Intelligence

Recorded and transcribed by P Challinor and a domestic extremist

There was a time, you know, back in the olden days, when people trying to gather intelligence used to record their victims, instead of being recorded by them. And believe me, we had to work for a living in those days. You couldn't just put on a balaclava and slap a bit of duct tape on your shoulders and just steam in and kettle happily away. Or sit around all day watching television while your superiors told the press that the security cameras hadn't been working in that particular district. Or even just pop onto a tube train and blow someone's head off in broad daylight. You see, that isn't what intelligence is about. Intelligence is about gathering information, preferably without the information being displayed on nationwide television or the interthing within a few minutes of the cheese-in-charge toddling into Downing Street. Intelligence is about sort of finding things out, preferably without being found out yourself. There seem to be a few of our chaps who have it all a bit arse-about-face these days, if you ask me. In my day it was completely the other way round. I remember being approached at Cambridge - one of my tutors came up from behind and gave me a bit of a poke. Asked me if I wanted to serve my country or whether I'd prefer to have the photographs all over the Evening Standard. Well, naturally I said I was as patriotic as the next chap, and before I knew it I was a mole for the KGB, happily burrowing into the lesser functionaries of the Wilson politburo. But the point is, about those photographs, I didn't know they'd been taken. Not a peep did I hear about them until my tutor presented me with the blow-ups, if that's the word I'm after, and gave me that moral dilemma. It's all a matter of education, you see. Education and intelligence sort of go together, always provided the good breeding is there to start with, of course. Can't expect some oik who's been grown in the laboratories of the social sciences to make the best of a proper schooling. And as for the boys in blue, well really. Don't they realise that the whole point of a cover-up is that you're supposed to do it before the embarrassment becomes public? It isn't much good covering up if you're standing in the headlights with your trousers round your ankles, your foot in your mouth and your shame spattered across all fifty billion lanes of the information superhighway, now is it? No point sticking a cork in your rectum after the condom's split, I mean. I say, that thing is turned off, isn't it?