How to Wash Out of Her Majesty’s Secret Service in Under Twenty Minutes

Tatler, the UK’s premiere society magazine and a great personal weakness, recently featured a deee-lightful compendium of stories by Oxbridge graduates who were briefly recruited for MI5 (or MI6) and then made a frightful hash of it.

Sometimes it’s really your recruiter’s fault:
“….he leaned over and firmly grasped me by the penis. I leapt to my feet and, babbling, backed into the hall and out onto the dark street.”

Sometimes it’s all on you:
“For a start, I had written in my CV that I was a member of my university’s Russian Debating Society. I was nothing of the sort…I tried to quote the government White Papers (probably top secret) on the forthcoming handover of HK back to China, which I had ‘borrowed’ the night before from the lodger in our family house in London, a very senior officer in the HK police.”

(Tatler, April 2011)