Despite that, he is dinner party host to Turner and Ludwig Siebkron, head of the German Interior Ministry; the latter is close to industrialist Klaus Karfeld, who is successfully building a new nationalist political movement which is anti-British and anti-Western European, and which seeks to turn West Germany away from Western Europe and bring it closer to Communist Eastern Europe.

The novel ends with Karfeld addressing the rally and delivering an anti-Western European, Nazi-apologist speech until violence erupts between his supporters and a group of socialist counter-protestors.

[3] In the same foreword, le Carré revealed that he based the hostile, reactionary Turner on himself, admitting that he was going through a nervous breakdown at the time of writing due to the dissolution of his marriage; he would ultimately stop work on the book for a period to deal with his personal life before returning to it later.

For a period, he believed the book would be his farewell to espionage fiction, following it up with a semi-autobiographical literary novel he intended to restart his career, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover.

Le Carré said that his intention was "to write something close to a black comedy about British political manners, and yet the result was widely perceived to be ferociously anti-German".

[citation needed] Le Carré created the first drafts of the book in Vienna, where Simon Wiesenthal helped him with Karfeld's background.