Was this unlikely ladykiller the real George Smiley?

AT MI5, Cornwell shared a small back room with John Bingham, left, a bespectacled man who had written spy novels. Known as ‘The Hon John’, Bingham was almost 50 and the heir to an Irish peerage. Some of his traits were certainly borrowed forf le Carré’s most important character,c George Smiley – his habit of polishing his spectacles on the end of his tie, for example. Like Smiley, it was said he could ‘lose himself in a crowd’.

He was also squat and pudgy, almosta toad-like in appearance. Women liked to fuss over him, as they did over Smiley.

Yet he was different from Smiley in key ways. Bingham was no scholar; his German was not fluent, and he had no love for German literature. He was also a ladykiller, unlike Smiley, who was a helpless cuckold. Nor did Smiley appear to share Bingham’s Right-wing views. His wife Madeleine believed her husband was Smiley, but Cornwell insisted his characters were ‘amalgams’.

Another model for Smiley was Vivian Green, who had taught Cornwell at Sherborne and Oxford. From him came many characteristics, including the silences that punctuated his conversation, and his ‘strong moral intellect’.