A committee is an animal with four back legs.

Le Carré’s quip treats a “committee” as a kind of creature that cannot move forward because it has only “back legs.” The image satirizes collective decision-making when responsibility is diffused: instead of acting with purpose, the group tends to retreat into caution, procedure, and compromise. In bureaucratic or institutional settings—central to le Carré’s world of intelligence services—committees can become mechanisms for avoiding risk and accountability, producing inertia rather than direction. The line’s humor comes from compressing a complex critique of organizational behavior into a vivid, absurd zoological metaphor.