MI5 chief says he is a Slow Horses fan

MI5’s chief turned to spy fiction to make a point about the real thing. In a video posted to the service’s official Instagram account, Sir Ken McCallum said at a Q&A at the National Archives in London, “You might want to say there is room for both James Bond and Slow Horses,” before adding that he is “a Slow Horses man.”

The choice of show was telling. Slow Horses, the Apple TV+ drama based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, follows a dysfunctional team of disgraced MI5 agents exiled to Slough House after career-ending mistakes. Sir Gary Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, the abrasive boss at the center of a series that critics have cast as a more grounded, self-deprecating answer to the Bond myth. Apple said in July 2025 that the show would return for a seventh season, with a six-episode run, while season five was set for 24 September 2025 and season six had already been announced.

McCallum’s public nod to the series fit a broader effort to recast MI5’s image for a social-media age. He had previously warned that recruitment should not be shaped by “James Bond stereotypes” and urged more applicants from state schools and working-class backgrounds in 2021. For an agency that still depends on secrecy, the message is clear: the outside story matters, because legitimacy and access to talent depend on whether potential recruits see MI5 as a club for a narrow elite or an institution that reflects the country it serves.

That makes the Instagram clip more than a light-hearted endorsement of a television drama. McCallum, who has more than 25 years of experience across MI5 and became director general in April 2020, has spent much of his career inside an organization that must persuade people to trust it without ever fully revealing how it works. By embracing Slow Horses, he used humor and pop culture to make the service look less like a fantasy and more like a modern employer, one trying to widen its appeal while keeping the mystique that intelligence work still requires.