Can James Bond be woke?

He’s a privately educated man who works for the government. So yes

Always judge someone by how they treat people who can’t do anything for them. As rules for life go, it’s pretty much unbeatable.

Back when I was about 24 or 25 I was given the task of interviewing a famous comedy writer - Charlie Higson, star of the hugely popular The Fast Show. I was a big fan of the programme in my teens so was both excited and apprehensive about talking to him as he promoted a film he’d written.

I can’t remember the conversation, but after it was over, and to my horror, I went to play the interview and realised that it hadn’t recorded. A nightmare situation for a neurotic young journalist.

The editor was very keen on running the piece, was quite demanding in a friendly Independent-reading liberal dad sort of way, and asked when I was going to produce my copy. Increasingly anxious and panic-ridden, in desperation I decided to call Higson again. He answered, I told him ‘this has never happened to me before,’ and waited for him to put the phone down or groan. He simply laughed, said ‘I bet you always say that’ and agreed to do the whole recording again. 

He was obviously busy, and even if he was keen on the publicity, many people would have at best done so with bad grace or even complained to the editor, while others would have told me to get stuffed; but he sacrificed his time because of the incompetence of a young journalist who was of no importance to him. Always judge someone by how they treat people who can’t do anything for them. 

Higson has since gone on to write a number of Young James Bond books, and this year published a grown-up Bond novel, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. 

The other day, an acquaintance messaged me some extracts of the book, which I tweeted because they struck me as interesting and amusing. The story involves a sort of Nigel Farage-type villain with reactionary and conspiratorial views, and who plans to disrupt the Coronation. The narrative features Bond’s internal monologue about nationalist populists, about the Hungarian government and horseshoe theory of extreme Right and Left, and I was tickled by the idea of 007 being a centrist dad/FBPE type who perhaps listens to The Rest is Politics and laments that the sensible Tory party of John Major and Kenneth Clarke has been hijacked by ideologues.

It interested me because one of my obsessions is the way that art now comes to serve the prevailing ideology, something characteristic of revolutionary regimes. Post-1960-something western civilisation has undergone a social transformation as dramatic as the Christianisation of Rome, and it is the nature of revolutionary regimes that art promotes the new faith. Just as Christians turned worthy men and women from the past into virtuous pagans, everything from before the revolution must be reinterpreted via the faith. Likewise great artistic narratives are recast, too, often in a way that would horrify the original writers.

The same is obviously true of James Bond, a pre-revolutionary figure who has come to be made palatable to the new faith, a difficult transition for a character who is inherently quite misogynistic.

Bond’s affairs with women, which were condemned in the early 1960s by social conservative columnists for being too sexy, are now condemned by progressives for being too sexist, as the revolution has moved from its libertarian to authoritarian stages.

This was very much on display in the most recent Bond film, No Time To Die, which I disliked, being basically two and a half hours of a middle-aged man moping about how much he hates himself: I don’t need to go to the cinema to see that, I get enough of it at home.

It is because of our civilisational upheaval that we see the increasing focus on diversity in the 007 films and speculation about making the next Bond black or female. Of course, one might ask ‘why not just create a new character?’, but conquering religions always absorb and recast figures from the old faith. Yet to detractors, to continue the Bond series, either on the screen or in novels, while changing his essential worldview makes no more sense than writing a new Flashman book where he works for an international hunger charity.

But it’s also natural that James Bond now reflects the new order, and Higson is probably not wrong to suggest that a 35-year-old secret agent today might be a progressive. After all, he’s a posh, privileged man, and centre-left values about the EU, diversity and other issues tend to reflect class interests, something epitomised by the popular Twitter figure RS Archer. It is also true that the sort of private schools which Bond would attend are among the most forthright on LGBT issues and race. 

Bond defends the institutional values of his era, and on the day that Putin started the war in Ukraine, the head of MI6 was tweeting about LGBT month. Prevent, set up to monitor jihadis at war with Britain, increasingly focuses on small-c conservatives, followers of the old religion whose views are more genuinely subversive to multicultural Britain than any Islamist.

In this worldview Hungary is an obvious villain, being a country overtly opposed to multiculturalism. Even if its western sympathisers concede that it is illiberal (although you’re way less likely to get arrested for jokes or opinions), the key fault line between Britain’s elites and Budapest is over diversity. Perhaps the regime has undermined democracy, as our new Bond might believe, but many western conservatives would say the same of transforming the electorate through immigration.

But that is not just a controversial idea in Britain; it is subversive, and a modern-day Bond would be trained to counter subversives.

Higson presumably knew his book would upset all the right people, and my tweet did as well as I expected. In fact it did too well, and I began to feel bad about the whole thing, initially locking my account (I appreciate Twitter dramas are a bit ‘this is what happened in the playground today’, so apologies). 

Then I decided to delete the thread altogether; there wasn’t even much comeback, I saw just one negative quote-tweet in response, mainly because I can’t see tweets from people who don’t follow me, but I just felt guilty for all the comments attacking Higson, who after all was kind to me. 

Anyway, this upset some political allies, and ironically made the whole thing worse for the author who ended up spending much of the day arguing with lots of younger Right-wing accounts. I’m not sure it’s very wise for authors to get stuck into critics of any sort, but I understand why they get upset, from personal experience. My father was an author and I have a horrible childhood memory of him reading a scathing review and being completely crushed.

There is a place for scathing reviews, they’re an art form in themselves - Niall Gooch did a good one of the new Bond book - but Twitter is not a good place for them, and I don’t really have the heart, especially when the author has been nice to me personally; I obviously wouldn’t make the cut with the Secret Service (well, for a number of reasons). Anyway, there’s a huge market for people who like Bond to reflect their values, his book is selling very well and plenty of people loved it, so I’m sure Higson will survive this criticism (and maybe even thrive from the conservative response).

The worst thing about this is that I’ll probably end up getting fictionalised in his next book as a Bond villain; not even an important one, just an underling who gets thrown into the shark tank after being told ‘this organisation does not tolerate failure’: Ned East, red-faced Right-wing polemicist, living in Budapest as a stooge of the villainous dictator Viktor Korban.

Obviously I’m not the target audience, and I was never a huge fan of the Bond books of Ian Fleming, much preferring the films (very much a Roger Moore-era type); I got through about three or four in my late teens and remember Moonraker seeming to feature 40 pages of Fleming describing what the secret agent had for breakfast.

Those books go out of copyright in 2034, so maybe I should write my own interpretation when the time comes. I always thought Viktor Orbán’s great opponent George Soros would make a far better Bond villain; I can see him stroking a cat in his volcano lair, announcing to our hero that he plans to destroy Europe by flooding it with unlimited immigration, ‘“It will… enrich them,” Dr Zoros cackled.’ But, of course, Soros’s huge efforts to influence politics is a Right-wing conspiracy theory, and I don’t want to put myself on the Prevent list (if I’m not already). 

Anyway, watch this space. James Bond will return in Dr No Borders.