John Le Carré, the Irishman: the writer was nationalized after Brexit, a few days before his death

An avowed enemy of Brexit, master of spy novels John Le Carré decided to become an Irish national shortly before his death in December, according to a close friend.

“John Le Carré, English chronicler, died Irish,” writes his friend, the lawyer and Anglo-French writer. Philippe Sands, in an article published by the newspaper The temperature.

According to Sands, it was one of the novelist’s sons, Nick, who told him this information while preparing a radio program on the figure of John Le Carré, the famous author of The spy who came out of the cold.

Days before he died and aware of his Irish origins, the writer – real name David Cornwell – traveled to the south of Ireland to start the process. Le Carré, the novelist who plagued the grim Cold War chessboard with morally ambiguous spies, was so disappointed with the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum that he applied for and received Irish citizenship shortly before her death for the past year, at age 89. old.

Her son, Nicholas, told British broadcaster BBC that Le Carré’s disillusionment with the modern UK and Brexit in particular prompted him to apply for Irish citizenship. According to his son, the writer posed with a smile for a photograph wrapped in an Irish flag.

Le Carré’s novels portray post-imperial Britain and its spies as incompetent, ruthless and often corrupt, and his subsequent novels show growing anger at US foreign policy and the actions of its powerful corporations.

On Brexit, Le Carré did not beat around the bush and compared it to the Suez Crisis of 1956, which confirmed the post-imperial UK’s loss of global power.

“This is without a doubt the biggest catastrophe and the biggest idiocy the UK has perpetrated since the Suez invasion,” Le Carré said of the UK’s exit from the EU. “No one is to blame but the British themselves: neither the Irish nor the Europeans.”

“To me, the very idea that we are currently considering to substitute access to the largest union in the world for access to the US market is terrifying,” he said.

In the referendum of 23 June 2016, 17.4 million voters, or 51.9%, supported the UK’s exit from the EU, while 16.1 million voters, 48.1%, have supported permanence.

Brexit supporters see the exit as a way out of the European bloc, which they see as a condemned and blocked Franco-German project as the United States and China advance in the global economy.

Opponents say Brexit will weaken the West, further reduce the UK’s global weight, impoverish its people and decrease its cosmopolitanism.

In his article for The temperaturePhillppe Sands reconstructed the moment when Le Carré made his wish come true: “In Cork, where his grandmother was from, the clerk received him in a very small place and said ‘welcome home'” .

Phillppe Sands reconstructed the moment when Le Carré made his wish come true: “In Cork, where his grandmother was from, the town clerk received him in a very small place and said, ‘Welcome home. “”.

According to the writer’s son, one of the last photos he keeps of his father shows him as an authentic Irish citizen: “Sitting, wrapped in an Irish flag, smiling”.

Le Carré was a Europhile and made no secret of his disagreement with Brexit. In A decent man, her latest novel, described British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as an “ignorant pig” and regarded the UK’s exit from the European Union as “madness”.

In an interview published by the newspaper The country in October 2019, he explained the reasons for his position: “This is without a doubt the greatest idiocy and the greatest catastrophe that the United Kingdom has perpetrated since the invasion of Suez. It is a self-inflicted catastrophe, for which we cannot blame anyone, neither the Irish nor the Europeans … We are a nation which has always been integrated into the heart of Europe ”.

* With information from Reuters and Telam

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