Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

It is my considered opinion that for Britain and Europe, and for liberal democracy across the entire world as a whole, Britain’s departure from the European Union in the time of Donald Trump, and Britain’s consequent unqualified dependence on the United States in an era when the US is heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism, is an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none.

emetic.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The two leaders are in Helsinki giving a joint press conference. They are standing shoulder to shoulder before the flags of both their nations. Trump, speaking as if to order, is disowning the findings of his own intelligence services, which have come up with the inconvenient truth that Russia interfered in the 2016 American presidential election. Putin smiles his proud jailer’s smile.

Somehow Ed and I grope our way to our Stammtisch and sit. A commentator reminds us, lest we have forgotten, that only yesterday Trump declared Europe to be his enemy and for good measure trashed NATO. Where am I in my mind, as Prue would say? Part of me is with my former agent Arkady. I am replaying his description of Trump as Putin’s shithouse cleaner. I am remembering that Trump ‘does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself’. Another part of me is with Bryn Jordan in Washington, cloistered with our American colleagues as they stare incredulously at the same act of presidential treachery. So where is Ed in his mind? He is bone still. He has retreated into himself: just deeper and further than I have seen him go. At first his mouth remains open in disbelief. His lips slowly come together and he licks them, then absentmindedly wipes them with the back of his hand. But even when old Fred the barman, who has his own sense of proprieties, switches us over to a cluster of frenzied women cyclists racing round a bowl, Ed’s eyes don’t leave the screen. ‘It’s a replay,’ he pronounces at last in a voice throbbing with discovery. ‘It’s 1939 all over again. Molotov and Ribbentrop, carving up the world.’ This was too rich for my blood and I told him so. Trump might be the worst President America has ever had, I said, but he was no Hitler, much as he might wish to be, and there were plenty of good Americans who weren’t going to take this lying down. At first h...

‘Yeah, well,’ he agreed in the faraway voice of a man coming round from an anaesthetic. ‘There were plenty of good Germans too. An...