The UK has an eccentric past.
You may think of Dickens as one example, or a poet or charismatic politician. It’s certain there aren’t many places to go if you’re not a larger-than-life figure in our past.
This is all true to form for the past but our present is much different.
We’re not so much performer’s now, or illustrious writers, or exciting adventurer’s, but people with skills and ambition.
The reach for the past however is a tendency that still exists. It persists more strongly in academia than anywhere else. There, in the rarified halls of power of the mind, it’s possible to dream up anything.
The trouble is the fluorescent light bulb has to switch off at some point.
It doesn’t always end up as so.
In my experience there are plenty of dreamers and pretender’s about still these days. They hark back to former times when farms were run off vegetables and stalls had fruit to sell.
It doesn’t work anymore but maybe Hollywood brings it back into view: it might do, just one more time. It doesn’t but there’s no harm in trying, allegedly.
The troubling truth is there is.
In recent times those of us more inclined to secrecy have believed that espionage – or spying, more pertinently – is a worthy cause to fall back on. It’s not as if we don’t do it already (there’s plenty of reason to suspect so), but some of us are not inclined to read the newspapers.
The news of actions abroad and reactions at home don’t reach all of us and it’s suspected that many of us don’t really regard news of anything to be of much worth at all.
It takes the few among us to make a fool of ourselves on this basis alone. It takes fewer to really cause damage.
The story that relates to intelligence in the military is that in recent times folks believed that they could do better.
The point is not we did it anyway and sometimes intelligence is a thankless task, it’s that human ego takes over when nobody is really watching.
This is to mean that ego had not been factored in as a threat where no other one was present.
The old style spy bases of both MI5 and MI6 – both respectively located in London in times past – became a source and focal point of interest. They’re both small buildings, but then why shouldn’t they be – a spy is supposed to be out in the field, and not closeting himself in, away from the cold.
They became locations of a resurgence of fake interest in spying.
The errors that resulted from this type of exuberance are noted in the public record of events in London, but thankfully they’ve gone down and not up. It wouldn’t work to be known for such foolishness.
