A salutary tale

From The Idler Book of Crap Jobs:

After a glorious Oxbridge education, my uncle started working for MI5 in 1952. His first assignment was to infiltrate the Communist Party. He was given a new name, a job working for the railways and the task of immersing himself in his new identity. After 10 years he had worked his way up through the railworkers’ union to a position of influence within the Communist Party, but his success was to be his downfall. He was such a good asset to MI5 that it became less and less likely that they would ever allow such a successful operative to “come out” and be reassigned to another mission.

He had to live on the railworkers’ salary so as not to draw attention to himself, he wasn’t allowed to pursue any interests that might conflict with his identity, he couldn’t have any time off from his “new life” and he had constantly to lie to his family. So throughout the next 30 years the only link he had with the intelligence service was a monthly meeting with his contact at MI5.

In the end he went mad, his wife and children left him and he started to compulsively collect newspaper clippings that related to his original mission. The piles of paper began to take over his house. It got so bad that in the end he had to cut pathways through the piles of newspaper that filled every room. Eventually, because newspaper is made from poor quality paper, the paper dust he habitually inhaled began to shred his lungs with tiny paper cuts until one day he effectively “drowned” in his own blood. The truth about his life only emerged 10 years after he was buried.

Most crap jobs steal some of your time. His stole his life.

Dirty tricks then...

Allegations—and, indeed, proof—of dirty tricks in the Lords are not unheard of. It turns out that the Habeas Corpus Act 1679 was passed thanks only to a particularly sly trick in the division lobbies when they voted:

Lord Grey and Lord Norris were named to be the tellers: Lord Norris, being a man subject to vapours, was not at all times attentive to what he was doing: so, a very fat lord coming in, Lord Grey counted him as ten, as a jest at first: but seeing Lord Norris had not observed it, he went on with this misreckoning of ten: so it was reported that they that were for the [Habeas Corpus] Bill were in the majority, though indeed it went for the other side: and by this means the Bill passed.

The clerk recorded in the minutes of the Lords that the "ayes" had fifty-seven and the "nays" had fifty-five, a total of 112, but the same minutes also state that only 107 Lords had attended that sitting. [Wikipedia]