John le Carré at His Very Best. Part Three

Last week the novelist received the Olof Palme prize for achievement in the spirit of the assassinated Swedish statesman. He reflects on how a lack of leadership today has allowed us to ‘sleepwalk’ into Brexit




I try to imagine how it was for Palme in those times: the shuttle diplomacy, the tireless reasoning with people locked into their positions and scared of their superiors. I was the lowest form of spy life, but even I got wind of contingency plans for outright nuclear war. If you are in Berlin or Bonn when the Russian tanks sweep over you, be sure to destroy your files first. First? What was second? And I doubt whether your chances would have been much rosier in Stockholm.

In Berlin, in August 1961, I look on as coils of Russian barbed wire are unrolled across the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint, otherwise known as Checkpoint Charlie. Intermittently, in the days that follow, I watch the Wall go up, one concrete block at a time. Do I lift a finger? No one did. And maybe that was the worst part of it: the oppressive sense of your own irrelevance.

But Palme refused to be irrelevant. He would make himself heard if it killed him, and perhaps in the end it did.

It’s October 1962 and Cuban crisis time. I am a junior diplomat at the British embassy in Bonn and I have just moved into a new hiring beside the river Rhine. German decorators are painting the walls. It’s a sunny autumn and I think I must have been on leave because I am sitting in the garden writing.

The blare of the builders’ transistor radio is drowned by the din of passing barges, until suddenly it is belting out the news of Kennedy’s ultimatum to Khrushchev: “Turn back your missiles, Mr Chairman, or your country and mine will be at war” – or words to that effect. The painters politely excuse themselves, wash their brushes, and go home to be with their families at world’s end. I drive to the embassy in case there’s work to be done. There isn’t. So I drive home again and continue writing The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

So what was Palme doing while the Soviet fleet continued on its way to Cuba and the world waited dry-mouthed to see who blinked first? Until I knew better, I pictured him sitting head in hands in some lonely place, despairing. I am a failed peacemaker. My mediations have been in vain. If the world ends, it’s all my fault.

But he had no time for that stuff. He was in Stockholm, pressing for educational reform, bumping up Sweden’s international aid budget and picking up the pieces after Stig Wennerström, a senior Swedish air force officer, was exposed as a Soviet spy. And that’s something that’s too easy to forget about Palme the diplomat for world peace and nuclear disarmament: he had a country to run.