Protagonist Beetlelicker

Protagonist Beetlelicker was 'one of them'. But not a 'one of them' them. Although it was not unknown for 'one of them' to be 'one of them'. In fact, when they were discovered, the number of those that were 'one of them' that were also 'one of them' came to a fair proportion - something like three out of five.

It took quite a long time, a very long time, to discover that Beetlelicker was 'one of them'. After all, he had been to the right school and the right university. He belonged to all the right clubs. He knew all the right people and came from one of the right families. He was arrogant to the point of almost complete and utter stupidity and possessed an accent that even the Royal Family found nearly incomprehensible.

The authorities first became suspicious when an official Soviet Party newspaper published a photograph of Brezhnev on holiday at his Dacha on the Black Sea coast. The Russian leader was pictured striding out of the sea in his swimming costume while next to him was Protagonist Beetlelicker, laughing heartily as he helped the elderly man up the beach.

Beetlelicker, as is it - even now - still is common practice in the secret services, claimed he liked to take Top Secret documents on holiday with him as he had an intense dislike of the average beach-reading fare - typically espionage novels. He found such novels deeply implausible, as most of the espionage agents he knew were far too busy having sex with each other, or fiddling their expense accounts, ever to engage in anything so sordidly middle-class as actually spying on one another.

The end for Beetlelicker came in 1978 when he was discovered handing over a Top Secret dossier containing both of Great Britain's nuclear secrets to the notorious Soviet female spy chief Cliché Suckemoff as they lay in bed together, exhausted from an afternoon of frantically athletic sex. British agents burst into the Vienna hotel bedroom just as Protagonist handed the file he retrieved from under his pillow to the eager Suckemoff.

His defence of "I knew she liked a good joke." was dismissed out of hand at his trial and he was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason. Beetlelicker was swapped in a spy exchange between Britain and the USSR in the early 80s where the USSR offered an Unmissable-Swap-Two-Get-One Free deal, which the notoriously frugal UK PM Margaret Thatcher could not pass up, despite her well-known hatred of the unpatriotic or bearded. Beetlelicker thenceforth was given some titular make-work job deep in the heart of the Soviet Bureaucratic machine and was never heard of again.

Curiously, however, after the collapse of the Soviet Union a trawl of the KGB archives revealed that Cliché Suckemoff was in fact a double agent working for the British. Unfortunately, due to an error of her own making she had defected not to MI5 or MI6, but to MFI - the well-known , but now defunct furniture chainstore. This didn't help Britain much politically or militarily during the Cold War, but it did enable the UK to maintain its lead over the USSR in fitted-wardrobe technology that turned out to be so instrumental in the final collapse of the Soviet system a few years later.