Toby Kinsella

Toby Kinsella
Species:	Human
Affiliated with:	Ministry of Defence
First appearance:	Threshold
Appearances:	see list
Main voice actor:	Hugh Ross

Sir Tobias "Toby" Kinsella was a British civil servant during the 1960s, and oversaw the Intrusion Countermeasures Group (ICMG). He was known for being inscrutable, manipulative, and ambiguous, and for his good taste in art and wine. In 1965, Rachel described Sir Toby as "pig-headed" and "difficult to get along with". (AUDIO: Changing of the Guard) She later claimed that lying came as naturally as breathing to him. (AUDIO: The Forgotten Village)

Sir Toby was Catholic. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence, The Fifth Citadel)

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 had stolen some of his food. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence)

During World War II, he was involved in a eugenics programme to create "super soldiers"; the plan was that if Germany won, the soldiers could be used to retake Britain. (He later said: "There was a war on! A lot of people did things they weren't proud of!") He was himself one of the test subjects with Mary Cleaver, his wife, but she faked the miscarriage of his son, Ray Cleaver, and divorced him. After the war, Sir Toby would remove all traces of himself from these files. (AUDIO: Sins of the Fathers) Charles Waverly was part of the project with him. (AUDIO: Manhunt) Years later, after Gilmore had accused him of only "pushing papers around" during the war, Toby knocked a man out and imply he'd seen action (which could be a lie). (AUDIO: Peshka)

After the war, he and Waverly continued to be part of the eugenics programme which was now preparing for nuclear war. By this point it was clear that the original creations had psychosis and the Wilcock Institute was trying to both "care" for the originals and create versions without this problem. (AUDIO: Sins of the Fathers)

In the government, he knew many intelligence secrets (such as the fact that it was in actuality the Cambridge Nine instead of the Cambridge Five) and tied to high-ranking figures like General Peters. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence, State of Emergency)

One of his oldest friends was Dr Elizabeth Bradley, who worked with the Secret Service. (AUDIO: The Fifth Citadel)

In November 1963, he met Professor Rachel Jensen for the first time. (AUDIO: 1963: The Assassination Games)

When pretending to be from the Department of Public Building and Works, Sir Toby was disparaging of the outgoing Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, saying that they had been "trying to work out what Earl Home thinks so we can agree with him before he's said it". He admitted that referring to Douglas-Home as "Earl Home", a title that he had 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: Threshold) Taking up Counter-Measures meant he lost his place in the nuclear war Citadel bunkers, a fact he was annoyed about. (AUDIO: The Fifth Citadel

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 Schumann's work was bought by industrialist Kenneth Temple (AUDIO: Threshold) 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 pollutants 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 had backed Temple. (AUDIO: The Pelage Project)

Sir Toby was conservative and unhappy with the prospect of Harold Wilson's Labour Party being in power, though he believed that they had to make the best of it.

Due to his political sentiments, Sir Toby was invited by General Peters to be part of his coup against Wilson. Sir Toby pretended to be sympathetic and gave him notes on Schumann'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 had secured 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)

In 1965, Sir Toby took on an assistant, Templeton, who he picked for knowing the "right people". (AUDIO: Manhunt)

Shortly after, he found Charles Waverly was trying to usurp control Counter-Measures. When Gilmore was accused of murdering Waverly, Sir Toby helped Gilmore avoid the authorities while appointing Waverly's main, James Astor, as an interim Counter-Measures member in order to draw out the truth. (He deliberately kept the truth and news of the manhunt from Rachel Jensen, and the murder was "officially" a suicide.) While he knew Emma Waverly was one of the eugenic creations, he was horrified to discover Astor was Emma — the experiment giving her the ability to shapeshift — and witness the transformation himself. He forbid Counter-Measures from pursuing Emma, secretly took files on the programme from Catherine Waverly, and then allegedly witnessed her suicide soon after he learned she knew he was in the programme. (AUDIO: Manhunt)

Counter-Measures were next used as a cover and way of helping him handle a renegade Cold War bunker: its reactor had leaked, poisoning the people inside, and his an old friend Dr Elizabeth Bradley was threatening to drive it into meltdown unless the UK disarmed its nuclear weapons. Sir Toby pretended to all characters that he was unaware of the situation, using different lies for different people, and tried to talk Bradley into standing down. In the end, when it was clear how dangerous the reactor was, he pretended to talk to the government on her behalf and, behind Jensen's back, had the army bury the citadel in cement. (AUDIO: The Fifth Citadel)

Sir Toby was himself manipulated when the Soviet Union conned the UK intelligence community into thinking a psychic chess player wanted to defect. To his horror, it turned out the "psychic", Shurik Barkov, was just good at chess — his sister, Anya Barkov, was the psychic and had been engineered to be a "bomb". A riot almost broke out in London until Anya was shot. In revenge, Sir Toby left Shurik to starve to death in a locked room. (AUDIO: Peshka)

While quietly watching Mary Carver's funeral, Sir Toby became aware that his son was alive and one of the super-soldiers when Ray tore through an army group after Emma Waverly. He made sure all Wilcock Institute records with his name were destroyed and tried to keep Counter-Measures from investigating, pressuring them into "accepting" that Emma had killed the soldiers. Behind their back, he tried to contact Ray and get him to come in for treatment; unfortunately his lies had made Jensen believe he was "compromised" and had gone to Templeton for aid, and Templeton ordered an army group to open fire on Ray immediately.

He finally admitted to his team about the programme and eugenics programming, and tried to talk Ray down from freeing the other super-soldiers at the Wilcock Institute clinic. To his horror, Templeton had the building gassed and Sir Toby has forced to kill an enraged Ray. Jensen had worked out that the soldier was Sir Toby's son but he obliquely told her to drop the issue, not wanting to admit to it in public and pretending he hadn't been affected.

A parliamentary inquiry was held over the Wilcock affair, forcing Sir Toby to step down. (AUDIO: Sins of the Fathers) As an old hand with the establishment, he assumed it was a formality — everyone on it were people he knew — only to find it was comprised of new, up-and-coming politicians like William Heaton and he was being properly investigated. Heaton talked to him between sittings, telling him Templeton had suggested the inquiry shakeup and was after his job. The MP believed Kinsella was the better man for Countermeasures and would help him if he agreed to "help" the Conservative Sunday Club — Kinsella angrily refused.

Rather than defend himself, he praised his team to the inquiry as "best of British" and that they shouldn't suffer. To Toby's surprise, the inquiry cleared him as taking justifiable action. Heaton told him he was considered the man for the job "for now", especially the job of keeping Jensen controlled. Kinsella remarked to himself he preferred backstabbing and scheming in Westminster to goodwill. (AUDIO: Changing of the Guard) He later heard that many in the spy world had had his back over the inquiry. (AUDIO: The Forgotten Village)

The Countermeasures team were glad to have him back after having to deal with Templeton, someone they considered inferior. (AUDIO: Changing of the Guard) While Gilmore and Jensen believed he had the country's best interests at heart, Allison Williams remained distrustful of him and was willing to show it. Their first mission back together was to investigate a haunting at the St. Anton's Point tower block — something the Housing Minister had told Sir Toby not to do. He commented that he himself didn't agree with the tower block policy. With his team, he solved the mystery and stopped an unexploded bomb. (AUDIO: The Concrete Cage)

Sir Toby and others were aware of presumed Soviet agent transmissions coming from around Lower Burford. Despite that, he pushed Allison Williams to go there on leave when her father was injured. When it became clear in Westminster that the situation had deteriorated, he rushed down with Gilmore to contain the situation. The issue was down to was a Soviet satellite, Mauriner 7, that had crashed: it was experimenting with weaponising magnetic disruption to drive people mad. As part of the investigation and containment, Sir Toby had a journalist beaten and terrorised.

The crashed satellite drove Allison catatonic and an unknown female spy almost killed Jensen when trying to keep her away. Allison's fate — and the fact Sir Toby had known something was wrong in Lower Burford — turned Jensen against Toby. (AUDIO: The Forgotten Village)

While Allison recovered from memory loss, Sir Toby led Countermeasures to East Berlin to investigate an alien incursion and a "Project Othello" run by brain surgeon Maria Jager. Relations with Jensen were fraught. Their West German contact, Stefan Lehne, was an old friend of Sir Toby's but to his suspicion was starting to act obstructionist. While Countermeasures were in the east, Sir Toby worked out that Othello was a brainwashing programme and that Jager had been in the west — with Stefan compromised. When he attempted to enter East Berlin, Stefan was mind-controlled by the enemy into shooting a guard and Sir Toby callously left him to be shot while he fled into the city. Reaching Gilmore, he warned him that the "alien" had been a fake to draw Countermeasures out so Jensen could be brainwashed into an enemy agent.

In order to let him escape, Gilmore let himself be captured near the Berlin Wall. Jensen saw this and, driven both by inherent distrust and the brainwashing, decided Sir Toby must be a Soviet agent - she reported him as a British spy to the border guard, and left him to be shot dead in the street. Meanwhile Templeton was part of the Othello plot and had brainwashed Allison into believing he was Sir Toby. (AUDIO: Unto the Breach)