Richard Osman received the “tap on the shoulder” from MI6 while he was a student at Cambridge University and interviewed for a role as a spy, he has revealed.
In an interview with the Guardian, the television presenter and crime fiction author said he was not able to develop a career in the secret services, however, because he failed the “fun” tests he was set and – in any case – would have been an awful spy.
“They just said, ‘No, it’s fine’,” he said of the end of the process, after he had spent time doing war-gaming scenarios and chatting to people “who got older and posher throughout the day”.
He added: “I would have been terrible. I’m too tall [6ft 7in], not bright enough, and if I have a secret, I tell everybody. You could not find a worse spy … I cannot tell a lie.”
It is often said that writers write what they know, though it would perhaps be a stretch to say so of Osman: Elizabeth, one of his best-known fictional characters in his Thursday Murder Club series of books is a former spy. Indeed, Osman told the Guardian she is the character from the series with whom he has least in common. Nevertheless, he joked: “I’m still available, by the way, if MI6 read this. I could be useful, because no one is going to suspect me now.”
The method by which Osman was selected for interview was perhaps the most cliched: a Cambridge undergraduate given the famed “tap on the shoulder”. In recent years, MI6 – known officially as the Secret Intelligence Service – has announced a return to the old-style tap, but with the goal of moving away from the sort of recognised type.
In fact, Alex Younger, a former chief of the agency, signalled a return to the tap method as a means of attracting black and Asian officers, and finally dispelling the image of British spies as the preserve of a posh, Oxbridge elite.
Younger, who was known as “C” until he left in 2020, told the Guardian in 2017 that MI6 had “suffered from groupthink”. He said: “I’m quite passionate about this. We have to go out and ask these people to join us. Before we were avowed as a service, that was the only way of recruiting people, a tap on the shoulder. That was the way I was recruited. We have to go to people that would not have thought of being recruited to MI6. We have to make a conscious effort. We need to reflect the society we live in.
“Simply, we have to attract the best of modern Britain. Every community from every part of Britain should feel they have what it takes, no matter what their background or status. We have to stop people selecting themselves out.”
