The ambivalent, paranoid John le Carré vibe is well suited to the present moment in a multipolar world — the feeling that previous certainties can’t be relied upon, and everything is slowly going to the dogs. The narrator in the Smiley books isn’t sure that the two sides fighting the Cold War are so very different: the West is capable of atrocities, betrayals, and fumbling cock-ups, just as its enemies are. These days, the logic works in reverse: maybe the West isn’t as bad as we thought; or maybe the alternative is worse. Either way, there is moral ambiguity and decay everywhere we look.

Like me, it seems that le Carré’s youngest son likes to live in the downbeat world his father created, and now hewants more people to join him there. Last year, Nick Harkaway – already a successful science fiction writer – published what is known in the trade as a “continuation novel” called Karla’s Choice. This filled in some of what George Smiley and other members of the Circus were getting up to in the mid-Sixties, between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This week, it was reported that Harkaway is encouraging other writers to bring “new stories into this same world”; for, he says, “the world of Smiley is richer and wider than the original books ever had a chance to show”.

Harkaway’s invitation is to be found in a book accompanying a new exhibition about his father, which opened this week at the Bodleian library. Oxford is the obvious place for such an event: Smiley’s “spiritual home”, as le Carré put it; the city where he himself spied on far-Left groups as a student, and where his double agent, Bill Haydon, first turned towards communism. Former intelligence officer Connie Sachs still sits there in her shabby front room, offering reminiscences of Moscow in exchange for whiskey. Harkaway says he is trying to “open the gates” to such cloistered places, adding that since he has already “claimed the Smiley universe, the next person doesn’t have to be so afraid”.

In the original Smiley universe, barriers to entry — social, political, physical — loomed large. At the end of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, protagonist Alec Leamas dies trying to climb over the Berlin wall. A psychoanalyst would presumably have a field day with a son who jumps over the wall of the story-world belonging to his celebrated father, then opens the gates from inside to invaders — albeit that Harkaway says le Carré “implicitly” authorized him to do so before he died. Or maybe it’s just an extension of the passionate anti-Brexit stance Harkaway has taken elsewhere, again echoing concerns of his famous parent. No literary landscape is really an island; incomers can only do good; there is enough land here for all.

Karla’s Choice is certainly an entertaining ventriloquist act. There’s a familiar sort of plot, prioritizing individual loyalty to people rather than to nations. There are the trademark bits of compressed dialog, heavy with inhouse spy jargon, bluff schoolboy jokes, and English self-consciousness: what William Boyd has called the “Pall Mall clubman’s patois”. And there are also the weirdly emotional monologues, during which otherwise repressed characters suddenly unburden themselves inexplicably upon their embarrassed confessor, Smiley, who simply blinks a lot and purses his lips sepulchrally in return.

But there are also differences. I spotted a few anachronisms when I read Harkaway’s book: a reference to someone “feeling his religion”, and to the state exercising “coercive control”. More importantly, as others have noted, there is an absence of the biographical preoccupations that keep bubbling under in actual le Carré plotlines: real-life fury towards a feckless conman father, a mother who abandoned him at the age of five, humiliations wrought by the English public school system. In Harkaway’s telling, for instance, Smiley’s wife, Ann, is comprehensible and even sympathetic. She is not acting as she does in the original books, like a sadistic nymphomaniac cartoon. Smiley’s stuffed shirt colleagues are not slyly goading him about the state of his marriage on a daily basis. There isn’t the same feeling that the people around you could maliciously betray you at any time.

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In short: without his father’s simmering psychological intensity to justify the latent melodrama, Harkaway’s book at times gets perilously close to camp pastiche. The son may have his own Oedipal issues — and don’t we all — but they are different from the father’s. And they make for a different sort of imaginary landscape, even if Cambridge Circus and the Bodleian are still present in both.

You might say: so what? New Miss Marple or James Bond books come out all the time. Continuation novels are just a lucrative version of fan-fiction, and many readers enjoy the results. And anyway, hasn’t le Carré’s vision been reinterpreted by the performances of Alec Guiness and his fellow actors in the masterly TV series from the Seventies and Eighties? Indeed, isn’t the writing of a continuation novel just another kind of adaptation? According to Harkaway, le Carré himself found Guinness’s performance “so overwhelming that he could no longer hear the character, only the actor”. Why then worry about new versions of old characters on the page?

But it’s one thing to interpret a character made of words for a visual medium; or even just to imaginatively slot the presence of George Smiley into your afternoon walk on Hampstead Heath. In both cases, you are making the original creation more vivid, and paying proper tribute to its owner. In contrast, by treating literary characters as things to be passed around to other writers and placed in interesting new positions, effectively you are implying their creator’s achievement was pretty limited to start with: most of the aesthetic value concentrated in parts to be extracted, and not in the unique and irreplaceable whole.

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Naturally enough, Harkaway doesn’t see it this way. He gives us a vision of a fictional universe that is concrete and specific like the real one, containing “richer and wider” detail than his father could ever have conveyed on his own; as if both authors were like historians, giving their readers a partial glimpse of people and events already in existence. But in fact, a better analogy for what he is doing is with the forging of oral folk tales, each new teller adding to a collectively wrought world. The characters in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy now have personal histories that include the embellishments of Harkaway, albeit that le Carré wrote that book shortly after Harkaway was born. If additional authors take up the invitation and place Smiley, Guillam, and co in fresh predicaments, their versions too will retrospectively inflect the narrative whole. And in theory, the contribution of the very latest skillful tale-teller might conceivably be as great as that of the first one — assuming you can even remember his name.

In practice, of course, it is unlikely to go this way. Not feeling a baleful parental eye upon them, other writers are less likely to be as fastidious as Harkaway in trying to get the characters right — though of course, AI will always be there to help. But in any case, what is “getting the characters right” once you have downgraded the originator to a mere collaborator in a shared project? In opening wide the gates of his father’s creation, Harkaway has invited potential vandalism, by people who don’t properly understand the culture there. Poor Smiley — it seems he really can’t rely on anything staying the same.

Wading through similar messages from Labour shadow ministers, aides and the like, I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People as the disbelieving Foreign Office mandarin, Saul Enderby, questions whether George Smiley has finally discovered the great Soviet spy chief Karla’s one lethal vulnerability. “It’s not all a wicked Bolshie plot, George, to lure us to our ultimate destruction,” Enderby asks. “You’re sure of that?”

This seems to be the instinct which still lies deep in the Labour soul as it looks at the Tories with incredulity. Can they really be this bad? Surely it must all be some kind of wicked plot? “I’m afraid we’re no longer worth the candle, Saul,” replies Smiley, wearily, trying to reassure his political master. Something similar is true here. For Sunak and the Conservative Party, it seems the burden of power is no longer worth the effort to maintain it. Brexit, lockdown, Partygate and Liz Truss have combined to drain the party’s spirit. The challenges facing the country have simply proved too great. Exhausted and bewildered, they now stumble towards the end knowing they’ve lost, but unsure quite what to make of it.

For the Labour Party’s electoral strategists, the great danger in all this is a sudden loss of discipline. Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney do not want to become the great rope-a-dopes of modern political history, surging forward, arms swinging, looking for a knockout that never comes. And so, the strategy is to stick to the plan they have been working on for months. “Do not give the Tories the election they want,” Starmer’s campaign coordinator Pat McFadden likes to say. This, in other words, means do not make spending promises you don’t know how to pay for which will allow the Conservative Party to run “tax bombshell” headlines. But more than that — don’t allow the Conservative Party any attack line against you. Play it safe. Stand for “change”, but ensure it is not unfunded or unsettling.

The danger in such a defensive strategy is that it leaves voters feeling as though there is nothing to choose from. Introducing Keir Starmer at Labour’s first-day rally in Gillingham — Conservative majority, 15,000 — the deputy leader Angela Rayner revealed the party’s own concerns about this charge gaining traction over the next six weeks: “Politicians aren’t all the same,” she declared. “There is a choice at this election.” That is not the kind of thing you say if you don’t think it is what people are already thinking.

Labour is right to be concerned about this. In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn seemed to tap into a pent up desire for something different and almost swept Theresa May from power. In 2019, it was Boris Johnson who became the candidate best placed to take on the broken establishment, even if he was already prime minister. Rishi Sunak today cannot do the same; he is simply too much of an establishment creature. But what if some other figure manages to do so at the margins of this story? Richard Tice, say, or George Galloway. There are always sinkholes out there.

In one sense, this is not the campaign Starmer and McSweeney expected to be running when they secured the Labour party leadership back in 2020. Back then, they were facing a populist street fighter in Johnson who, in McSweeney’s analysis, was following the successful populist-right playbook, which “talked Left but acted Right” on the economy.

To deal with this, McSweeney believed the old Labour strategies — whether Blair’s “radical centrism” or Corbyn’s Left-wing populism — were doomed to fail. In one sense McSweeney’s answer was simply to do the opposite and talk Right but act Left. Traditional Tory aspirations would be adopted — home ownership, lower taxes and the like — but underneath there would be a much greater focus on boosting the incomes of the average worker and the real economy than was ever the case under New Labour. This, in effect, remains the Starmer-McSweeney strategy for government, should they get there.

Yet, the fact is the Conservative Party abandoned its “talk Left, act Right” Tory populism two years ago, when they removed Boris Johnson. Since then they have swung from madness to technocracy. Starmer’s sensible demeanour can no longer be contrasted against the wildness of Johnson’s or the recklessness of Truss, but must do so against the emptiness of Sunak. There is a charisma hole at the heart of this campaign and the danger for Labour is that something will fill it.

Writing a book about the 2017 general election, I remember being struck by the conclusion reached by one veteran campaign insider. “She’s not as good a candidate,” he said of Theresa May, as she struggled to cope with the demands of a national campaign. “She has never run for anything before other than her own constituency. No one could’ve been ready at such short notice, but especially not if you’ve never run before.” This is true for both Sunak and Starmer today. We will swiftly find out who can deal with the pressure.

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The difficulty for Starmer will be to rebut the accusation that he really isn’t offering much of a change — for in the basic sense it is true. The Labour Party, after all, has accepted the Conservative Party’s spending plans and so for the first few years, at least, the “change” the party is offering can only be marginal: one of personality, competence, discipline, character. These things matter of course, but they are not structural. The house will continue crumbling, and Labour can only continue to plaster over the cracks up until it finds a way of earning more money.

But what if real change is impossible? Perhaps the Tories are stumbling, dazed and disorientated towards their annihilation, not because they are inherently incompetent and useless, though that may also be the case, but because the challenges we face are now simply too big for the tired old ideas of our political class.

It is hard for political parties to make this point, naturally. It’s not a comfortable message for any voter to hear. In Le Carré’s novel, Smiley notes how Saul Enderby “did not care to be reminded of the limitations of British grandeur”. But nor do many of us, beyond the usual superficial grumbles. No-one wants to hear, for example, that for deep structural reasons beyond our control we cannot ever be a rich country again.

Look at the challenge that a future Starmer government faces. Taxes, already at their highest level in decades, will have to rise because nobody believes the spending plans offered by either party are deliverable. But this isn’t the worst of it. Both parties are pretending that we can decarbonise our entire economy and re-industrialise it at the same time. In reality, of course, if we are to use the energy transition to re-industrialise our economy, it will require cheap polluting energy in the short term, protectionist tariffs against competition, and more government spending. And we could do all of this and still get blown out of the water by China.

We have been here before. In 1964, Harold Wilson came to power promising to sweep away the tired and out of date Conservative Party which had spent 13 years in power. Twelve years later, having won two elections, lost a third and won a fourth, he left power a broken man, tearful and spent. As he prepared to leave, he was asked about his plans. His answer was grimly revealing. He would retire to “think about the problems facing the country”.

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Starmer and McSweeney believe that part of Labour’s problem since its last victory, in 2005, is that its leaders stopped “narrating the changes” that were affecting voters. The party stopped trying to explain the great trends in the world and how the government was reacting to protect people’s standard of living.

If this is the test of leadership, the most successful prime minister since 1945 is certainly Margaret Thatcher. She had a diagnosis of Britain’s ills, proferred a course of treatment, claimed to have the iron discipline to see it through, and owned the results she liked. Whether she actually transformed the economy and arrested the country’s decline, as her supporters believe, is far less clear. Another way of telling the Thatcher story is that she left office with Britain in recession, inflation again running too high, monetarism abandoned and the currency locked into the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Something similar could be said of Tony Blair. Even his critics would admit that he “narrated the change” that was happening in the world, which lay beyond Britain’s control. Blair’s story was that globalisation was happening — and a good thing. The future was open and liberal and European. Some industries would die, but the free movement of goods, people, capital and ideas would leave Britain better off and the winners of this great global revolution would vote Labour. In the end, Blair departed a few months before the great financial crisis blew up the economic foundations of the political settlement he had constructed.

The likelihood is that whatever narrative Starmer alights on to explain the great changes happening today, they will at some point be shown to be inadequate. But no prime minister escapes this fate. Right now, the important thing for him is to win. And given the state of the Tory party, he probably doesn’t even have to explain what change he represents in order to do that come July 4.

“I want his body, George, hear me?” Enderby tells Smiley in the end. “Hand me a live, talking Karla and I’ll accept him and make my excuses later.” For now this is Labour’s instinct too. Kill the Tories and think about events later. But Enderby had a final warning for Smiley: “Don’t you ever go thinking they’ll go away.”

The first of the books, The Secret Heart, is written by le Carré’s former mistress who goes by her own rather splendid nom de plume, Suleika Dawson. It’s a brisk read, filled with gossip and acute observations about her subject, who seemingly alternated between insecurity and arrogance, kindness and selfishness — like most humans, but especially most writers.

It’s also a book with a fair amount of sex bits, which are generally boring, as sex bits almost always are in books (unless you’re in the first flush of puberty on holiday in Greece and have stumbled across a Jackie Collins paperback in the beach house your dad has rented, in which case they are thrilling and then, eventually, exhausting). But, given what she says, I seriously doubt le Carré would have complained:

“This was sex as I had never encountered it before, the sex I had determinedly pursued all my adult life, the sex I truly believed I had always been enjoying, until then. But this was different from anything before, by an order of magnitude. This was sex that only the hero and heroine can have; sex for the cameras, sex for the Olympics, sex for the gods.”

Crumbs. As well as sex there is also a fair bit of lying, which is inescapable given le Carré was a married man. He treats having a mistress like being back in MI6. Money for their holidays is taken from a slush fund (known as the “reptile fund”, as in his novels). The travel agents he uses to book their sojourns are the same “discreet” ones he used back in the day; he buys a flat for their trysts that he christens their “safe house” and so on. All of which is, in of itself, slightly sad, reeking of a middle-aged man living out the fictional life of so many of his characters. And all to deceive, not Moscow Station, but his wife Jane who, let’s face it, must have known.

What is interesting here is the compulsive need for deceit — or more narrowly, the need for some kind of double life. Doubles: agents and crosses and so forth are obviously integral to spy fiction. But they are also integral to le Carré’s life, which is what both books are about, because you cannot understand le Carré or his work without understanding his father, Ronnie Cornwell, a conman of unimpeachable dishonesty, who created both David Cornwell the spy (literally) and John le Carré the author.

The study of Ronnie has become so prevalent when discussing le Carré that it has become a cliché. Public school: tick. Class and empire: double tick. Ronnie: tick, tick, tick. But these subjects are inescapable, both to le Carré’s life, and more importantly, to his work.

Like so many flamboyant conmen, Ronnie was a relentless social climber. He sent his son to boarding school (Sherborne) to make him a gentleman and thereby breach the world from which Ronnie, despite his bogus Old Etonian tie and Ascot box, was forever barred. But Ronnie’s life of extravagant windfalls combined with periods of near-destitution meant that fees often went unpaid, while Ronnie’s school visits, often with relatives of varying but unyielding coarseness, mortified the young le Carré, who always claimed he lived uneasily among his peers.

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Ronnie sundered his son’s life. Early in the other new book, A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020, we read of the “tension between le Carré’s home life, the high-wire existence of ‘Ronnie’s Court’, and the Anglican orthodoxy of [his teacher Mr] Thompson’s Sherborne”. Eventually the young le Carré couldn’t take it anymore and, when he was 16, fled. Years later, Mr Thompson, who appears to have been a colossal old bore, wrote that his escape “was all the result of an unsatisfactory home background working unhappily on a very sensitive mind… The boy found a disturbing contrast between his very material home background and what he experienced at school. He was afraid that he would “lose” his family, which he did not want to do.”

But even if he couldn’t stand it, Sherborne would leave a lasting imprint on le Carré. There, he was, for the first time, inside a traditional English institution, but not of it. And so was the pattern of a lifetime — and a body of work — set.

This, as they say, is the rub. If sex in books is often boring so is, for the most part, espionage. There are only so many dead drops and code words you can read about without the prose descending to uniform banality. But in the hands of a skilful novelist, what spying says about society is interesting. Good spy novels, like good crime novels, are always moral barometers of their settings. Every murder is an implicit statement on the value of human life; every betrayal is a judgement on the person or country or cause being betrayed. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories are pastoral idylls in which a prelapsarian England is contaminated by a serpent whom she must cast out to restore Eden. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries are 19th-century paeans to empiricism exemplified in the image of the magnifying glass that Holmes never actually used.

Le Carré’s Circus (MI6) is the inner sanctum of the British Establishment, the locus and custodian of its secrets. But the circus is also, by contrast, a world of foreigners (the Hungarian Toby Esterhase), misanthropes (its boss, Control) and outright weirdos (the donnish Connie Sachs). Even his most famous character, the irretrievably English George Smiley, is a cuckold and, by the standards of his world, an outsider from the Establishment due to his “minor” public school and unfashionable Oxford college. These are le Carré’s (and thus Smiley’s) people: products of worlds shattered by revolutions and dictators and war.

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It was reading le Carré and not, say, Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl (whom I also revered before I discovered his thoughts on People Like Me) that I discovered an England that was avowedly mine. Even beyond my luminously foreign surname and Jihadi-like appearance, my world was cleaved by Events. Geopolitics sent my parents spinning across continents; mine was an England soaked in ambivalence, and it created ambivalence in me: a Greek who can’t bear shouting or fuss; a Jew who can recite the Lord’s Prayer and Anglican hymns from memory. 

In the end, with le Carré we always return to our beginnings, in his case to the need for some kind of double life. Earlyish in her book, Dawson recounts an anecdote where he has sent a love letter to the wrong address:

“That he encoded my address to keep it secret in his own home, hiding it out of a lifetime’s habit of secrecy whereby he instinctively treated his domestic environment as enemy territory. That he mangled the deciphering of his own code because he had been too long out of the field, away from the real world of secrets, even though the compulsion to create secrecy was as strong as it ever had been.”

It is in these secret, almost half-formed spaces that le Carré’s art emerged. People always make the same mistake with le Carré. They think he is a writer of Englishman’s Englishness, but he is not: he’s a writer of immigrants’ Englishness. As the books make clear, he always argued that this is because he came to the establishment as an outsider, like immigrants do, and because of Ronnie.

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Now, le Carré might be regarded as a consummate insider and any idea to the contrary viewed as insulting to those who genuinely were outsiders, unable to catch a break. Viewed in a certain light, le Carré’s life was nothing but a succession of breaks. But the fact is he believed this idea, and this belief exercised huge influence on his work. You only have to look at his greatest novel, A Perfect Spy, to see Ronnie’s influence on him, or perhaps more correctly, on his artistic imagination.

Taken together: Sherborne, Ronnie, the Cold War — with its cast of exiles and misfits — created, to paraphrase Harold Macmillan, a writer who tackled both Eton and Estonia. But it is in his study of the latter that his lasting value lies. The MI6 of le Carré’s novels was, in this sense, a trailblazer. The first institution to allow this new breed — people that as a child I recognised as being like me and so many of my friends — to run Britain’s secret service.

Now, as I look around me — from the Cabinet to the media to the universities and banks, that is to say, the institutions — I see British men and women of the type he wrote about so well, and whom I recognise as so familiar, finally emerging from what were once marginal spaces. I have gone from seeing myself reflected in the people who ran the circus, to the people who now run the Treasury. What began in the Sixties has reached its conclusion. Smiley’s people — his half-breeds and exiles — have entered the mainstream, to play their part in reshaping our country, not covertly or in secret, but in the full glare of public life.

A glorious Le Carré moment, this sly, clever, allusive joke, and insouciantly placed to flatter the reader who gets it. He knows that when an archaeologist extracts a mouldy old pot fragment from the mud, one of them is bound to say what Howard Carter said on entering the tomb of Tutankhamun: he also knows that this kind of sardonic insiders’ joke is going to be flaunted at outsiders, especially in a marriage in trouble. John le Carré knew this stuff. He was, like many of the best novelists, intensely knowledgeable — specifically, that strain of knowledge we call worldliness. There ought to be more of it about.

The classic advice to novelists, “Write about what you know” is pretty good if, like John le Carré, you know a hell of a lot. There are probably corners in the novels which have been filled in by specific, purposeful research. But no-one can doubt that the author of these novels knew his subjects, in detail, long before he set to work. The casual placing of individuals within very specific, even recherché social worlds hardly ever puts a foot wrong, and the range is awe-inspiring. An ordinary sentence in le Carré might run: “The village was one of those half-urbanised Georgian settlements on the edge of Bath where English Catholics of a certain standing have elected to gather in their exile.” This may all be made up; my God, we trust the circumstantial detail.

We’re quite in need of worldliness at the moment. Among novelists, it isn’t compulsory, and some novelists, like poets, are very unworldly indeed. But the decline in worldliness, and the fall in our esteem for it, is to be regretted. It’s something that needs to be defined. In part, it’s the fact of having seen a lot, and gone through all sorts of different experiences. Le Carré’s life before becoming a full-time novelist is a good example: his father was a confidence trickster; he taught in a school; he worked for the security services, first as a stringer and then full-time. He spoke excellent German, and knew all sorts of societies from the inside until he had to leave the Service, his cover blown by Kim Philby, in 1964.

Having done stuff is part of it, but not the whole thing. After all, a lot of people have had interesting jobs. The difference between Le Carré’s books and Stella Rimington’s, say, is not in the experience they could draw on, but on the powers of observation and understanding. Like another very worldly novelist, Anthony Powell, Le Carré was superb at discerning “types”; small but distinct groups of individuals, sharing an apparently miscellaneous range of qualities. When Jim Prideaux explains to Bill Roach at the beginning of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy that he must be a good “watcher” — “us loners always are” — there’s someone behind that who has looked at a lot of different men and women, and understood them. This knack for analysis and categorisation sometimes got Le Carré into a little trouble with those unwilling to be so coolly categorised. Once, the film director Mike Nichols was sitting next to Mrs Thatcher at an official dinner, and said to her “My friend John le Carré says you’re a very sexy woman.” “Well,” Mrs Thatcher said. “I’m not.”

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Le Carré’s worldliness consisted of these fine distinctions, and his characters — even Smiley, even Rick Pym in A Perfect Spy — are excellent examples of types we feel we could glimpse elsewhere. In that, he resembles those other very worldly writers, Dickens, Anthony Powell, Waugh and Kingsley Amis. We feel that there are other Pecksniffs out there, other Widmerpools, Tony Lasts, other Jim Dixons on the make; it is just that these are unusually good examples.

Is this kind of worldliness on the decline? It’s certainly hard to think of many novelists now who have had the kind of large-scale experience Le Carré had. Ferdinand Mount is one, having worked very close to a Prime Minister and having lived close to the great from childhood. But there’s no doubt that his novels, excellent as they are, are a little out of tune with current taste. For the most part, if a lot of current novelists want to write about public life, or a range of social settings, they are obliged to undertake research, to look at something unfamiliar from the outside. Often, it shows.

And the predominant spirit of our times might be a certain unworldliness. One of the characteristics of worldliness is taking an interest in the idiosyncrasies of very small, and perhaps very unsympathetic groups and milieu. (It’s worth remembering that Le Carré’s politics were very remote from Mrs Thatcher’s, who he found so alluring). There isn’t a lot of that sort of interest around. Recently, Sam Leith, talking about the response to David Amess’s murder, very convincingly argued that those we disagree with have melded into an “amorphous enemy mass”, not interesting individuals and small groupings, but “they’re just them: the ‘wall of gammon’, the ‘wokies’, ‘the blue-hair-and-pronouns’, the ‘Terfs’”. Reading some popular commentators, it’s striking how readily they reach for the word “we”, sometimes conflating some extraordinarily distinct groups. One such wrote a column explaining that fundamentalist Muslims and “the LGBTQ community” were basically exactly the same in the way they looked at society.

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This level of astonishing unworldliness is not, perhaps, on the increase, but rarely before has it received such prominent circulation. Nor, perhaps, has it been at the expense of writers who are interested, in inconclusive ways, not in “diversity”, but in the diverse; the way that people are very different to each other, that they act very differently in different settings, and that sometimes we needn’t agree with an individual to find them fascinating, and worth spending some time with.

Some time ago, I met a middle-aged writer who declared, as a matter of pride, that she thought she could enter into any character’s mind imaginatively “except,” she went on, “a Tory MP”. Having spent time with a fair number of Tory MPs, who seemed to me to cover a fair stretch of possible human types, I thought this was a curious admission of failure. No: that kind of willed unworldliness was, in the view of the writer, a confirmation of her authenticity and even literary quality. That sort of thing is on the increase: a novelist who wrote about political actors with understanding and sympathy, whatever his or her subject’s views, would quickly find some sharp critics emerging from the unworldly grottoes of social media groupuscules.

I hope Le Carré isn’t the last of his type. The inner resources which allowed him to walk his plots from the leisurely outskirts towards the terrifying kernel, accounting convincingly for every step and milieu, never failed him — Smiley’s People, for me his masterpiece, starts from the furthest possible point. This last novel is both intricate and trimmed down, and makes a graceful gesture of farewell at the end, as the mole is hunted down, cornered, and vanishes into thin air, leaving an empty stage with no-one to take a bow. Will worldliness come back, and that will to understand, to describe, to know stuff? Sooner or later, and when it does, the readers will be waiting.