Perfection: The Rest is Classified reviewed

Interviewing for MI6 sounds to have been even scarier a century ago than it must be today. Candidates would enter an office to find a man with a ‘large intelligent head’ seated behind a desk and absorbed in paperwork. Everything would appear normal until he picked up a penknife and stabbed his own leg. A prospective agent who flinched at the sight might do himself out of the job.

It is brilliant: carefully crafted, closely scripted, immaculately edited and best of all perfectly cast

Rather like one of those rumoured Oxbridge interviews (candidates for a fellowship at All Souls were reportedly served a cherry pie at dinner to test what they would do with the stones), the ordeal was intended to weed out the weak. The man in the chair, like M in James Bond, was known only as C, and every SIS chief since has been referred to by the same letter. David McCloskey, CIA analyst turned co-host of the podcast The Rest is Classified, admits that he was one of many to assume that C stood merely for ‘chief’. In actual fact, it was the second initial of the organisation’s inaugural head, the penknife-wielding Mansfield Cumming.

The Rest is Classified launched late last year from the same Goalhanger stable as the other The Rest is… podcasts. It has since racked up more than 30 episodes on the highs and lows of espionage, from the creation of MI6 to the Cambridge Five, Watergate and Trump’s ambitions for Greenland. The success of the franchise is such that the host of one podcast will now refer listeners to another. Handy. Former BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera – who co-presents with McCloskey – directs anyone who wants a long view of Ukraine to The Rest is History, allowing him to focus on events since 2021.