GOODBYE, SHAYLER

Besides secret agents themselves, who face assassination should their identities become known, no man can have been more grateful for the existence of the Official Secrets Act than Ian Fleming. Had it been known back in the 1950s that MI5 and MI6 were inhabited not by suave womanisers but by dull paper-shufflers who go home on the Tube, his books would not have prospered.

Thanks to David Shayler, the former MI5 officer jailed earlier this week for breaching the Official Secrets Act, the image of the secret services now projected on to the public mind is that of any other government department: a bungling bureaucracy staffed by a mixture of the ambitious, the bored and the devious, fighting little turf wars and gradually being consumed by paperwork. It would be extraordinary if it were any other way: the aura of exoticism which long surrounded secret-service work – the sherry parties hosted by shady dons, the clandestine meetings with agents carrying rolled-up copies of the Times – cannot be expected to exempt it from the institutional arthritis which tends to afflict all large public organisations.