Voice of Albion

Definition

The fictitious far-right group that claims Hassan Ahmed’s kidnapping: a two-week- old website, a Swedish proxy shielding it from tracing, a thirty-hour deadline, and a demand of fifty-six tube deaths for fifty-six in return. Organised, in the fiction, by Gregory Simmonds — who telephones Curly with a warning, which is how the performance starts to come apart.

Book 1 — Slow Horses

The group is a costume. Diana Taverner needs a threat that will justify a Service rescue; Alan Black needs a plausible set of racists to run it; Curly and Larry need a cause to belong to. Each of them gets something different from the same fiction, which is Slow Horses’s argument about how extremism is used by institutions that do not believe in it.

Jackson Lamb punctures the official reading in C05: the boy is Pakistani, the kidnappers are home-grown racists, and the beheading is staged so that a beheading can be the answer.

Related

Alan Black · Curly · Diana Taverner · Off-the-books operations