The National Archives in London, that grand repository of imperial decay and bureaucratic hoarding, has decided that the public’s appetite for misery requires a garnish of romance. They have unveiled the "softer side" of John Cairncross, the man history generally remembers as the "Fifth Man" of the Cambridge Spy Ring—a title that carries about as much dignity as being the fifth member of a failed boy band. This "softer side" comes in the form of intimate correspondence with one Gloria Barraclough, discovered by her son, Tom Brass, who apparently spent his life unaware that his mother’s romantic history was entangled with a man who treated national security like a suggestion.

It is a classic British obsession, isn’t it? We are a nation that cannot stop picking at the scabs of the Cold War, forever searching for a crumb of "humanity" in the men who made careers out of systemic deception. Cairncross, a man who worked at Bletchley Park and later the Treasury, wasn't just a spy; he was a contributor to the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk. He funneled thousands of documents to Moscow, helping the Red Army steamroll its way toward a "liberation" that looked remarkably like a forty-year occupation of half of Europe. But forget the geopolitical fallout, the purges, or the iron-fisted crushing of human potential. Let’s look at his handwriting. Let’s marvel at how a man can balance the betrayal of his country with the delicate task of wooing a woman who had no idea she was a footnote in a KGB file.

The Right will view this with its usual brand of incoherent, frothing-at-the-mouth indignation, seeing it as further proof that the "intellectual elite" are inherently treasonous vermin, while the Left will likely attempt to frame Cairncross as a tragic figure, a man whose "idealism" was simply too expansive for the narrow, parochial confines of British democracy. Both are equally exhausting and equally wrong. Cairncross wasn't a martyr or a monster; he was a symptom. He was one of those posh, overeducated nihilists who found the reality of mid-century Britain too dull to endure and decided that playing God with intelligence reports was a suitable hobby to pass the time between cocktails. The "softer side" displayed in these letters isn't a revelation of character; it’s a revelation of the mundane. It shows that even a man who enables a totalitarian regime is still subject to the same insipid, turgid romantic impulses as a suburban accountant with a mid-life crisis.

Tom Brass’s discovery of his mother’s letters is being framed as a poignant moment of clarity, a son finally seeing the "real" woman. In reality, it’s just another layer of the performative secrecy that defined that entire miserable generation. Why be honest with your family when you can live a life of shadow and intrigue? The National Archives exhibition isn't an educational endeavor; it’s a voyeuristic exercise in historical apologia. It asks us to empathize with the spy, to see the "man behind the mask." But the mask was the man. There was nothing else there but a void filled with stolen documents and unearned self-importance.

The Cambridge Five—Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, and Cairncross—represent the ultimate failure of the British establishment. They were the "best and brightest," the products of an educational system designed to produce leaders, and instead, it produced a collection of high-functioning turncoats who felt more loyalty to a pipe dream of Soviet utopia than to the reality of their own neighbors. We are told Cairncross helped win the war against the Nazis. Fine. But let’s not pretend he did it out of a love for freedom. He did it because he had a fetish for being the smartest man in the room, the one with the secrets, the one who knew which way the wind was blowing while everyone else was worried about the price of coal.

Now, we are invited to look at his love letters and feel... what, exactly? A sense of shared humanity? The only thing I feel is a deep, abiding boredom at the predictability of it all. The "softer side" of a spy is just as fraudulent as the "hard" side. It is all part of the same grand, pathetic performance of an era that valued style over substance, even in its betrayals. While Cairncross was busy being "soft" in his letters, he was being "hard" on the prospects of a peaceful post-war world. He was a cog in a machine of betrayal, and the fact that he occasionally stopped to write a love letter doesn't make him a complex hero; it just makes him a human being with a pen and an ego.

This exhibition is a monument to our own cultural desperation. We have so little of substance happening in the present—just a collection of grifters and morons shouting into the digital void—that we must return to the 1940s to find a betrayal worth talking about. We romanticize the "intelligence" of these spies because we are so starved for it in our modern politicians, who couldn't keep a secret if their careers depended on it—and they usually do. But make no mistake: Cairncross and his ilk weren't geniuses. They were just men who were lucky enough to live in an age before CCTV and digital footprints, allowing them to indulge their vanities at the expense of millions who would never know their names.

Keep your love letters. Keep your "softer side." I’ll stick to the facts: a man betrayed his colleagues, empowered a dictator, and lived a long, comfortable life while those he helped "liberate" were busy disappearing into the gulags. If that’s romance, you can keep it. The National Archives can continue to polish the brass on this sinking ship of a legacy, but for the rest of us, it’s just more noise in a world that’s already too loud with the sounds of its own self-congratulation and the echoes of old lies.