Boris Johnson, James Bond fan

Photo: Huffington Post

When former Mayor of London and chief 'Brexiteer' Boris Johnson was announced as the UK's new Foreign Secretary, it's fair to say that the decision was met across the world with incredulity and much amusement. Given the nature of the position, it wasn't too long before internet was rife with talk about Boris as James Bond's boss. 

It's not the first time that Boris has been linked with James Bond. Back in October 2015, Daniel Craig told reporters, with tongue firmly in cheek, that Boris was the new James Bond. And when Boris was left dangling on a zip-wire during a live-screen event for the London Olympics in 2012, the stunt was labelled by the national media as James Bond-like.

I don't suppose Boris minds about this coverage, and may actually be flattered by it, as, judging by some of the comments he's made about Bond, he's something of a Bond fan. Most recently, during the EU referendum campaign, Boris appeared to compare the EU with a SPECTRE-like criminal organisation. In a speech, he reminded the audience that the last Bond film, Spectre, had been filmed in his mayoral offices, ‘where James Bond shoots the evil baddie who is hell-bent on subverting democracy around the world through a supra-national organisation. I think there’s a metaphor there,’ he said.

In 2013, during a visit to China to promote London as a place open to investment, Boris told an audience of students that the Chinese-owned Trinity Square in London had doubled as the replacement MI6 headquarters in Skyfall. Boris said, 'if that isn’t openness to China, I don’t know what is.'

Shortly after his zip-wire mishap in 2012, Boris took Arnold Schwarzenegger for a cable car ride across the Thames. To a certain generation, cable cars are synonymous with Where Eagles Dare and Moonraker. I certainly can't ride in a cable car without thinking of the films and judging the distance between my car and the oncoming one as they pass, assessing the practicalities of a jump from one to the other. Boris and Arnie are evidently of a similar mind. In the cable car, Boris reminded Arnie of Where Eagles Dare, in which 'they get out and wrestle on top of the cable car.' Arnie replied that 'they did the same thing in a James Bond movie', before mentioning Jaws. Boris' face lit up. 'Jaws! That's right!'

In addition to his political duties, Boris Johnson is also a columnist. He's referred to James Bond. In some of the columns he's written for the Daily Telegraph,  In a piece published in 2010 about the use of helmets on the ski slopes, Boris wrote: 'Each of us must make his or her choice. But I ask you this: does James Bond wear a helmet, when he out-skis the baddie in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service?' Earlier, in 2006, Boris argued that it might be better to talk to the regimes of Iran and North Korea, rather than threaten them, but added that 'if there was some way of quietly disabling Kim's bombs... we should certainly consider it. Where is James Bond these days?' And back in 2003, Boris wrote about his love of the James Bond films and his memory of being taken to the cinema by his father to watch Diamonds Are Forever.

However Boris Johnson will be judged as Foreign Secretary, he's certainly flying the flag for James Bond. Part of that comes from his fondness of the Bond films (and, presumably, the books, which I imagine are required reading at Eton). But for Boris, James Bond is also a source of national pride and a proxy for Britain's position in the world. However illusory such use of James Bond may be, it's been this way ever since Fleming wrote the Bond books, which from the start provided a counterpoint to the national soul-searching in a post-Empire Britain rocked by spy scandals and politically damaged by the Suez crisis.

Roger Moore as a Bond villain

If you've ever wondered what Roger Moore might be like as a Bond villain, then you need look no further than an episode of Alias, the television series created by J J Abrams and starring Jennifer Garner, in which Roger Moore played a member of a nefarious organisation. His performance also demonstrates that he can play more serious roles if demanded.

Alias ran from 2001 to 2006 for five series. Jennifer Garner plays Sydney Bristow, who, when not studying at college, is a double-agent working for the CIA within a criminal organisation known as SD-6. This organisation is part of a wider network called the Alliance of Twelve, which, rather like SPECTRE, trades in weapons and intelligence.

The show inevitably contains nods to the James Bond films. It features, for example, a pre-titles sequence in each episode, a Q-like character in SD-6, and some natty gadgets, such as a lock-picking tool hidden in the heel of Sydney's shoe, and a 360-degree camera disguised as a lipstick. It seems only fitting that Roger Moore should take a guest role, though ironically as a minor villain.

Roger Moore appears in 'The Prophesy', episode 16 of the first series. His character, Edward Poole, is a rich and cultured man who is a member of the Alliance and in communication with Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), the head of SD-6. When Sloane suspects another member of being a traitor, he asks for Edward Poole's help in exposing the man. Instead, Edward Poole frames a fourth member, who Sloane is compelled to assassinate, even though the two are close friends.

Roger Moore plays it straight, and is not a little chilling in his measured, urbane manner, which masks duplicitous intent. At a crucial point of the episode, he and fellow Alliance members sit round a boardroom table onboard a yacht on the Thames outside the Houses of Parliament and make a fateful decision. The scene could have been taken from Spectre or Thunderball. Indeed, the set design itself looks like it was inspired by the work of Ken Adam. All that's missing is the white cat. 

A scene from Alias. Roger Moore is on the right.

Roger Moore is best known for light comedy, and his Bond films are the most comedic of the series. Yet, he has played roles with a hard edge worthy of Sean Connery and Daniel Craig (as an example, just look at Gold), and his performance in Alias shows he can play serious villains too. If Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson are wondering who to cast as the next Bond villain, it might just be worth giving Roger Moore a call.

James Bond goes commando

Journalists, historians and James Bond experts may have been arguing about the origins of James Bond for decades, but one thing is clear from the many interviews Ian Fleming gave: Bond was based on commandos Fleming had met during the Second World War. And naturally, since those interviews, the search has been on for individuals that may have inspired Fleming the most, individuals such as Patrick Dalzel-Job and Fitzroy Maclean.

Lately, though, I've begun to wonder whether this speculation is rather fruitless. Ian Fleming didn't, of course, mention any names, and, short of a long-lost document or interview containing the name, we can never be certain about any of our suggestions. What's more, Fleming's descriptions of Bond as a mixture of wartime commando types appear to date to the final two years of Fleming's life; before then, there is little hint of this origin. With this in mind, it could be argued that the commando inspiration was a narrative that Fleming gave to Bond retrospectively, a little like Bond's Scottish roots. Let's look at the evidence.

The interviews in which Fleming talks about the inspirations for Bond appear to date exclusively to 1963 and 1964. In an edition of the BBC's Desert Island Discs in 1963, Fleming told the presenter Roy Plomley that Bond was a 'mixture of commandos and secret service agents I met during the war.' Fleming confessed to CIA director Allen Dulles in 1964 that Bond 'is more a commando type' than a spy. In a Playboy interview dated 1964, Fleming regarded Bond as 'slightly more true to the type of modern hero, to the commandos of the last war' than to the heroes of ancient thrillers. Fleming told Daily Express journalist John Cruesemann in January 1964 that Bond was 'a compound of... commando types', and he said as much to Jack Fishman in an interview published in 1965.

Given Fleming's consistent explanation, it's curious that commandos are absent from earlier pieces. When Ian Fleming was in conversation with fellow writer Raymond Chandler for a BBC broadcast in 1958, he discussed the nature of literary heroes, his and Chandler's in particular, but didn't mention that Bond was inspired by the real heroism of wartime commandos. Fleming wrote of the work of the Secret Service, of frogman Buster Crabb, and secret tunnels in Berlin in a piece published in Broadsheet, the bulletin of World Books, in 1956 to illustrate how the fantastic events in his novels were not so unusual, but didn't include commandos in that list. In his piece, 'How to write a thriller', published in 1962, Fleming similarly described wartime secret service exploits, for example the Man who Never Was', and wrote in answer to the typical question of his readers, 'how do you manage to think of that?', that some incidences in Casino Royale were 'extracted' from his 'wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division'. But again, no commandos.

It's true that a commando dagger features on Richard Chopping's cover of The Spy who Loved Me (published in 1962), thus establishing a connection between commandos and Bond. Moreover, there are many aspects of the Bond books that are clearly drawn from the Second World War. It should also be noted that Fleming gave many more interviews in the final years of his life as Bond's popularity grew than he had done in the earlier stages in his career as a novelist. Faced with the demands of journalists, broadcasters and the like, Fleming may have introduced the commando explanation to add interest or to assuage complaints that his plots were implausible. And with each telling, the explanation become better established.

My trawl through the archives of Fleming's interviews is by no means exhaustive, and it is possible that there is some piece dating before 1963 that states that Bond was based on commando types that Fleming had met during the war. Judging from what I've assembled, however, the commando meme was a late development, and before then, the source of inspiration for Bond was more generally located in the Second World War and the Cold War (not to mention including a good dose of Fleming himself). Any search for 'the real James Bond', particularly from the pool of wartime commandos, is likely to be something of a wild goose chase. 

Postscript

I should add that I'm of course aware that Ian Fleming set up and ran a commando unit during the Second World War, and that the Bond books contain references to commandos and have Bond doing commando-like feats. My point, however, is this: Ian Fleming didn't write a series of commando adventures, and probably didn't even start out with a fully-formed character in mind, with all the memetic building blocks in place. Bond acquired commando-like traits, along with others (for example, the traits of the fictional American private eye), gradually over the course of the series. Casino Royale (1953) itself is different in many ways from the other books and draws most heavily on Ian Fleming's own experiences, and only obliquely, if at all, on the experiences of the commandos he directed.

In later years, Ian Fleming developed a coherent narrative to explain the origin of James Bond that doesn't quite reflect the somewhat unplanned evolution of the character. Why Fleming began to talk about commandos to such an extent in later interviews and articles is what I find particularly fascinating, and is what I'm chiefly commenting on in this post.

I dated the earliest use of the 'commando explanation' to 1963, but I've been informed that there is an earlier mention. I'm grateful to Jeremy Duns for alerting me to a 1959 edition of Books and Bookmen, in which Ian Fleming says that he 'wanted Bond to be... a composite figure made up of commando types and spies' he met during the war. I must also point out that Jeremy Duns has explored Bond's commando roots and the commando references in the books in his excellent piece, 'Commando Bond', published in the book, Diamonds in the Rough.

Shades of Live and Let Die in the Flashman Papers?

There are only a few authors I return to time and again. Ian Fleming is naturally one, PG Wodehouse another. A third is George MacDonald Fraser. I can't remember how many times I've read the Flashman Papers, George MacDonald Fraser's series of adventures featuring Harry Flashman, a Victorian cad, scoundrel, poltroon and undeserving hero, but the novels, presented in the form of Flashman's memoirs, are becoming as dog-eared and well-thumbed as my Bond books.

I was re-reading the tenth volume in the series – Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (1994), in which Flashman reluctantly joins John Brown and takes part in the infamous raid at Harper's Ferry in 1859 that presaged the American Civil War – and was struck by a number of similarities between the book and the novel of Live and Let Die (1954).

For example, after a remarkable series of events, Flashman finds himself in Washington. Escaping from an organisation keen for him to join John Brown, Flashman hails a cab and is invited in by a mysterious woman already occupying it. Flashman tells her he's from Canada, to which the woman replies 'uh-huh'. Flashman remarks in his memoirs that uh-huh “is the most expressive word in the American language.” This brought to mind Felix Leiter's advice to James Bond in Live and Let Die that “you can get through any American conversation with 'yeah', 'nope' and 'sure'.”

While in New York, Flashman meets and is arrested by Allan Pinkerton, who founded his famous detective agency in 1852-3. (Felix Leiter would become a Pinkerton's agent in Diamonds are Forever.) In his cell, Flashman consumes a “disgusting luncheon consisting of a cake of fried chopped beef smothered in onions and train oil.” Flashman's first experience of a hamburger is rather different to Bond's. He describes his meal of “flat beef Hamburgers, medium-rare” (among other items) as “American cooking at its rare best.”

Earlier, while still in Washington, Flashman is dining in a restaurant and eavesdrops on the conversations of fellow diners. One conversation gives us a flavour of the political background in 1859, and George MacDonald Fraser, through his writing, attempts to convey the accents and dialects that Flashman is likely to have heard. Inevitably, this reminded me of Bond and Leiter in Sugar Ray's in Harlem, where they listen to a couple's conversation so that Bond can get a feel of the accent and the colloquialisms. (Today, the passage makes rather uncomfortable reading, but Fleming was no doubt well intentioned.)

It also occurred to me that both Live and Let Die and Flashman and the Angel of the Lord feature secret organisations that have spies everywhere to keep tabs on the movements of the books' respective heroes. Mr Big has his Big Switchboard in the former, and while the latter introduces us to a secret network sympathetic to the southern states.

Live and Let Die and Flashman and the Angel of the Lord are very different novels, and the similarities may well be completely coincidental. But George MacDonald Fraser did, of course, co-write the screenplay of Octopussy, and his comic historical novel, The Reavers (2007), is packed with Bond references (the hero of the novel is the spy, Archie Noble, who, as head of Station B for Border, is ‘licensed to slay’, and a ‘double-nought operative'). It is not impossible that as a Bond aficionado, George MacDonald Fraser alluded to the Bond books in some of his other work. 

Spies on British Screens conference - a review

As mentioned in last week's post, a fortnight ago I attended the Spies on British Screens conference at Plymouth University. The conference explored how spies and the intelligence community have been represented in British cinema and TV. It also examined the impact of screen spies on popular culture, with good part of the proceedings looking at aspects of the James Bond phenomenon.

Head over to the excellent website Artistic License Renewed for a review of the conference. Tom May looks back to day 1 of the meeting, while I review days 2 and 3.