It seems nearly every week that a new British spy heroine appears in the media. Then it turns out that the old trout had been a clerk at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. I blame Dominick Cumberbatch. The film he starred in about the code breakers at Bletchley Park drew the attention of a new wave of self-obsessed and pitifully ignorant journalists to the fact that the British could read top secret German radio messages for much of the Second World War. Some of these stories in which the "spy heroines" finally speak about the "vital" work they did even include a photo of Cumberbatch alongside a photo of the now very wrinkled old trout. For goodness sake; these women were clerical workers who hardly risked arrest by the Gestapo at any moment. These stories trivialise the genuine courage of the women who really did risk their lives in Occupied Europe. But any excuse to print a photo of Cumberbatch, I suppose.