HE MAY NOT HAVE BEEN ON THE SOVIET PAYROLL...:

Le Carré told us, in no uncertain terms, that Britain had had it. That our game was up. He even encouraged us to sympathise with, if ultimately reject, the calculation made by Bill Haydon, that for anyone raised to manage an Empire, our role overseas was now so trivial, our hopes of influence so futile and embarrassing, that a Cold War traitor was something to be.

The final scene, of Smiley's unfaithful wife openly laughing at George's incomprehension at the mysterious failure of his marriage, and the world at large, was many things, but feel good it certainly was not. This was a Captain going down with his ship. Sure, Haydon had got his comeuppance, but there was no hero whose fate we could choose in his stead. The alternative, it seemed, was to take our pills and not make a fuss.

We remain a destination that millions are willing to literally risk their lives for

And yet. Even as the series went to air, a new Government was settling into Number 10. On the horizon, invariably overcast but settled throughout the 70s, a storm was coming. The nation was about to be offered an alternative after all -- or rather, the stern admonition that there was no alternative, none at all. Whatever else she wrought in the next decade, by the time Margaret Thatcher limped off stage with her own wounded back eleven years later, the Cold War had been won -- a victory in which Britain's role was recognised pretty much everywhere other than in Britain itself, as having been as crucial as that of Ronald Reagan, Lech Wałęsa and Pope John Paul II himself.

Britain may never again know the power and might that Bill Haydon grew up believing to be his birthright. But as I write, we have somehow shrugged off the greys and browns, the tonal palate of the 70s casserole recipe book which seem to have defined the George Smiley era. The red stars which hover in extraordinary abundance over London's night skyline, are those of commerce, investment and the future. Baffling as it seems to many of us, we remain a destination, a society that millions of migrants and refugees around the world are willing to literally risk their lives (and France) to come to and be part of.

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