UK’s China Spying Scandal Is a  ‘Slow Horses’ Plot

Life imitates art, sometimes too well. The Soviet double agent Kim Philby was so impressed by the work of John le Carre that he asked to meet the doyen of British spy novelists in Moscow in the late 1980s. Le Carre declined. The China spy scandal currently gripping UK politics and media is again redolent of a fictional milieu — but this time the action resembles more closely the chaotic world of Slow Horses, where sloppiness, confusion and infighting are the norm.

Le Carre’s most celebrated works depicted a declining 1970s Britain that still boasted some competence and bite. George Smiley, his outwardly unremarkable but cunning and ruthless hero, unmasks a mole at home and ultimately blackmails his Soviet counterpart into defecting. It’s a world of intrigue, but one bounded by the familiar guardrails of the Cold War. Slow Horses, a series of novels by Mick Herron adapted into an Emmy award-winning Apple TV series, inhabits a more unmoored and nihilistic universe. It centers on a group of MI5 rejects who have been banished to a decrepit London office warren called Slough House, from where they carry out often inept operations for unclear purposes. The 21st century technology is slicker, the action and dialogue faster paced, and the relationships more fractious (particularly with their MI5 overlords) — but the meaning behind all the sound and fury is often obscure.