Toby Kinsella

Sir Tobias ("Toby") Kinsella was a civil servant in the 1960s and oversaw the Intrusion Countermeasures Group (ICMG). He was known for being inscrutable, manipulative, and ambigious, and for his good taste in art and wine.

He was at school with Professor Jeffrey Broderick. During his school days, Kinsella engineered a fight between the rugby team captain and a boy who'd stolen some of his food. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence)

In the government, he knew many intelligence secrets (like how it was really "the Cambridge Nine" instead of "Cambridge Five") and tied to high-ranking figures like General Peters. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence) Sir Toby was conservative and unhappy with the prospect of Harold Wilson's Labour Party being in power, though he believed they had to make the best of it. (AUDIO: State of Emergency) When pretending to be from the Department of Public Building and Works, Sir Toby was disparaging of the outgoing Sir Alec Douglas-Home, saying they'd been “trying to work out what Earl Home thinks so we can agree with him before he’s said it”. (He admitted that calling Home "Earl", a title he'd dropped by 1964, was a hard habit for him to break) (AUDIO: The Pelage Project)

He made many deals to set up Counter-Measures and keep it going, and discouraged Ian Gilmore from seeking any more resources from the Ministry of Defence: he felt Counter-Measures (and himself) would look more credible if they could handle themselves. After their first post-Shoreditch mission, investigating Heinrich Shumman's teleportation experiments, he agreed to put Rachel Jensen in charge rather than Gilmore. (AUDIO: Threshhold)

The second Counter-Measures duty was to ensure Broderick's artificially intelligent Sentient Engine Generator 2 computer (Sen-Gen) project was working smoothly. Sir Toby was aware Broderick was using Jensen's own research for Sen-Gen and was amused by the idea of Jensen finding out, and even gave Broderick recordings of her voice. Unknown to his old school friend, he was secretly having him watched by Julian St. Stephen, and was also making use of Gilmore's old ties to Sen-Gen's Dr Cervenka. When it was discovered that Sen-Gen was driving people insane, he publicly shut the project done. In secret, he callously broke Broderick's mind so the government could use him to make another such computer. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence)

He was annoyed when some of Shumann's work was bought by industrialist Kenneth Temple (AUDIO: Threshhold) and wanted to investigate what Temple was doing with it, but couldn't as the man was too connected to the government. As a result, he discouraged Counter-Measures from investigating - in a way that would ensure they would dig up something that meant he 'had' to investigate Temple's Pelage site. Sir Toby personally joined the mission, pretending to be from the Department of Works. When the true extent of Temple's work - forcibly altering humans to breath pollutives as part of a mad scheme to move the species from Earth to Venus - came to light, Sir Toby was sickened and went on a personal crusade to purge the government of anyone who'd backed Temple. (AUDIO: The Pelage Project)

Due to his political sentiments, Sir Toby was invited by General Peters to be part of his coup against the newly elected Harold Wilson. Sir Toby pretended to be sympathetic and gave him notes on Shumann's teleporter so they could stage an alien attack, while ensuring Counter-Measures would investigate the teleportation site and that Gilmore would be the one who'd secure 10 Downing Street. After the coup was advanced enough for Peters and all his collaborators to be revealed, Sir Toby and Counter-Measures worked to shut it down. (AUDIO: State of Emergency)

]