Dame Stella Rimington, the former first female director general of MI5 and reputedly the inspiration behind the female character of M played by Dame Judi Dench, is considering the depictions of spies in TV dramas and movies.
She chuckles when asked about how realistic they are, from the James Bond movies to more recent series including Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman, and Black Doves with Keira Knightley.
“They’re mostly not at all (realistic),” she says. “I watched Spooks quite a few years ago and thought that was ridiculous because it was a group of people who seemed to solve the most horrendous problems each week, and then next week they had another horrendous problem. That was most unrealistic.
“I wouldn’t like to say Slow Horses was realistic, because it isn’t, but nevertheless, there’s some sort of attraction about that. It’s the characters. If you look at them (spy series) as dramas, a lot of them are well worth watching, they’re fun, they’re exciting. But to think that they represent anything like what actually goes on is wrong.
“Even Judi Dench playing M – and I was delighted when a female started to play M because it was a complete reversal of how it had been before, with all these stuffy gents in suits sitting in offices in Whitehall, and I was very sad when she was killed – if you think any of that is very realistic, you’re misled.”
Rimington, a sprightly octogenarian who turns 90 this year, hasn’t yet watched Keira Knightley’s spy in Black Doves, but she will, she enthuses.
She began her career as a novelist after leaving MI5 in 1996, and has now penned her 12th novel, The Hidden Hand, which sees Chinese students being sent to the University of Oxford by the Chinese government – which is funding their studies – to steal AI and new technology research secrets, while Beijing bribes senior academics to turn a blind eye to their spying activities.
China today, Rimington believes, is a real threat to security.
“It must be very confusing for the intelligence services now because in a sense, the government is trying to make a friend of China, but in another sense we fear the threat that they may pose. I regard China as a great ‘undealt-with’ threat.”
She is sorry that this will likely be her final novel, given the macular degeneration which has caused her eyesight to fail and on this occasion required her family to transcribe her writing on to the computer.
In the decades since leaving MI5, spycraft has changed beyond all recognition, she observes.
“When I last visited MI5, the impression I had was of people sitting at computer screens, whereas when I retired there were a few computer screens but otherwise loads of people with large files in which the information was that you might want to look up.
“The world has rolled on its head about the storing, availability and speed of information. But at the heart of it all lies actual people on the ground finding out information from other people.”
Being in intelligence took its toll on family life, she agrees.
In the early days of her career in the service (she joined MI5 in 1969), when she went to parties, she could never reveal her true profession, she recalls.
“I used to make up all kinds of things, but the difficulty was that you say one thing to somebody and then they pop up at another gathering and you’ve forgotten what you told them you did.
“The ideal thing to say was that I worked for the Home Office. You were supposed to make yourself sound as boring as you possibly could.”
“I imagine they’re a lot more open now,” she continues. “After all, the director general (Sir Ken McCallum) now appears regularly making speeches, so I think the world is much more open than it was when I joined, which I think is a good thing.”
Rimington recalls that when her daughters – who are now grown up with children of their own – asked her what she did, she would just say she worked for the government, which was accepted when they were young children.
“When they got a bit older, they now tell me they knew I was a spy. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know.”
During her tenure as director general of MI5, between 1992 and 1996, there were threats from the IRA and Russia, while the Islamist terror threat was also emerging.
Becoming the first female head of the security service attracted much publicity. She was the first to be publicly identified when appointed and when a newspaper published a photo of her house, she and her family had to move to a covert location for their own protection.
“Immediate danger at that time was from the IRA. When I was appointed, they had at least one covert group wandering around London looking for targets and with a photograph of my house on the front page of a major newspaper, well, that was the risk.”
There were other threats, of physical harm and kidnapping, she remembers. Her younger daughter was particularly affected by the move because it came at a time when she had lots of friends and didn’t know who she could tell where she lived.
“It wasn’t easy but we struggled on and I’m still friends with both of them,” Rimington says today.
She split up from her husband, civil servant John Rimington, in 1984, but they never divorced.
“It’s quite complicated. We did split up – whether it was to do with my work, I don’t know – so during the time I was working but before I became director general, I was a single parent.
“Later on, after we both retired, we have got back together to an extent. My husband lives in London and I live in Norfolk. He comes to stay, takes the dogs for a walk and that kind of thing, and then goes home again. And so it goes on. It has settled down quite well as we are both approaching 90. All passion spent. We can just be friends.”
She agrees that there has been a resurgence of interest in spy stories given the TV dramatisations and believes it’s because intelligence agencies are now more open about what goes on.
But there’s little to match the genius of John Le Carre’s early novels about the inside of MI5, she reflects.
“When those novels were first turned into drama they were really good because they showed the two sides and how you had to be prepared to find the right person guilty even if he was your best friend.
“There’s been nobody yet writing dramas that have matched his early portrayals of (George) Smiley.”
The Hidden Hand is published by Bloomsbury, priced £20. Available now
