Spoilers ahead for “Scars,” the season-five finale of Slow Horses.

Claude Whelan never stood a chance. I think he knows that now. I think he always knew it a little, probably, even as the rest of his brain tried to convince him he could manage a group of spies and analysts the same way one would manage a summer-internship program. He got the job as MI5’s director-general only because the people who put him there wanted a stuffed-shirt bureaucrat to color inside the lines a little more or at least not get caught scribbling off the side of the page. He wasn’t sneaky and thought he was clever, and in the world of spycraft, those two things leave you as vulnerable as a poodle in a shark tank. And now he’s gone, probably, pressured into a resignation after overplaying his hand one to

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