From the moment Sean Connery first uttered “Bond, James Bond” in *Dr. No*, right through Daniel Craig’s final, rather damp exit in *No Time to Die*, I, like millions of other loyal subjects, laboured under a charming delusion. I believed the United Kingdom possessed impregnable security. MI5, MI6, the whole alphabet soup of spooks with licences to kill, gadgets that could turn a fountain pen into a nuclear deterrent, and a national instinct for spotting a wrong ’un at fifty paces. We had the Queen, the navy, and 007. What could possibly go wrong?
Alas, I was wrong. Spectacularly, hilariously, historically wrong.
It turns out that while Bond was busy shaking martinis, skiing off cliffs, and seducing women with questionable loyalties, a rather less glamorous fifth column was hard at work inside the castle walls. Nigel Farage and his ever-shifting gang of professional Brexit enthusiasts have, according to the latest official pronouncements, been operating with all the subtlety of a Russian tank parade through Red Square. Their Welsh leader, Nathan Gill—once a proud MEP for UKIP, then the Brexit Party, then briefly Reform UK’s man in Wales—has now been jailed for taking kickbacks from pro-Russian sources. Cash for comments. “Christmas gifts,” they called them. How festive. How thoroughly un-British. How very much like something Bond would have foiled before the opening credits.
And now the Prime Minister himself, Andy Burnham, has announced that the Russians were indeed practising the dark arts during the great national self-harm exercise known as the EU referendum. Moscow, it seems, helped gear the United Kingdom towards exiting the European Union with the same quiet efficiency that Bond once used to defuse a bomb under a volcano lair. Only this time the bomb went off, the country is still picking shrapnel out of its economic rear end, and Bond was nowhere to be seen.
One is forced to ask the obvious question: where, precisely, was James Bond while all this was happening?
Was 007 tied up in a casino somewhere, losing Her Majesty’s money at baccarat while Arron Banks was having cosy chats at the Russian Embassy? Was he too busy perfecting the perfect dry martini to notice that certain political entrepreneurs were accepting envelopes that smelled faintly of borscht and oligarch cologne? Did Q Branch’s latest tracking device only work on SPECTRE agents and not on Welsh MEPs with a sudden passion for Ukrainian television interviews?
Perhaps Bond was simply out of date. The old threats were clear: bald villains with white cats, nuclear warheads pointed at Fort Knox, and the occasional rogue British agent gone native. The new threats are more mundane and infinitely more effective: a man in a tweed jacket waving a pint, talking about “taking back control,” while someone in the background quietly wires money for favourable speeches. No exploding pens required. Just a WhatsApp group and a willingness to say the right things on the right channels.
The irony is almost too rich. For decades we watched Bond save Britain from foreign plots with a raised eyebrow and a perfectly tailored dinner jacket. Meanwhile, the real-life version of the plot involved people who claimed to be the purest of patriots accepting payments that advanced the interests of a foreign power that has never exactly wished us well. Fifth columnists don’t always wear trench coats and speak with thick accents. Sometimes they wear Union Jack socks and appear on GB News.
So here we are in 2026. The impregnable security fortress turned out to have a revolving door marked “Useful Idiots and Occasional Cash Recipients.” The man who once led the charge for sovereignty now finds his former Welsh lieutenant counting the years in a prison cell for services rendered to the Kremlin’s narrative. And the current Prime Minister has finally said out loud what many suspected for years: the dark arts were practised, the referendum was interfered with, and the country still has the scars to prove it.
James Bond, if you’re listening from whatever Caribbean beach you retired to after *No Time to Die*, the nation could use a word. Preferably before the next election. Bring the Walther PPK. Leave the shaken-not-stirred attitude at home. We appear to have developed a national taste for self-inflicted wounds, and the people who helped inflict them are still walking around free, denying everything, and calling the Prime Minister a liar.
Licensed to kill? In the end, it seems some people only needed a licence to cash the cheque.
