John le Carré took Irish citizenship just before he died because of Brexit ‘catastrophe’

Author once called referendum result ‘without doubt the greatest catastrophe and the greatest idiocy that Britain has perpetrated since the invasion of Suez’

John le Carré took Irish citizenship shortly before his death after becoming disillusioned with England over Brexit, his son Nicholas Cornwell has revealed in a new documentary.

On BBC Radio 4’s upcoming documentary, A Writer and His Country, the son of the novelist behind books including The Little Dummer Girl, The Night Manager and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, says his father discovered his Irish ancestry and decided to take Irish citizenship before he died aged 89 in December.

The programme covers le Carré’s staunch opposition to the Brexit vote. He once said of the UK leaving the EU: “This is without doubt the greatest catastrophe and the greatest idiocy that Britain has perpetrated since the invasion of Suez.

“Nobody is to blame but the Brits themselves – not the Irish, not the Europeans.”

He discovered he qualified for an Irish passport via his maternal grandmother, Olive Wolfe, and completed the process before his death.

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“He was, by the time he died, an Irish citizen,” Cornwell, who writes as Nick Harkaway, says in the documentary. “On his last birthday I gave him an Irish flag, and so one of the last photographs I have of him is him sitting wrapped in an Irish flag, grinning his head off.”

A Writer and His Country will air on Saturday 3 April.