THERE was much to admire about John le Carré, the master of the spy thriller who died after a short illness last Saturday evening. Le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, died in a cottage near Land’s End which he had bought so he could be miles away from London and “all that had gone wrong with a once great capital city”.

Le Carré was one of England’s finest writers and a great chronicler of national loss. His books about the curious world of espionage were compelling and more so because they became a metaphor for the decline of Britain. Le Carré was fascinated by the end of empire, by the emotional debris it left behind and by the folly of the misplaced superiority complex that still festers in the minds of many today. He despised Brexit and loathed the people who had been the architects of its deceitful promise.

Le Carré once said: “Brexit is the greatest catastrophe and the greatest idiocy that Britain has perpetrated… I’m not just a Remainer. I’m a European through and through, and the rats have taken over the ship… My England would be one that ­recognises its place in the EU. The ­jingoistic England that is trying to march us out of the EU, that is an England I do not want to know.”

He talked mostly of England, and only obliquely of Scotland, but that is not something we should hold against him. Le ­Carré had a very English upbringing, born in Dorset where his brother played county level cricket. He attended a ­minor boarding school, where he learnt to despise the harsh vindictiveness of the English public school system.

In a conversation with the film director John Boorman, he argued that the reforming Atlee government after the war was the true spirit of England and that it’s greatest achievement was making secondary-modern education available to all.

Le Carré had worked out that of all the great pop bands born into the post-war era, The Beatles, The Stones and The Kinks, none of them had gone to Eton, where he had briefly taught. For le Carré that fragment of knowledge joined the inexhaustible list of things he used to berate Boris Johnson – a man who desperate for fame and sex but wasn’t talented enough to be in a good pop band.

Abandoned by his mother and brought up by his grasping father who was an insurance fraudster, le Carré had an unloved childhood shaped more by the ­arcane laws of social class than by love. He attended a language school in Bern in Switzerland where he developed a skill for not only languages but for the shifting loyalties of a neutral country that survived in war battered Europe, by being all things to all ideologies.

Le Carré returned to England to Oxford University where he was recruited by the secret services to spy on fellow students, the beginnings of his career working for MI5. His promising career within the ­secret services was irreparably sabotaged in 1963 by the defection of the double-agent Kim Philby. Le Carré was named as a secret agent, and so no longer able to travel incognito or to work underground in the trade.

It was his times at MI5, and the great nervous breakdown provoked by ­Philby’s defection, that gave him the inspiration for the mole Gerald in Tinker Tailor ­Soldier Spy. His greatest character was the slowly, methodical George Smiley, a mournful man who was “breathtakingly ordinary … short, fat, and of a quiet disposition”. Smiley’s ponderous concerns dominate The Karla Trilogy, which also includes The Honourable School Boy and Smiley’s People.

Smiley is a monk-like presence as he tries to unearth the mole at the top of British intelligence. The books gave readers a new language to savour, the circus, ­Moscow central, the lamplighters, babysitters, moles and dead drops, a language that allowed us to peek behind the dark curtains of Cold War secrecy.

Over and above, le Carré’s beautifully crafted plots and complex ­characters stood out amongst a chilling philosophy of Britain in decline. Philby, and the other members of the Cambridge University spy ring, were not only traitors – their treachery signalled the dying of an empire.

Le Carré had concluded that the end of Britain’s global greatness has fed Brexit and in another sense the drive for Scottish independence. While Brexit hoped to jump-start it, Scottish independence had declared Britain incapable of reform, and so began to imagine a new society unburdened by imperial legacy.

Only one of le Carré’s central characters is actually Scottish and he is a fairly repellent species. Percy Alleline is portrayed as a weasel of a man from a Presbyterian background in the Borders, a Son of the Manse with limited potential, whose emollience, enables him to rise beyond his competence to become the Director of Operations at the Circus. Thanks to his impeccable political connections Alleline is feared and distrusted in equal measure.

In the 1979 TV adaptation of Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, Alleline was played by that fine actor of the English aristocracy Michael Aldridge but in the more recent movie version he was brilliantly conceived by the actor Toby Jones. In a majestic piece of characterisation, which is hinted at in the book, Jones plays knowingly with Alleline’s accent, drifting in and out of a Scottish brogue, as if to ­convey two things. Firstly, that Alleline was effacing his Scottishness in London, in the way that so many people have done, and secondly that there is something intrinsically deceitful about the man, and that he cannot even be loyal to his own identity.

In Smileys People, Scots are briefly the subject of speculation too. “‘Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world?’ Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. ‘Ships’ engineers, Colonial administrators, spies… Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches,’ he decided.”

You sense that le Carré distrusts Scots and that our historic associations with the Auld Alliance make Scots prime ­material for heretical betrayal. It may be that le Carré was channelling his dislike of another one of the Cambridge spies, John Cairncross who grew up to become a Marxist among the declining coalfields of Lesmahagow and ended up passing ­secrets to the Soviets. Cairncross prayed at a “distant church” that cannot easily explained without recourse to the industrial decline that devastated Scotland and its organised working class.

There is one final connection that binds Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy to Scotland and that was the location filming of the TV drama. In the opening scenes, the MI6 agent Jim Prideaux is sent to Brno in Czechoslovakia on a fatefully compromised mission. The TV series was turned round speedily and there was no budget for overseas filming, so central Glasgow doubled as Czechoslovakia. Prideaux was played by the Airdrie-born actor Ian ­Bannen. It is his capture by the Soviets that finally leads Smiley to unravelling the tangled threads that lead to the mole. As Prideaux is taken to his fate by a low-level Soviet apparatchik, they drive solemnly along Glasgow’s Barrack Street past what is now a Morrisons supermarket.

John le Carré was an exceptional writer who confronted the way class and networked elites dominate the institutions of post-imperial Britain. No longer comfortable in the land he had written so regretfully about, he planned to relocate to Dublin, to remain in Europe.

In a final sadness, redolent of the spiritually troubled George Smiley, he died in England as Brexit loomed. Sadly, for him there was not enough time left to escape.