The Apple original series Slow Horses centers around a man who has fought two wars. The world-worn Jackson Lamb, brilliantly performed by Gary Oldman, is disheveled, indifferent, and bitter. And he’s got every right to be because he’s not only been fighting against the Soviets and numerous security threats to the UK, but has also battled the large institutional bureaucracy within MI5 Britain’s security agency. At the end of each season, viewers are left wondering which conflict is worse.
Those bureaucratic wars, skillfully crafted by creator Mick Herron, are important in explaining the appeal of the show. All espionage tales have the great inherent attraction of peeking into the shadowy world of cloak and dagger and witnessing the deadly battles between competing systems of governance. But Slow Horses has something else. Intelligence and security agencies are large impersonal bureaucracies just like the DMV. Herron has humanized his characters and placed them in a world where individuals are susceptible to both traitorous temptations and the basic human instincts of self-interest and ambition that play out in the politics of bureaucratic institutions—whether it’s getting the corner office or murdering a loyal agent to cover up a scandal. At a time when the West faces multiple security threats from terrorists, dictators, hackers, and extremists and is also experiencing explosive growth in unchecked bureaucratic autonomy and authority, Herron has made the well-worn spy thriller even more relatable to his audience.
Until the 1960s, scholars modeled individuals in the public sector as public-spirited in their motivations and work. One of the founding fathers of public choice, the irascible Gordon Tullock worked in the US foreign service in China after completing law school. That experience, and his general skepticism about—well—everything, prompted him to turn his attention to the administrative state. Tullock and his Nobel prize-winning co-author James Buchanan built a model of politics that posited politicians and bureaucrats as self-interested rather than public-spirited and rational rather than angelic. They also included the idea that politics is an exchange process, much like a market. Using those two assumptions, they turned the world of political analysis upside down.
Tullock’s career was illustrious and varied. His work on bureaucracies included two important books studying the administrative state that provided fresh ways to analyze the government agencies that all of us caricature from time to time. We know that the public sector can be inefficient and sclerotic. Bureaucrats avoid responsibility and try to claim credit, and without market signals, the quality of their work is difficult to judge. Taking those institutional constraints and assuming individuals are not angels once they are hired by the government, Tullock argued that bureaucrats work for the same reasons all of us do: to make a living, be happy with our work, and gain the esteem and approbation of others. Because metrics to measure “good” work are hard to find in large non-market organizations, promotion is often more about flattery, popularity, and serving your superior’s wishes, which can lead to consensus views and uniformity of opinion, even incorrect ones.
Faulty opinions and unconstrained loyalty loom large in Herron’s world, and he balances realism with a dark humor that’s smart and frequently disarming. I doubt he is familiar with Tullock’s work, but they are kindred spirits in their pursuit of a more realistic way of understanding modern life within large institutions. The premise of the show illustrates another key insight of Tullock: it’s almost impossible to fire incompetent bureaucrats. Slow Horses is based on a fictitious place where MI5 sends those agents who have messed up. Rather than trying to fire them, the flawed agents are sent to a building called “Slough House” run by the aforementioned Jackson Lamb. Lamb is something to behold. He hilariously curses, ridicules, and mocks. But he is also gifted and revered even among the leadership of MI5. Under all of his bluster and cynicism, he helps guide the group in each season through the dangers of spying to endings that might not be “happy” but avoid as much carnage and chaos as possible.
Among the misfit spies are a drug addict, compulsive gambler, recovering alcoholic, and the grandson of a famous service character who infamously “blew up” Stansted Airport in a training exercise. All of them are more interesting for their warts and humanity. Imagine not super spies like James Bond or George Smiley, but rather characters from The Office or Parks and Recreation (if slightly darker) fighting real security threats. It’s an odd mix, but it works beautifully because Herron makes them sympathetic and human. There are spies looking for love after failed marriages and who are too trusting of Russians with a bottle of vodka. The recovering alcoholic has a stunning attention to detail and is gifted at chess. The drug addict has a Bruce Willis-esque irreverence when she isn’t sneaking off to the bathroom to get high.
All of the seasons that have been released so far have many excellent illustrations of the points Tullock articulated, but the third season is the clearest and best. An outside private security agency with ties to a cabinet minister is tipped off by one of the MI5 leaders about weaknesses with security protocols, but the real reason is to reveal a cover-up at the top of the agency. Slough House is used as the weak point in the test and the vulnerabilities of the agency’s security are found. But an idealistic former agent flips the script and brings Lamb and his crew into the action, which culminates in brutal bloodshed and an orgy of automatic weapons fire in an old documents storage facility. It’s a fitting way to end this latest season and one Tullock would have very much enjoyed.
Under Lamb’s highly unorthodox leadership style, he slowly tries to reform the profoundly human agents dumped in his lap and protect the UK.
There are four layered games going on. First, there is a struggle for power between MI5’s two most powerful figures, the so-called “first desk” who is ruthlessly self-interested and emotionally frigid even by MI5 standards and played brilliantly by Sophie Okonedo of Hotel Rwanda fame. “Second desk” is played by Kristin Scott Thomas who looks like she is having a ball meddling in operations, verbally sparring with Oldman, and trying to undermine her boss while advancing her own career. First Desk has engaged in an extensive cover-up to protect her position. It’s now spiraled out of control and Scott Thomas’ character is slowly leaking it out to undermine her. At one point the two meet to discuss the situation and Scott Thomas notes sadly that a Slough House agent has been kidnapped. Okonedo shakes her head saying the two of them needed to “limit the collateral damage.” Scott Thomas interprets this as saving their missing agent, but Okonedo corrects her and admits, “I wasn’t meaning her, I was talking about us, but yes I hope she’ll come through unscathed.”
The second game involves a quest for justice by a selfless former agent who is masquerading as a member of a for-profit security group. His love for a fallen comrade pushes him to leave a trail of corpses as he struggles to shine light on the cover-up. Third, there is the material self-interest of a wide range of characters including the ambitious, greedy, delightfully immoral British cabinet minister played by Samuel West, who lacks the guile and cunning of his MI5 counterparts. Chris Riley’s bull in the China shop turn as the head of security follows Okonedo’s bloody illegal orders to promote his own career in exchange for her promises of promotion for loyalty. There are times throughout this season when I almost started referring to Slough House as Tullock House. Eventually, Okonedo ties Scott Thomas to the leaks. From there the two veteran actors play out the remainder of the season in an office trading barbs in a psychological chess match over a gifted bottle of rare single malt scotch as the battle between the goons loyal to First Desk and the Slow Horses rages in a secret MI5 document facility.
Finally, there are the personal struggles of those working at the Slough House. The compulsive gambler and drug addict arrive at the scene of the climactic confrontation literally fighting for their careers. At the same time, the recovering alcoholic, the misanthropic IT whiz, and Lamb evade a hit team sent by Riley to “clear the board.” Lamb tries to tiptoe through the minefields of all four games with his supreme confidence, raucous sarcasm, biting tongue, and finally his often brutal but necessary use of honesty, almost as a weapon. It’s great fun, but there are important lessons here as well.
In the Federalist Papers, Publius argues famously that political power can be constrained in a number of ways, but one of the key limits was that ultimately ambition can be made to counteract ambition if institutions are well constructed. However, Publius could not have anticipated the size and scope of the current administrative state in the West and elsewhere. Can that same principle apply today? Can we have hope that agencies such as MI5, charged with the critical task of protecting “our way of life,” will be successful despite being staffed with “regular” people, immune from electoral accountability, ill-suited to flexibility and adaptability? At the end of season three we see ambition can counteract ambition, but only at tremendous cost.
Tullock emphasized the importance of creating institutional structures to encourage better outcomes based on his assumptions of human behavior. The MI5 we see in Slow Horses certainly does little to deter misguided self-interested behavior. Under Lamb’s highly unorthodox leadership style, he slowly tries to reform the profoundly human agents dumped in his lap and protect the UK. They might never be real-life James Bonds or George Smileys, but the legitimately human and flawed spies from Slough House are surprisingly agile and effective without the overbearing bureaucracy that the “good agents” must endure. Herron’s slow horses aren’t just loveable underdogs, they are more realistic and approachable. And if flesh and blood spies can help protect us from the bad guys unleashed from the tyranny of an overbearing bureaucracy, that gives us a glimmer of unexpected hope for liberty from this razor-sharp series.
