John le Carré: I was beaten by my father who later begged me to bail him out of prison

THE father of John le Carré was a violent conman who beat him and his mother but would later call the writer from prison to beg him for money.

In a compelling and long-awaited autobiography, le Carré, a former MI5 and MI6 agent, described his father Ronnie as a “conman, fantasist [and] occasional jailbird” whose violent temper prompted his mother to “bolt”.

Le Carré, whose real name is David Cornwell, would sleep in front of his mother Olive’s bedroom door holding a golf club to deter his father, describing himself as “her ridiculous protector”.

He adds dryly: “Certainly Ronnie beat me up too, but only a few times and not with much conviction. It was the shaping up that was the scary part: the lowering and readying of the shoulders, the resetting of the jaw.”

He writes in The Pigeon Tunnel, serialised in The Guardian, that his childhood was largely lacking in love.

His father would ring him from foreign prisons asking him to bail him out with cash and later tried to sue him after watching his appearance in a documentary and deciding “there was an implicit slander in my failure to mention that I owed everything to him”.

Le Carré tells how he went on to work for British intelligence before taking up writing, outlining the firsthand research and punishing travel schedule that went into creating more than 20 novels – including The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Night Manager. His success brought him into contact with some of the modern world’s most powerful people, including Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch, but he appears to have remained generally unimpressed by them.

The novelist, now 84, refuses to reveal details of his spy work, carried out mostly in German, saying he is “bound by my vestiges of old-fashioned loyalty to my former services, but also by undertakings I gave to the men and women who agreed to collaborate with me”.