Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller is the head of MI5. The name is plainly a cover. Her real name is 'F'. She wears large earrings which contain plastic explosive and her big hair conceals miniature missile silos. Her predecessor was Stella Rimington. She is an obsessive tea-drinker and - see my review of her memoirs here - cannot write to save her life. Rimington was recruited by somebody who whispered, 'Psst.... Do you want to be a spy?' Daggers are concealed in the toes of her sensible shoes and the tiles of her personal Scrabble set can be assembled into a high-powered rifle in 87 seconds. After reading Rimington's dreadful prose with its petit bourgeois fussines - this was soon after 9/11 - my first thought was that we were all doomed. Surely, I thought, we need somebody called 'X' whose existence is officially denied and who kills bad people with a heavy, mahogany-handled service revolver when he is not translating Thucydides into Wolof. Now I am not so sure. I wouldn't like to meet Dame Eliza - sorry 'F' - in a dark alley. And Rimington could extract a confession from me in minutes just by reading me a few pages from her book. So send in the scary ladies, I say. They are the one secret weapon we have left.
'F' says there are 30 current Al Qaeda-linked terrorist plots in Britain with 1600 individuals involved. I, for one, wouldn't dare disbelieve her.
Friday, November 10, 2006
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
And if anyone would know the Al Qaeda numbers, it'd be the head of the recruitment policy.
ReplyDeleteI see Ms Rimmington took little notice of your advice in the memoir review to get a ghost writer. She's since penned two novels and had them published - I wonder if her writing has improved with practice.
ReplyDeleteOnly yesterday, I saw an enormous pile of Ms. Rimington's novels in the bargain basement of my local bookshop. They'd been discounted multiple times and still couldn't get rid of them for a pound. I did wonder if they were trying to shift them to make room for Blunkett's memoirs.
ReplyDeleteHas Modesty Blaise come back to work for British intelligence?
ReplyDeleteIf only we had Thucydides to analyse our existential war on terror.
ReplyDeletePerhaps then we would have some true insight that could help us throught this testing time.