The Midwit Cuckoos

On Mick Herron’s Clown Town

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If our eldest child, three, had a favourite word, it would be cosy. She likes it so much she uses it for everything. A collected pile of every duvet and blanket in the house is cosy; so is the tomato plant we bravely grew on a W9 balcony; even the pair of dress shoes I own, worn with such irregularity she simply calls them my ‘wedding shoes.’

My toddler, it seems, isn’t alone in her obsession. Cosiness is now everywhere. There’s cosy crime, best embodied by The Thursday Murder Club series. Cosy fantasy, the paragon of the genre being (I am not making this up) Legends & Lattes, a bestseller in which a band of marauding orcs jack it all in to open a coffee shop. Even the term that started it all, cosy catastrophe, is making a comeback: once used to describe the weak tea apocalypses beloved by the science-fiction writers of the 1950s, it equally applies to Ian McEwan’s latest, What Can We Know, in which horny librarians wait out the end of the world in the Snowdonia outpost of the Bodleian library.

With literary fiction now having fallen, only one genre has held out: the spy novel. Traditionally, it’s been a particularly inhospitable environment. Read any Le Carré (sample quote: ‘love is whatever you can still betray’) and you’ll soon conclude that happiness is the surest path to ruin. Deighton starts out better: we meet Bernard Samson, happily married, and with two adorable children. By the end of Berlin Game his domestic bliss is shattered, his wife having defected to the KGB. Even Bond isn’t spared. In No Time To Die, the producers might have whipped out the soft focus lens and given 007 a child, but he paid an exacting price for it: nobly eating a Royal Navy destroyer’s worth of missiles.

But what if the turn was hiding in plain sight? Open any Slough House novel, and take the usual tour - through the grimmer corners of the Barbican into the beige, flaking, job-centre décor of the eponymous office itself - and you’ll hardly feel cosy.

Yet the argument can be made. The books themselves are surprisingly picturesque: by now the Slow Horses have completed a grand tour of Britain’s best - chases through snowy Welsh villages, massacres in deep Derbyshire, and brawls with football hooligans on the grounds of a country estate. Plus, whatever the calamity, things usually settle back into some semblance of normality. Jackson Lamb, unwashed and happy, returns to his desk; whilst Diana Tavener, queen of MI5, and grubby politico Peter Judd are both back safely ensconced in one of the nicer parts of West London.

In Herron’s new Slough House novel, Clown Town, it’s as cosy as it comes. The antagonists are a band of elderly spooks, veterans of the Troubles, condemned to a threadbare retirement, now out for revenge, blazers with elbow patches and all. In my notes while reading, I had oh-so-cleverly described them as The Thursday Murder Club, already imagining myself unveiling this epithet, maybe even using it as the title, to impress all of you. Unfortunately, Jackson Lamb says it first, two-thirds through the book. Looks like it’s not just Taverner and the Park who are two steps behind.

The rest of the gang, too, are in happier times. Shirley Dander is out of rehab. Roddy Ho is busy basking in his ‘hot girl summer,’ new tattoo ensuring that, upon sight, ‘the girls would crap themselves - in a good way.’ Even River’s enjoying life, and all the good things in it, as he cruises up the M40 to Oxford. ‘He may not have a song in his heart, but he has a radio that works. It’s playing Solsbury Hill.’

The sweetness and light soon fades, thanks to the ever competently incompetent Taverner and Judd. As usual they’ve set a disaster in train, leaving those beneath them, the incompetently competent Slow Horses, to clean up their mess. The distinction here, though somewhat Rumsfeldian, matters: it’s the thread that runs through the whole series, the paradox that powers every new Slough House story.

Let’s start with what it means to be competently incompetent. These people are the masters of process: optics managed, the right papers lost, all sides squared away, paragons of what Whitehall cliché calls ‘grip’. They rarely achieve the right outcome but always know how to look as if they have. Theirs is the competence of appearances: the middle manager whose reports are immaculate and every deadline met, though nothing ever improves; or or the track athlete with the Nike contract who does and says everything right in front of the cameras but never quite delivers.

Lamb and his crew are the opposite. They are incompetently competent. This is a breed Brits like to romanticise, though we usually hold our breath when they’re around. We even have another word for them. The maverick. This is Lamb, the Tyson Fury of spycraft, chaos in theory and control in practice, the brilliant coder who refuses to log his changes or turn up on time, yet when the website goes down, he’s the first one you call. The kind of person the phrase to wing it was made for.

Hence the usual criticism of Herron: why, after saving Britain’s collective bacon nine times over, are they still relegated to their Aldersgate hovel? In the world they live in, a world of pure process, there’s no other way it could be. It’s less misconduct or bad behaviour (heaven knows we’ve seen enough of it from Lamb) but this injustice Herron aims at. What he fears most is a world where such deeds can no longer, from time to time, be justified, the means glossed over, if the ends are right.

A counterintuitive example here comes from Herron’s most misunderstood creation, Peter Judd, the figure around whom Clown Town revolves. Judd is usually compared with Boris Johnson: I suppose for his general outrageousness and libertine streak. He certainly began that way, but is now a fundamentally different creature. A much better comparator is Peter Mandelson or George Osborne: those rare political operators who love the game so much that everything else melts away - those who see themselves less as as political actors than, as Judd puts it, ‘indispensable national assets’: critical, load-bearing figures that the country silently depends on.

Judd may look like a rule-breaking renegade, but in fact he is as incompetently competent as they come. This is what makes him so repugnant: the sense that all his schemes are perfectly planned yet devoid of substance bar his rapacious desire to be a legend in his own lunchtime - the Widmerpool of the Wolseley. Judd is not Lamb’s mirror, but his negative, oh so happy to be a member of the class which, as he puts it,‘enjoys rewards commensurate not to [its] achievements, but to [its] expectations.’

The reason for Judd’s life as an incompetent competent is obvious. Like many ministers, he is a spy who never made it, a man whose pulse quickens when handed a pink piece of paper with ‘STRAP’ at the top, a twinge in his stomach each time he gets close to the ‘high side,’ knowing he never quite landed the done thing post-Oxford.

Taverner, on the other hand, is the spy who did. She is an instinctively more likeable incompetent competent: at least she believes in higher things than yet another three-letter acronym after your name. Yet nine novels in, her closet is so full of the dead that the hinges are beginning to give way. Perhaps it is a sign of the times, or simply the laws of wardrobe gravity, but the deep-state shtick no longer has the juice it once did, so many errors to her name you can no longer argue the toss. The kid with the Kalashnikov at last must be disarmed.

Who yanks the gun from her? Take a wild guess. It’s the king of the incompetents himself, the man from '‘the engine room’ as Judd tells him at one point in the story. After such needling, and the carnage contained in a story that ranks among Herron’s best, Lamb does something he has never done before: calling time on the soft focus shenanigans. ‘I’m going to burn the fucking house down.’

So he transforms into an Eumenidic spirit, not a sword of Albion but its scalpel, turned inward to excise the malignancy from our body politic. When Gary Oldman gets to this one, he’ll feel like he’s playing the villain in Léon again. The catastrophe isn’t so cosy any more.

This has always been Herron’s way: subverting a fundamental tenet of Britishness – our addiction to cosiness – and doing it so well. Time and time again he lures us in with country lanes, snowy fields, and ancient libraries, only to then collapse it all around us. It’s easy to forget, especially reading Clown Town, with its geriatric A-Team and an even funnier array of one-liners: ‘Footage of Goldilocks going down on Daddy Bear,’ ‘Show her the Dreaming Spires then take her up the Woodstock Road,’ or, more simply, ‘Are you there God, it’s me, Jackson.’ But then, inevitably, he reminds us.

Take Joe Country, perhaps the most cosy catastrophe-esque Slough House novel. When writing each book, Herron says he begins with a single image, and builds the entire plot around it. In the case of Joe Country, we actually know what that image is. It is of a snowy field in Wales. A man sits down in the snow, staring out across the hills of Pembrokeshire. He holds the image in his eye, sighs, and dies.

It’s an image I return to every time I drive the aforementioned toddler, her brother, and my wife down the A40 past Carmarthen on the way to our annual family holiday in Pembrokeshire, as the car eats up the final half hour of the journey westward. Was it that field? Or the next one? Few things could be more cosy than the snow blanketing the hills surrounding Tenby or Saundersfoot, orange light flickering from farmhouses built of old red sandstone, nostalgic dreams of a Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Nor more horrifying. The man, who I won’t name, is disembowelled, literally holding his guts in with his hands as he sighs his last. Here’s what happens when he’s found: ‘“I’m sorry,” he told his dead colleague, then went through his pockets, removing [his] ID and phone. Unlike River’s, this still had some charge in it.’ Stripped like a battlefield corpse, all that survives of him is his phone battery.

At this point it’s worth remembering that the original cosy catastrophes were, above all, love letters to the competent incompetent - the quiet, attentive figures that dominate the works of Wyndham, Christopher and Shute. Think of Keith Stewart, writer for The Miniature Mechanic and the quiet man of Ealing, who saves his step-daughter’s fortunes by flying halfway around the world in Trustee from the Toolroom. Or Gordon Zellaby, the mild-mannered intellectual of The Midwich Cuckoos, befuddling Midwich when the alien children arrive by deciding to teach them instead.

What first looks like folly, in hindsight, becomes something else entirely. In the book’s final pages he says goodbye to his wife and calmly drives to their school. The children greet him warmly as he walks into the classroom, and promptly blows himself up, destroying the aliens and saving the world in the process.

Herron’s defence of competent incompetence matters. Spy fiction is one of the few soft-power assets still capable of converting itself into hard currency. The world’s appetite for it shows no sign of slowing. 2025 was not only the year of Black Bag and The Day of the Jackal, but the moment Netflix entered full spook mania, churning out tale after tale of British espionage: Black Doves, Hostage, and a third season of The Diplomat in the last few months alone. Are we paying them for this? We should be.

Where does Slough House fit? I suppose it brings us back to our original distinction: between the incompetent competents, and the competent incompetents. For a modern state to aspire to competent competence is a bridge too far, accepting incompetent incompetence a dangerous fatalism. The only choice left, as Clown Town makes stark, is to choose between the Park and the Horses.

Maybe that is Britain’s secret service after all: the quiet triumph of engine room lot currently being beamed to fifty million users worldwide via the excellent Apple TV adaptation. Not Bond’s impossible gloss, but a crocked, shabby, flaking, believable form of excellence - our national art of getting away with it.