Wit & Attitude Quote by John Le Carre

Le Carre’s anger lands with the force of a man who spent his career mapping the polite face of power and the rot behind it. The setup is almost conversational - “15 or 20 years” - then he punches through the civility: the press has “gone to hell.” It’s not just decline; it’s damnation. That’s classic le Carre moral geometry: you don’t merely get worse, you cross a line into a different category of human behavior.

The sentence structure does the work. “No limit, no depths” is a tight rhetorical ratchet, compressing outrage into a bleak, cumulative rhythm. He’s describing an industry that has discovered the business model of shamelessness: once attention is the prize, every boundary becomes negotiable, then obsolete. The vague “these people” is strategic. He refuses them the legitimizing detail of names, titles, or even “journalists.” They’re not peers in a profession; they’re a contaminant. The final insult - “little pigs” - is not ornate, it’s deliberately childish, which makes it sting. It strips away the tabloid pose of swagger and reduces it to appetite: rooting, grunting, feeding.

Context matters: le Carre’s public disgust sharpened in the era of tabloid excess and, later, the phone-hacking scandal that exposed how far British papers would go to turn private grief into content. The subtext isn’t nostalgia for a golden age; it’s a warning about what happens when a democratic institution adopts the ethics of espionage without the pretense of serving the public good. In le Carre’s world, betrayal is expected. What horrifies him is betrayal marketed as entertainment.