Hang on. Boris seems to have said a Conservative thing.

[Burney]

Perhaps you are right. It’s just an increasingly common theme as one reads through his work; his message, if there is one, is ‘a plague on both your house’.

I accept that there's a certain amount of jaundice, but I think even with that he acknowledges that we aren't the ones who drug people, put them on planes, take them to the depths of the Ljubjanka, torture them and then shoot them in the back of the head.

[Sir C]

I accept that there's a certain amount of jaundice, but I think even with that he acknowledges that we aren't the ones who drug people, put them on planes, take them to the depths of the Ljubjanka, torture them and then shoot them in the back of the head.

True. He always made the inquisitors sound pleasingly sinister, though.

[Burney]

True. He always made the inquisitors sound pleasingly sinister, though.

You will note, of course, that I’ve inadvertently managed to frame Smiley’s redemptive arc in ridiculously Catholic terms?

You can take the boy out of the Church...