So it has come to this. An American journalist, one of the chattering class we hold so dear, pleads guilty to acting as an agent of the People’s Republic. Not a mole in the CIA, not a general selling secrets, but a scribbler, a wordsmith, a denizen of the opinion pages.
And now MI5, in its wisdom, reviews counter-espionage protocols. How very Victorian. How very like the age of philhellenes and Russophiles, when every aesthete with a disdain for bourgeois democracy might be a conduit for foreign influence.
The journalist, you see, is not a man of action but of persuasion. He trades in the currency of ideas, of framing, of narrative. And what better way to subvert a nation than to corrupt its storytellers?
The Chinese know this. They have always known it. From the Mandarins who wrote the Emperor’s edicts to the propagandists of the Cultural Revolution, they understand that words are weapons.
Meanwhile, the West trips over itself defending free speech, forgetting that freedom is not the same as immunity. The journalist’s plea is a symptom, not an anomaly. It is the logical endpoint of a century of intellectual decadence, where the intelligentsia fancies itself above nation, above tribe, above loyalty.
We sneer at patriotism as a provincial superstition, and then wonder why our scribes become apostles for a rival empire. MI5’s review is necessary, but it will miss the point if it focuses on dead drops and encrypted apps. The real battle is in the salons, the universities, the editorial boards.
We need not just counter-intelligence but counter-ideas. A revival of that unfashionable thing called national identity. But that, I fear, is a labour too great for a generation raised on relativism.
So we will have our reviews, our prosecutions, our hand-wringing. And the agents of influence will continue their work, not in the shadows, but in plain sight, behind a byline. The Fall of Rome was not accomplished by barbarians at the gates, but by a rot within.
The Chinese know this. Do we?
