Through the Looking Glass

‘Have you got over your father yet?’ the 26-year-old David Cornwell was asked by MI5’s head of personnel when he joined the agency in the spring of 1958. And the answer, more than half a century later, has to be ‘no’. We knew of his conman father Ronnie’s cartoonish presence in Cornwell’s life, but never the extent to which he has dominated his very being.

After leaving Lincoln College, Oxford, Cornwell taught for a couple of years at Eton, where he disliked the ‘Herrenvolk doctrine’ expounded in what he called the ‘spiritual home of the English upper classes’. So he sought a return to the secret world that he had glimpsed as a gap-year student in Bern, after leaving Sherborne and before going up to Oxford.

While in Switzerland he was approached by a British diplomat and asked to keep an eye on fellow students — a practice he maintained at Oxford, where he developed a more formal liaison with MI5.