I'm with Victoria on this. Yes, Toby was breaking rules to make the recording, but Quinn was clearly breaking a great many more.
I liked the term "solitary decider" also. Toby is the whistleblower, a man with ethics when there are precious few of them on display anywhere else.
You may have noted in the Acknowledgements that le Carré expressed his thanks and admiration for Carne Ross,
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former British foreign servant and founder and director of the not-for-profit Independent Diplomat, who by his example demonstrated the perils of speaking a delicate truth to power. Without Carne's example before me, and his pithy advice in my ear, this book would have been the poorer.
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I looked Carne Ross up and found that he had testified to the Butler Review, directly contradicting the British position on the justification behind the invasion of Iraq.
In Australia, we have our own version of Carne Ross, a man called Andrew Wilkie, and one of the few of our parliamentarians who has my respect. (Unsurprisingly, he's an independent.)
He was a senior figure in Australian intelligence and felt so strongly about what was being fabricated as an excuse for our involvement in that same invasion that he resigned his post and then gave information to a trusted journalist.
And what do you know: the response of the government was to denigrate him as much as they could. He wasn't very senior (he was); he was in a fragile mental state because of recently separating from his wife (he wasn't); and so on. And of course Australia went ahead with the rest of the gang, and in due course it was shown that everything that Wilkie had said was absolutely correct and true.