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Oliver Lacon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sir Oliver Lacon is a Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office in John Le Carre's 'George Smiley' novels: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. He is responsible for administrative oversight of MI6.
Ministers come and go, while secret services change very slowly - not at all, if they can help it. Consequently a PU is a necessary grease to the wheels. Stereotypically, Labour governments tend to make a fuss about tighter restrictions and not trusting secret operatives, but protest loudest when something happens that they don't know about. Tory governments often think secret operations are a wonderful thing, but they want to control everything and sometimes make impossible or just ridiculous demands.
Lacon's job, then, is to damp down political matters as much as possible, while endeavouring to get MI6 to accept at least some direction from the current Minister. He is also effectively their paymaster, so that if MI6 won't accommodate ministerial demands, he has the whip of money to hold over them.
Sir Oliver is written as venal, petty, and utterly without morals. He is the bureaucrat's bureaucrat. At the same time, he is quite intelligent, and he does his job quite amazingly well. Probably nobody actually likes him, but it's hard to imagine that any replacement could possibly be an improvement.
He was born in 1929 and has been in his position since 1965. He is married and has several daughters. His wife, Joy (née Rhys), was wonderfully cut out to be an ambassador's wife but missed her calling.