Meet M, the James Bond of the natural world
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Version 0 of 1. After an enjoyable weekend pottering outside with my children, admiring ladybirds and reluctantly letting them chase spiders, I sometimes worry that these experiences won’t equip them to compete in Dave ’n’ George’s Global Race. But reading a new book, Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms, an enthralling true spy story by Paul Willetts, one sentence jumped out at me: “You should always remember to look under a log because that’s where you’re likely to find interesting things.” This is the advice of Maxwell Knight (otherwise known as “M”), a spymaster who ran section B5b in MI5 during the second world war. The “log” Knight peered under in 1939 was the fascistic Nordic League, and Willetts tells the amazing story of how the spymaster hunts down a Russian and an American spy. ‘You should always remember to look under a log because that's where you're likely to find interesting things.' Knight was a brilliant intelligence agent, it seems, because he was a talented naturalist. As a boy, he roamed wild around his uncle’s house in south Wales, watched birds and kept mice, toads, slow-worms and hedgehogs. “Birdwatcher” is old British intelligence slang for a spy and, as an adult, Knight applied his skills as “a nature detective”: careful observation and a patient approach to the accumulation of facts. He was wildly eccentric, taking his brown bear Bessie for walks round Chelsea on a lead, but seriously applied the way he befriended wild animals – he had a soft voice, moved slowly and believed in acting with candour – to his handling of agents. Knight’s love of animals bequeathed him a postwar career as a broadcaster (presenter of The Naturalist on BBC radio) and author of books with titles like How to Keep a Gorilla. He virtually foresaw climate change – warning of the retreating Arctic ice in one broadcast in 1962 – but his spying work was hidden, not even mentioned in obituaries. Most deliciously, as Willetts reveals, one of Knight’s books, Talking Birds, carried illustrations by another former MI5 officer, David Cornwell – aka John le Carré. Related: New homes for habitats – our new deal with the newts | Patrick Barkham I hope my children don’t aspire to espionage because I’m not sure any spy is a healthy individual, but Knight’s life shows how the natural world can fire imaginations, and that an “eccentric” accord with animals may offer a niche in which an individual can thrive. A garden bridge too far I want to like the idea of the £175m garden bridge in London. A tree-lined footbridge linking Westminster and Lambeth sounds lovely, but this privately funded project now requires £60m of public funds, and the National Audit Office is investigating why George Osborne offered £30m towards it. No major infrastructure would ever arise if we employ the “why don’t we build hospitals/schools/a Greater Britain instead?” argument, but there’s another green “bridge” that’s miles better value: the Peckham Coal Line. Converting disused sidings into a 1km linear park is billed at about £2m. Boris Johnson, the mayor, has donated £10,000 (he pledged £30m for the garden bridge) and this community project hopes to crowdfund £65,000 (they still need £18,000) by the end of October. The neonics nightmare The VW emissions revelations will be the first of many regulatory scandals. Another could erupt over the testing and approving of pesticides. A temporary European Union ban on neonicotinoids was introduced in 2014, just when I’d learned how to pronounce this class of bee-killing pesticides, but new ones are still being approved. Matt Shardlow of conservation charity Buglife, highlights how the EU has approved a pesticide called Sulfoxaflor despite US courts overturning its approval there, ruling the Environmental Protection Agency had used “flawed and limited data”. In two decades, there’ll be a Hollywood blockbuster about neonics, and everyone will wonder why we spread them everywhere. |