He’s not the Messiah!

IF MI6 HAD ACTUALLY BEEN ABLE to get its arse in gear to send someone to Moscow in 1963 to whack Philby, we would have felt pretty terrific about it — wouldn’t we? As it was, as Simon Winder detailed in his riotously disenchanted book The Man Who Saved Britain, a country which had the rest of the world rolling around with hilarity at the gulf between its haughty self-image and the tawdry, impotent, impoverished reality, was obliged instead to make do with a rather hairy actor furiously boozing and shagging his way round unimprovably naff tourist destinations for the Queen and the honour of old England.

Things are different for the KGB and its descendants and sister organisations, of course, but I don’t get any big impression that Anthony Bolton’s opera , with a script by Kit Hesketh-Harvey — to be performed soon at Grange Park — contains a lot of even grudging admiration for a country that