulties. So the sheen has really been stripped away. Right. For a long time, they were really sort of geniuses at marketing, essentially. And I think that was sort of the key to their success. And the Labour Party didn't know how to fight back because a lot of younger Labour supporters looked down to London and said, we're facing a generation of conservative government because the Labour Party is sort of disappearing in the years when Jeremy Corbyn led it. There was absolutely no chance it was gonna win a UK general election. If you were a left leaning young voter in Scotland, you could believe quite easily, although I think it's a slightly naive interpretation, but you could believe quite easily that the SNP offered you a kind of social democratic on the European model way out. And so you would be quite happy to go down that road even if you didn't like the details of independence. I think that has been set on fire now as an argument. And if Labour can come up with an alternative, a deeper form of devolution, you know, powers devolved from Westminster, but not the absolute power of self determination. I think a lot of people who have voted SNP for, you know, two or three decades now will go back home to the Labour Party, which after all dominated Scottish politics for the forty years until the nineteen nineties.
Dearlove: I was just going to interpose a question, and, you know, I go to Edinburgh a fair amount because my daughter lives up there and you know we've had some Scottish friends but what has struck me over the past four or five years is the sheer unpleasantness of aspects of Scottish politics. And I certainly know a number of who I thought were dyed in the wool Scots who sold up and moved south because they just couldn't stand it.
Naughtie: No. I think that's true. Look. People talk about this a great deal. I think there is a slightly harsh side on the independence side of the argument, which is reciprocated. And I think in that sense, it has been divisive. I think there's been a politics that's become rather, you know, whose side are you on? It's not as catastrophically divisive as the situation we see in the United States at the moment where, you know, the congressional parties have just drifted apart so that publicly they can't be seen to be talking to each other, which was never the case thirty, forty years ago. Now it's not as ugly as that. You don't get the rhetoric which is hyped up on the, you know, on the scale that you see in the States. But some of it is pretty bad, and I think the sense of air going out of the balloon is palpable. And I think one of the things that inevitably happens when you get a party which has been on a roll for years and increasing in numbers and, you know, all powerful and so on. The minute that it starts to seem to be human like everybody else, feet of clay, then all sorts of stuff which people didn't really talk about starts to be talked about. And one of the things I think is, you know, if you like the ugly undercurrent of rhetoric that an independence nationalist divide obviously opens up because you start to get, you know, anti-English rhetoric and so on. Now it was always Nicola Sturgeon's determination to try to say that she would never have any time for that. She didn't like it. She thought it had no place in her party. Her opponents always said, well, that's not the way that it looks if you're on the ground campaigning against the SNP. I mean, I think there are probably pretty horrible examples right across the spectrum. But it did certainly raise the temperature. There's no doubt. And the fact that the SNP had gone slightly off the boil means that except on the fringes with, you know, pretty extreme people, the atmosphere has cooled quite a bit.
THE US ELECTION AND AMERICAN DIVISION
Mcfarlane: Jim, as someone who's anchored every US presidential election since 1988, I wanted to ask you about the situation we find ourselves in the US. And I just want to read out something that you said in your recent radio series, Letter to America. You wrote, For older Americans, the simple contours of the Cold War episode must evoke a certain nostalgia. The world seemed straightforwardly divided between East and West, democracy on one side and communism on the other. The transatlantic alliance was unbreakable because it had to be. How different it seems in 2020, that 2020 was back when you were recording this. And I just want to quickly note, it's unsurprising that you've chosen to set your latest thriller in the background of the Cold War. So perhaps there's a little nostalgia that you feel for that period. But I wanted to just ask what you made of the division, the tribalism, the instability, the I hate to use the word unprecedented, but unprecedented situation we have with former president Trump who's in the dock, may be running for president from jail and may even still win.
Naughtie: Well, I think there are two things. There is the Trump personality, which, of course, is extraordinary. I mean, here is a man who describes himself as a friend of Kim Jong-un, the dictator of North Korea, as a great admirer of president Xi who, as he puts it, keeps 1,400,000,000 people under his thumb or under his foot. I can't remember which the phrase was. Well, yes, that's certainly true. And who says that he was the apple of Putin's eye. Now and then goes on to describe the president of his own country as a lying son of a bitch. Now you don't need to go any further in saying that's a president, ex president talking in a way that Americans have never heard an ex president talk before. So he's sui generis. But it always seems to me that the point about Trump that some people on this side of the pond often miss, that Trump didn't create the anger that elected him. He simply gave it a voice. It was there anyway. And I think it had built up for all kinds of reasons, a sense of economic slide, a feeling that the promise of each generation being better off than its predecessors being betrayed or certainly at least not realized, a feeling that the twentieth century, which was Americans culturally, militarily, industrially, was not going to be the same in the twenty first century where it might well be China's. All these things came together. And in a country where you're taught fundamentally that you must always think about yourself and your inheritance, god given, as it's often said, through the constitution and the founding fathers. It's a very, very bitter pill to swallow. And, unfortunately, I think, for the American kind of political system, Trump came along with his animal instinct. I mean, a kind of feral feeling for these parts and complaints and slights that people felt about their national identity. And he turned them into an absolutely fantastic bandwagon. His opponents, of course, would say that it was demagoguery. But whatever happened, he did it against the odds in 2016, as we know. And what we've got is a culmination of this. You know, I first went, and Richard, you'll remember the era very well. I first went as a student. I was still in my teens to America in 1970 and did what we all did and went around in a Greyhound bus and so on and saw the country for the first time and spent a whole, you know, three months there or something. And, of course, it was the height of Vietnam. The height had passed, but it was still embroiled in Vietnam. It was a war that had divided the country, obviously. It had divided generations, young and old. It divided families. It was a fantastically painful episode coming on top of, you know, the chaos of 1968 and the assassination of Kennedy in '63, followed by Watergate immediately afterwards. It was a sense of America falling apart, and people had been told this cannot happen, but it seemed to be happening before their eyes. Well, I thought that you could never imagine the country being so deeply divided as it was during Vietnam, but I think it's more divided now than it was then. And I think that's a measure of the danger that they face because it seems to me intractable and all kinds of reasons for that, the atomization that social media produces, the way the media landscape has changed. They all play a part in it, but it's deeper than that too.
WRITING SPY NOVELS
Mcfarlane: Jim, you recently did a talk with a certain James Comey talking about thrillers, something that you have in common with the former director of the FBI. You both become novelists. Tell us about that and tell us about how you went on to that path.
Naughtie: Well, it was a very interesting conversation because part of it was in public and part of it was recorded onto air, and there was a conversation, which I don't think I would describe as private, but was a much more freewheeling one, you know, without an audience. And, of course, what I wanted to ask him was whether he felt as somebody who has expressed deep distaste for the Trump presidency and deep alarm about the prospect of a comeback, whether he believed that it was his intervention ten days before the 2016 election on the question of Hillary Clinton's emails, that effectively by reopening that question in a way that produced no eventual comeback in terms of legal proceedings. Well, he felt that he'd handed the election to Trump, and his answer was a very uncomfortable answer, I think, for him. He says he thinks about it a lot. Well, I bet he does. But he said that he thinks that he did the right thing at the time. And, of course, clearly, he also said that he believed that she was gonna win anyway. And I think that must be a very pain, in other words, it wasn't gonna change the result of the election. I think that must be a very painful episode. But his thriller, which is not bad at all, actually, is essentially a courtroom mafia story set in New York, where he was a prosecutor before he went to the FBI. And he prosecuted the mob. I mean, that's sort of what, I mean, if you're a DA in the Southern District of New York, I mean, that's what you spend half your time doing. And, you know, he sat across from these beautifully coiffured Italian men and tried to send them down. And this is quite a good story that there's sort of politics involved in it and murder and all the rest of it. But I talked to him about how he did it, and he talked to me about why I did them. It's slightly not exactly a conversation between equals. I mean, he was head of the FBI. I was a mere radio presenter. But this business about going from reality to fiction, because after all, if you tell a story on the BBC, it better be true. Or at least as journalists used to say, well, it was true when I wrote it. You know? Things do change after the fact. But, obviously, we are obliged to perform somersaults to make sure that what we say is justified and as far as we know true. The whole point about making it up is a joyous expedition. And, you know, I was joking with Richard that the one thing that I didn't do quite deliberately when I was producing these three books, of which this is a third, I deliberately didn't get into long conversations with people about the events because they're set in a real background, but not about real events, completely imaginary events, because I feared that then I would start writing a history about the Anglo Irish Agreement of 1985, which is a background to the story I've just written or indeed the story of the now famous British agent in Moscow. And if I talk to people who knew the insides of these things, and I knew people who were involved to some degree, certainly in the Anglo Irish thing. I feared I would have been drawn into worrying about accuracy and making sure, and I didn't. I wanted to make it up as much. It's really quite important, and that was quite a discipline. Funnily enough, I think Comey's book is much closer to the truth than mine is. Mine is pure fantasy. I just think this could have happened. And what I was trying to do is not write about events as such, but write about the people and how they were affected by events and what it must be like. And, Richard, you may recognize this. I mean, it just seems to me that the thing that fascinated me about the central character that I've put in this book is ambassador to Washington. Through various strange things, he's become ambassador, but he was trained and was an operative in your old service originally. That's where he cut his teeth. And one of the interesting things about him is that it seems to me that the most interesting, fulfilling, and important things that he does in his life are the very ones about which he can't tell anybody. And that's a very interesting piece of pressure, which you know very well.
Dearlove: Yeah. Well, if I can just add that, I mean, of course, as you're probably aware, there is a passage of people that interchange or have done in their careers between conventional diplomacy and the intelligence service. So there are quite a few people who fit the paradigm and quite a few people who've reached very senior positions on either side, both as diplomats or as very senior officers. So I think you're making a very cogent point. And I think your point about inventing your books is very, very interesting because I think one of the things that I'm really interested in is if you go back to a period when there was very little about the intelligence community in public domain, there was almost, let's say, a substitution culture. So that when people like Le Carré wrote fiction, a lot of people now believe that actually that isn't really fiction at all, it was what it was really like. And it gives status. And I think that Comey, you know, coming out of the FBI would be almost unavoidable for him not to write something which was based essentially on his experience and knowledge of the inside of the FBI. I bet you there are parallels. I mean I won't give you chapter and verse, but there are a couple of very good authors now writing about British intelligence. And I know when I read those books, that in them, there are my former colleagues' DNA, which has been snipped up and rejoined in different ways, but I could read two pages and say, hey, I don't know who that person is. Then you turn over and he's somebody else because he's injected a bit more of another person's personality into the character.
Naughtie: Yes, yes. Well, there's one whom I know who's written a number, and I think they seem to me to have the crackle of the real thing about them. And, you know, I've got no connection with anybody who, I mean, I talk to anybody inside your old game about it. I mean, I just observed and sort of, you know, obviously have read a lot and so on. I think I know who you're talking about. Yes, in the novels, yes, and I think he's very good. He's very good. His pen name is Alan Judd.
Dearlove: That's correct. People should read his books because they're very good and they're surprisingly authentic and they are novels.
Naughtie: They are. Yes. And I've talked to him about the whole thing as well. I mean, the other thing that fascinates me, you see, is that there is the question of the story. What happens? Would this have happened? Is this credible? And in my story, The Spy Across the Water, the essence of it is that Fleming, as ambassador to Washington, through various chance encounters, meets up with someone with whom he had a secret but trusting relationship when he was doing some work on Ireland or the Irish troubles. And he was called in for various reasons to help with something, And it turned out that they had a professional relationship, shall we say, across the lines. And this comes back to life. Now, the details of it, the, you know, the business of how it has worked and so on, I'm in no position to know what the truth is or not. So I made it up. I thought it was plausible. But what I'm really interested in is how two people like that who've developed a relationship of trust for professional reasons on one side because they believed that it was right to help the other side to try to bring this thing to an end. And on Fleming's part, to walk a dangerous path because this was a very precious insight into what was going on. Now these things are, you can imagine what the pressure on individuals is there. And what I was trying to write a bit is how do people react to this and how when they come together again after all these years at a moment of some sensitivity and crisis, how they work out the balance between their trust for one another and actually their fondness for one another, but their rivalry in protecting their respective interests, which in both cases they're very loyal to. So I mean that's, you know, it's the duality of the whole position, which of course is bound to be fascinating to outsiders. I mean, it just is. Yeah. Well, I recognize what you're describing. I won't go to professionals. No. I bet you do. I mean, the other thing I'm interested in is, you know, Fleming, he's a smoothie. I mean, he's gregarious. He's elegant. You know, he's an intelligent man. He can make a great speech at a diplomatic reception. He can write a telegram that will knock the socks off people back in Whitehall, all these. He can do the job. He can work at it. And he's, you know, he's very bright, and he knows a lot of things. But, of course, in the end, all this gregariousness has to be replaced at times by a very solitary life because it has to be private and indeed secret, even from his family. I mean, not in every detail, but, you know, in the really important bits. And he says to his sidekick, who's a rather nice guy, and Fleming likes him. He's head of station in Washington at a rather young age. Unusual, but Fleming kind of upped him because he liked him. And Fleming thinks that he is what he was like when he was young, when he was 35, and he confides in him. And he says, you know, the thing about solitary men, referring to himself, is that we enjoy being alone together with other solitary men. And it's a very, I don't know. I just find that as a human condition, which is in a sense forced on you, although people choose it. It's very interesting because it puts you in a position that most people don't experience, at least not at that level of seriousness or sensitivity.
Mcfarlane: Jim, is it hard as the author of a spy novel to write a story and develop a central character under the immense hulking shadow of James Bond? I mean, I do note with interest that your character's last name is Fleming after all.
Naughtie: There might have been something unconscious about this, but it certainly wasn't deliberate. I don't know if you're aware of this, Richard, but I was rung up by somebody about a year ago who is a writer and has written on military things, and I think has a considerable knowledge of your old service, who had been asked to write a sort of fictionalized biography of Bond. I mean, a, you know, a proper, this is what it must have been like. And were you aware of this? I think I've heard a bit about it. Yeah. Yes. Well, and the Fleming estate, in the end, as I understand it, I was talking to somebody the other day, sort of put the foot down and said, we're not having it because they're very protective of the genre and so on. I think from their point of view, it's daft, but it's nothing to do with me. I mean, Richard mentioned Le Carré, and I know that he divides very much opinion among your old colleagues. But, you know, that is a hulking presence, not because I don't look at him from the same point of view as you do as to whether his interpretation of betrayal and loyalty and so on is remotely accurate or proportionate. But as a writer, I mean, it is extraordinary stuff. I mean, if you read, you know, Tinker Tailor and Smiley's People and so on, you think, how could anybody do it as well as that? Again, simply as a piece of fiction, not talking about its veracity or verisimilitude, but it's pretty good stuff, I think you would have to admit.
Dearlove: Well, Le Carré for various reasons does drive me rather mad. But I mean, that's mainly because he makes the currency of betrayal the currency of relationships inside my former service, whereas the currency that makes the service function is trust. So he flips the coin. But of course, he flips the coin because you know, books about trust don't make exciting reads whereas about betrayal.
Naughtie: No, but that's true. And I can see how that's, but, you know, I know that he had a dilemma, I think, when he was on some trip to Moscow, I think, quite late on and had the opportunity. And it was presented as a, you know, as an opportunity to meet Kim Philby before his death. See, obviously for any listener who doesn't know, the arch traitor in the forties and fifties. And he declined and he said that it was because, although of course in some ways he would have been perfect to meet him, I mean, we just, what do you make of him? But he just, he couldn't stomach it. Now you may believe that or not, but I think there was an element of feeling that this was somebody who had sold the shop and that really you couldn't, in the end, break bread with him.
Dearlove: Well, you probably know that I had something of a public dispute with Le Carré. Indeed. Which was quite interesting. Because I did an interview at Clifton, the book festival, and discussed his novels. And I certainly, you know, don't sort of detract from his reputation as a brilliant novelist, and we all loved reading his novels. But what I, you know, was concerned about was the way that he subscribed to what I would just call moral equivalence. And you know, in his world, the KGB and SIS were as bad as each other. They were both black dogs. Well, that is what he often wrote, but I think, Jim, you've put your finger on something important. He didn't actually believe that in the end. He did have a sense of what was right and wrong. And I think what I regret is that the dispute we had was conducted in letters and, you know, in interviews. We never actually got the chance, although I had met him several times, to sit down and talk this through, which I would very much have liked to do. And there's no question that he's the preeminent espionage novelist of that period.
Mcfarlane: Jim, I have a contact of mine who may or may not belong to Richard's old world, but he has this theory about journalists who write spy novels and notes that there have been quite a few of them. And that there is this dream inside so many journalists who often find themselves at the pointy end of history and events that they all wish that they had a spy in them. What has stopped them from that was that journalists in the end are all blabbermouthed. And so they end up writing about spies instead of, Not guilty. Not guilty. Could you comment on that?
Naughtie: The first thing is Richard knows me well enough to know I would be absolutely hopeless. I mean, I can't keep my mouth shut for ten seconds. So I would be off.
Mcfarlane: But that's what my contact says. Journalists all make, would all make terrible spies, but they dream of being in the service.
Naughtie: Hang on. It strikes me that between the two trades, put it like this, there is this in common, that they're both driven by insatiable curiosity about people. And that it's working out what's going on behind the eyes. Now that, you know, you may be doing that in some café in Vienna. But if you're watching a prime minister making a speech or some poor sod at a by-election being torn apart, it's the same process. You're trying to get behind the veil. And, of course, there's also the same love and drive to have a piece of information that no one else has got. And that, you know, in that sense, the currency is common, but the life, you know, is entirely different. And just for the record, nobody ever touched me on the shoulder or anything else.
Mcfarlane: Richard, would you have given Jim a job in SIS?
Dearlove: No way.
Naughtie: Exactly. I'm glad to hear it. This is excellent. I want this on the record. No. No. Absolutely. You wouldn't have got a job in the newspaper, so there we are. I don't know. But, anyway.
Dearlove: Yeah. I would have given him a drink at the VMS bar any day of the week.
Naughtie: And I would have reciprocated.
Mcfarlane: That's it for this week's episode of One Decision. We drop new episodes every Thursday. Like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Drop us a line. Tell us your thoughts. What decisions have impacted you and where you live. You can write to us. Our email is 1decision@1decisionpodcast.com. From me and the team, thank you for listening, and see you next time.
