The ‘licence to kill’ spy debate is straight out of a le Carre novel | Mary Dejevsky

John le Carre, the writer whose fiction illuminated the ambiguities of espionage and treachery more than any factual accounts could ever do, died last weekend at the age of 89. And he would surely have savoured the irony. The timing was such that appreciative obituaries and warm personal memoirs found themselves sharing media space with some of the more tantalising glimpses afforded to the British public in recent years of the often uneasy relationship between spies and the law.

One of these, worthy of a Le Carre novel on its own, was the revelation that MI6 had been rapped over the knuckles by the official watchdog for not giving the foreign secretary information about a potential, or proven, “rogue” agent. Under the law, the foreign secretary is in charge of both MI6 (officially SIS) and the intelligence-gathering agency, GCHQ, and must sign off on anything that might put an agent on the wrong side of the law. A section of the Intelligence Services Act (1994), dubbed the “James Bond clause”, or “licence to kill”, exempts British agents operating abroad from prosecution in the UK, so long as they have the foreign secretary’s authorisation for whatever they were doing.