Deep throats

The mark of many an undercover agent is his or her fondness for the bottle.few Cannes Film Festivals ago, PS I Love You was the working title for louche Hollywood actor Rupert Everett’s new James Bond movie in which the iconic licensed-to-kill operative would jump out of the closet, gun cocked.

 

As Rupe elaborated, “It will be much more violent and aggressive than the James Bond films. The books were very violent and he was a very scary man. That is what mine will be like. He will be a philanderer. He will be everything.”

Bond was to be played by Everett, naturally, and the plot was to be straightforward: “My Bond film takes place in the world of fashion where a Karl Lagerfeldtype character has discovered a virus that is going to kill off half of Europe, and he is going to reinstate European Royalty, and I fall in love with the guy from the CIA.”

Swapping sexual identities is not as farfetched as you may imagine, with the image of Her Majesty’s secret agent James Bond undergoing many changes at the moment. Revisionism started back in 1999 with the 19th film in the Bond franchise, The World is Not Enough, in which 007 has his signature martini made with Tanqueray gin.

In the succession of spectacularly successful Bond films, starting with Dr No made at the height of the Cold War back in 1962, 007 preferred vodka martinis (more correctly known as vodkatinis), famously shaken not stirred. But with the collapse of Soviet-style communism, product placement is the name of the new game. Already the leading imported gin in the United States, with sales of over 25 million bottles a year, Diageo (the largest multinational beer, wine and spirits company in the world) is hoping Tanqueray will emulate Red Stripe beer which saw sales soar 53% when Tom Cruise drank one in the movie The Firm.

Boozing is a fine old spying tradition. Possibly the most unlikely spy of modern times was the hard-drinking Welsh windbag, poet Dylan Thomas. The author of Under Milk Wood visited Iran in 1951, ostensibly to research and script a documentary film about the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, an enterprise viewed as so vital to British influence in the Middle East that it had its own operative from MI5 permanently attached to it. The oil company was under threat of nationalisation from a left-wing Iranian government and Thomas’s trip was an attempt to gauge local attitudes towards nationalisation. The details of the trip are still classified, but MI6 staged a coup in Iran two years later to assure control of the oil supplies and prevent them falling into Soviet hands…

A decade earlier, novelist Graham Greene was spying in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Greene was a malcontent who drank heavily in a vain attempt to try and overcome the blackness of depression that would periodically engulf him.
On the voyage to Freetown, Greene would drink a bottle of Champagne in the mornings as a regmaaker for excesses of the previous night. His letters home were filled with the heavy drinker’s lament: nothing to drink and nowhere to drink it. There was “only bad bottled export beer of uncertain kinds, Scotch if you are lucky, gin which is a depressant, and South African wines that make you feel like hell the next morning”.

But with the Cold War now officially over and Islamo-terrorism the new threat, the syllabus at spy schools will have to change. An alcoholic tipple, no matter how discretely enjoyed, will be a sure giveaway in a muddle of mullahs and mujahedeen.

Neil Pendock writes for the Sunday Times and Financial Mail. He judged at prominent international wine competition Concours Mondial this year.