From ISIS to China, we need a real 007
NEXT week the latest James Bond film, Spectre, opens in London. The usual, pre-premiere public relations flim-flam included an hour-long ITV plug from a fan, Jonathan Ross. But who needs 007 when real life resembles the Bond screenplays?
Islamic State (ISIS) is bent on t he worldwide destruction of unbelievers. The Chinese are taking control of our nuclear power industry, and it’s reported they try to hack into our National Grid computers 1,000 times a day.
Meanwhile, we have a Leader of the Opposition who vows the UK won’t retaliate i n kind if we’re attacked by an enemy’s nuclear warheads.
Bond has never been rooted in reality. The films have less to tell us about international dangers and conspiracies than TV series such as Homeland — or, my current favourite, The Americans.
However, the men responsible for the fictional secret agent — author Ian Fleming and his wartime friend and associate Robert Harling, on whom 007 is loosely based — did have real-life experience of cloakand-dagger exploits.
Operating out of a Central London HQ called The Citadel, their unit, 30 AU, was charged with taking possession of up-to-the-minute German military equipment during World War II so that it could be studied by our scientists.
This often i nvolved the team undertaking dangerous missions crossing enemy l i nes i n wartime Europe.
Harling was a Mad Men- style advertising man, publishing executive and typographical expert, who shared Fleming’s enthusiasm for seducing women, dining in f i ne restaurants and gung- ho military adventures.
He wasn’t much like Daniel Craig’s rather precious interpretation of a suffering, ‘sensitive’ Bond.
‘James Bond bears a distinct resemblance to Robert i n his sardonic elegance of manner and his cool sexual expertise,’ says an old friend of 40 years’ standing, writer Fiona McCarthy.
Fleming was i n the habit of peppering Harling with questions about women and sex — especially after the latter fell in love and settled down.
Did Harling and his consort, Phoebe, ‘share the same interests in all carnal activities?’ he wanted to know, mentioning ‘sadism, bondage, flagellation, sado-masochism and so forth’. They didn’t, said Harling.
‘They’re not much of a sexual recipe for long-haul marriages,’ he pointed out.
FLEMING concluded: ‘I just think I’m inclined to try out a few tendencies towards the more socalled sadistic side of sex than you two seemed prepared to practise.’ Like Bond, Harling’s past was largely a mystery. He told friends his parents had died young and he’d been brought up by a family friend in Brighton.
In fact, both parents — his father was a North London taxi driver — survived until their late 70s.
‘Harling later became an accomplished thriller writer, but his towering achievement was to fictionalise himself,’ says Ms McCarthy.
Fleming and Harling talked endlessly about women. That, too, might have informed what is seen as the ‘sexist’ tone of the Bond books.
And neither of t hem were romantics. Harling says: ‘I rather agreed with a one-time girlfriend, who said that, in her experience, alleged romantics were cold-blooded characters with a ready reckoner in one hand and a dance card in the other.’ Fleming agrees.
Harling’s ‘personal memoir’ on Fleming, published posthumously — Harling died aged 98 in 2008 — is far from gushing, despite their long friendship. He portrays Fleming as a chilly, sexually confused man who, in middle age, was still under the thumb of his mother, unable to have normal relations with women.
‘What the hell am I going to do about this marriage of mine?’ he demanded of Harling during one of their lunches. Harling writes: ‘He puzzled over the dismal prospect prompted by these discussions until days before his death.’
Would Fleming and Harling have rated Daniel Craig as James Bond? Possibly not.
Surely they’d think that his claim that he’d ‘rather slash my wrists’ than make another Bond Film is self-pitying and vulgar after the millions he’s made f r om t he franchise, as is his ‘I don’t give a ****’ response when asked who should be the next Bond.
Fleming, Harling (and Bond) seem like dinosaurs, but — to me, at least — are more sympathetic than the New Man Craig.
And I know which sort I’d prefer to be fighting on our side in an increasingly dangerous world of jihadists and Chinese spies.
In fact, you might remember how 007 killed off the half- Chinese super-villain in the Dr No novel — buried alive under a small mountain of seabirds’ guano.