Kmflett's Blog

James Bond & the Tory Party

I have never been a great fan of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books or the films that came from them. I don’t like the machismo, the sexism or the politics and the world of spies and the cold war is not something that I find myself engaged with.

You might think that the Bond books and particularly the movies are mainly about sex and stunts, but there are politics too

What, for example, was James Bond up to in 1956? In the novel From Russia With Love, Bond jumps from the Arlberg Express as Heinkel and associates confront him at about the time of the Hungarian uprising. It is not clear if Bond was in Hungary, but those who have spent more time pondering the book than I have suggest that this is very likely, since the train in question ran through Hungary, Austria and Switzerland to London.

This may amount to no more than Fleming providing a topical reference to events in his book. However, the Old Etonian Fleming was closely connected to the British secret service and his plots were based in many cases on real-life scenarios. It may be suggested that his story lines were often fanciful and far-flung affairs, but this may tell us more about the secret service than it does about the plots’ likely veracity.

I should note that according to the Financial Times MI6 does indeed find Bond a bit far-fetched. Not so much so that he might not be a modern CIA agent, but British intelligence prefers to think of itself more in the Smiley model of espionage.

Fleming, not surprisingly, was a Tory. Slightly more surprisingly, he was the kind of Tory that David Cameron rather than Kemi Badenoch might have claimed for his own.

After the 1951 general election victory, Fleming argued that the Tories had no long-term future unless they ditched their association with the rich and renamed themselves the People’s Party.

Fleming, partly through marriage, had serious connections with the upper echelons of the Tory Party. He was a friend of John Profumo and also an acquaintance of Anthony Eden, the Tory Prime Minister in 1956.

Hence, when Eden’s health collapsed after the launch of the illegal invasion of Egypt at the end of October 1956 and his doctor ordered “complete rest,” it was to Fleming’s Jamaican retreat Goldeneye that Eden and his wife decided to go.

Incidentally, Fleming lifted the name James Bond from the leading authority on Caribbean birds of the same name.

The arrival of the British prime minister sent the colonial administration and the ex-patriot community into something of a flap. Noel Coward, who lived nearby, procured some caviar and Earl Grey tea for Eden and arrived at the gates of Goldeneye to deliver them. He did not, however, get beyond the gates.

Unfortunately, Fleming’s house was infested by rats, with which Eden became obsessed. After a late night rat hunt, when seven of the vermin were killed, Eden had to return to London, before the whole thing made his health even worse.

Still with the Tory Party shaken if not stirred by political and economic crisis James Bond may remind them of a time, pre Suez 1956, when the sun had not quite set on the British Empire and the kind of values that Boris Johnson holds dear were still something that found some kind of popular echo in some quarters.