“It's a very British thing, I think, to kind of become obsessed with your own traitors, get the spies you deserve as a country. And maybe, you know, you also get the traitors you deserve. And I think Philby is maybe the traitor we deserve because he tells us so much about ourselves in Britain and holds up a mirror to us.”
The Rest Is Classified · Geopolitics & World Affairs · October 2026
Closing the series on Kim Philby's years in Moscow, David McCloskey asks why Britain is still fascinated by him half a century on. Corera says Philby forces the country to look at its attitudes to class, patriotism and treachery, fuelled by le Carré and spy fiction.
Transcript
…and change it, I don't think works for me. I'm afraid any sympathy I have disappears, not least the way he treated the women around him, the way he treated his friends. And I mean, intelligence is a kind of can be a hard game, but there are a lot of people who died as a result of what Philby did.
…Russia. There's fascination with him in the States. In particular, though, there's fascination with him in the UK. Yeah. The Philby story is history at this point. I mean, we're talking about things that happened more than a half century ago in some cases. But why is it so fascinating to us today?
…then in turn, I think he fuels a kind of slightly masochistic British obsession with traitors, you know, which is fueled by fiction. Yeah. And John LeCarre and that world. And, you know, I think many individuals exert a fascination over the public, but I think rarely has one individual held a fascination for so many years for a country that they betrayed. You know what I mean? It's, you know, it's a very British thing, I think, to kind of become obsessed with your own traitors, get the spies you deserve as a country. And maybe, you know, you also get the traitors you deserve. And I think Philby is maybe the traitor we deserve because he tells us so much about ourselves in Britain and holds up a mirror to us.
Well, that fascination has even made its way into MI6 and the way MI6 trains new recruits.
Yeah, I was told that new recruits for MI6, this is quite a few years ago, were shown the film of Philby in his mother's flat in 1955 denying that he was the third man. And they would sit in a room and they would be shown this video of their greatest traitor lying. Now, whether it was to teach them…
Well, I think that's the spot to leave it. We are finally, we're at the end of our six-part series on Kim Philby:. We hope that listeners have enjoyed this incredible journey of, regardless of what you think about the man, an incredibly interesting and continually interesting character, even…
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