MI5 chief's Bond girl fantasy

By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor

Yet Dame Stella Rimington, the first female head of MI5, has confessed that she would rather have been a Bond girl.

Asked by the audience at a literary festival which Bond villain she would like to be, Dame Stella admitted: “I would rather not be a villain - I would rather be Octopussy.”

Octopussy was the exotic beauty played by Swedish model and actress Maud Adams in the 1983 film of the same name. The character, a jewel smuggler, lived in an Indian palace with a harem of female assassins and a pet octopus for company, and was seduced by Roger Moore’s 007.

The film is not regarded as one of the finest in the franchise but Dame Stella was adamant about her choice and selected Adams over more famous Bond girls, including Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore or Ursula Andress’s bikini-clad Honey Rider.

Dame Stella’s desire to play a glamorous femme fatale could be a reaction to the negative comments that greeted her appointment as the head of MI5 in 1992. She was the first director-general to be named publicly and was immediately dubbed the “housewife superspy”.
 
The press attention led to comments about her less-than-glamorous appearance. When photographs of her appeared in the newspapers “it was always of me unloading my shopping on a Saturday morning, wearing a Barbour and jeans”, Dame Stella told the audience at the Telegraph Ways With Words Festival in Dartington, Devon.

“‘Why do British women in public life look so much worse than the French?’ was a headline I remember.”

Dame Stella, 76, retired from the service in 1996 and is now a novelist, using her knowledge of the secret services to write spy thrillers starring a feisty heroine, Liz Carlyle.

“I wanted to try to rescue spy stories from the idea of one man up against a baddie,” she explained. “James Bond goes to see M and she shows him a very thin file with a photograph on the front and says, ‘Off you go and kill that man’. In fact, it’s not like that at all.”

However outlandish the plots, Dame Stella has said in the past that M does bear an uncanny resemblance to her and that Dame Judi’s depiction was “really very good. Both my daughters said so. One even noted that she holds her hands the way I do.”

One Dartington audience member asked Dame Stella for her opinion of security services in other countries. She replied: “The Italians were all ex-admirals and terribly courteous - lots of hand-kissing and bowing. The French were extremely good and seemed able to do anything. We worried about laws, they seemed able to do exactly what they liked so we rather envied them.”

The former spymaster said that Spooks, the BBC One series about a group of intelligence agents, remains one of her greatest bugbears.

“I know everybody loves it, but it’s nothing like the real thing,” she said. “I’ve stopped watching it because it annoyed me so much. I gather it’s coming back for another series - much to my horror.”