"Claude Whelan never stood a chance. I think he knows that now. I think he always knew it a little, probably, even as the rest of his brain tried to convince him he could manage a group of spies and analysts the same way one would manage a summer-internship program. He got the job as MI5's director-general only because the people who put him there wanted a stuffed-shirt bureaucrat to color inside the lines a little more"
"He wasn't sneaky and thought he was clever, and in the world of spycraft, those two things leave you as vulnerable as a poodle in a shark tank. And now he's gone, probably, pressured into a resignation after overplaying his hand one too many times. I'll miss him if we never see him again. He was an ineffective leader who got in the way of important intelligence work"
Claude Whelan was an ineffectual MI5 director-general whose bureaucratic instincts and lack of craftiness made him ill-suited to running spies. He secured the job as a safe, controllable bureaucrat rather than a capable intelligence leader. His pretensions to chivalric competence and habitual overreach endangered operations and likely forced his resignation. Slow Horses frequently portrays senior officers as self-interested, careerist obstacles who feel more villainous than actual adversaries. The series provided a notably detestable antagonist in James Spider Webb, whose violent death satisfied many viewers and left a narrative need for a new loathsome bureaucratic target.
Read at Vulture
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