by Robert Lacey
Wilson and monarch soon became a surprising – and surprisingly effective – team. Elizabeth ‘tamed’ the awkward Labour man to use the word coined by the Queen Mother.336 Following the death of Winston Churchill in January 1965, the Queen gave a reception for the world leaders attending the funeral – among them Ian Smith, the defiant white settler leader of Southern Rhodesia that was still part of the Commonwealth, but only just. Wilson was hoping to repair the situation through informal contact with Smith, and he asked the Queen if she could invite him to the reception, though Smith was technically ineligible, not being the head of a Sovereign government. Elizabeth agreed – then noticed after an hour or so of drinks and small talk that she could see no sign of their quarry. Having conferred with Wilson, she summoned an equerry to seek out Mr Smith immediately.337
The Rhodesian leader was duly discovered enjoying a steak in the restaurant of the Hyde Park Hotel and was hauled sheepishly to the Palace swearing that he had never received the invitation – though his High Commissioner had seen him put it into his jacket pocket. The Queen chose to be gracious as he stammered his apologies, and Wilson then had the chance of the private conversation that he had been seeking.338
Peter Morgan opens Season 3 by looking at the ‘pre-taming’ differences and mistrust that were hovering between Harold Wilson and Elizabeth II in 1964, as played out through the most notorious spy scandal of the era – the betrayals of the ‘Cambridge Four’, who would later become ‘Five’. At the start of Elizabeth’s reign there had only been ‘Two’, when early in the summer of 1951, just three months after the young Queen’s accession, Britain and America – and the West as a whole – had been rocked by the defections to the Soviet Union of Guy Burgess, a high-ranking member of MI5,** and Donald Maclean, Head of the American Department in the Foreign Office. Burgess and Maclean, it seemed, had been systematically betraying British secrets to the Soviets throughout the Second World War and the Cold War for the best part of 20 years, taking flight to Moscow that May on the point of being unmasked.339
It was known that the two men had been friends at Cambridge University in the early 1930s, part of a circle of gifted young left-wingers who feared the rise of the Fascist dictators on the Continent and despised the old British Establishment’s torpor in response to the misery of the Depression. Idealistically, they looked for salvation to the new factories and collective farms of the Soviet Union, where, at that date, the crimes and mass murders of Stalin were not widely known.340
Kim Philby, a senior officer in MI6, had been one of Burgess and Maclean’s closest associates, both at Cambridge and thereafter. So when the pair defected in order to forestall discovery, suspicions started to drift towards Philby as people tried to work out who was in the know and might have tipped the men off.341
Questions were asked in Parliament a few years later about the possible existence of a ‘Third Man’ – i.e. Kim Philby – working as a double agent inside the Foreign Office,342 following a gloating Moscow press conference in which Burgess and Maclean had criticised the ‘senselessness and danger’ of Western policy. We know from their Moscow friends that the pair were bitterly disillusioned by the harsh realities of Soviet life – ‘Can you imagine Glasgow on a Saturday night in the nineteenth century?’ Guy Burgess once asked his fellow exile Jim Riordan who would serve as a pallbearer at his funeral in 1963.343 But that was not their message to the world’s press as they contrived to make British intelligence appear especially hapless.344
The problem for London was the mistrust – and the possible withdrawal of collaboration – that Britain’s incompetence risked provoking in her main Cold War ally, the United States. But in 1963 help arrived in the confession of Michael Straight, a long-time Soviet agent operating in America, who is depicted in this episode making mysterious telephone calls in Washington.
Born into a family of immense wealth – his father Willard was a partner at J. P. Morgan – Straight had arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1934, and soon became a friend of Burgess, Maclean and Philby through the ‘Apostles’, the elite intellectual society whose past members had included Bertrand Russell, and which contained only 12 members at any one time.345 By 1934 the ruling ethos of the Apostles was unashamedly Marxist, with members like Anthony Blunt, a brilliant young mathematician-turned-art historian, who soon became a lover of Straight and recruited the American for Russian intelligence. In 1937 Straight returned to America, and the Cambridge spies could congratulate themselves on their first major infiltration when Straight almost immediately became a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the very heart of Washington policymaking.346
But the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 that enabled Hitler to swallow Poland undermined the Marxist sympathies of Michael Straight. He joined the US Army Air Corps as a bomber pilot in the Second World War, and when, after the war, he became publisher of his family’s magazine, The New Republic, he steered its editorial policy towards an anti-Stalinist stance.347 One of the triggers of Guy Burgess’s defection to Russia in 1951 had been a chance encounter with Straight in Washington, and Burgess’s realisation that his fellow Apostle was no longer a Communist, and that Straight might well take steps to reveal the dark secret of the past they shared.348
Straight himself later claimed in After Long Silence, his self-justifying autobiography, that he actually drove to the British Embassy on three occasions in the years 1949–51 to do precisely that, before losing his nerve.349 In the event, it was a 1963 offer from the Kennedy administration of a position on the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts that prompted the now-remorseful spy into action. Realising that one passport to this plum job would have to be FBI security clearance, Straight decided to volunteer the truth.350
In January 1963 Kim Philby had defected to Moscow, confirming to the world that he was indeed the ‘Third Man’. Now Michael Straight could reveal who was the ‘Fourth’ – his former lover, Anthony Blunt, who had not only become Professor of Art History at the University of London and a director of the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art, but had also, since 1945, occupied an office at Buckingham Palace. The fellow Apostle and Cambridge co-conspirator with Straight, Philby, Burgess and Maclean, had risen to become Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO (Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order), Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and hence curator of one of Britain’s most prestigious art collections – knighted by Her Majesty in 1956 as a particular sign of her personal favour and gratitude.351
By the time the security services brought this shocking news to Elizabeth’s private secretary, Michael Adeane, they had already worked out a deal with Blunt. The spy would confess all in interrogation over the following years, and in return for his confession and silence he would be spared prosecution. Blunt would be allowed to retain his prestigious position at Buckingham Palace,352 since this would help British ‘intelligence’ to conceal their incompetence – just as they had deliberately allowed the compromised Kim Philby to evade their clutches and board a Soviet freighter in Beirut at the beginning of 1963. In both cases, they preferred to let the traitors escape judgement in order to avoid the embarrassment of public revelation and the inevitable trial and retribution that would follow.
In the case of Blunt, it seems likely that MI5 decided to conceal his double identity from the Queen, instructing Adeane not to pass on the truth about the spy to his boss. When Mrs Thatcher finally unveiled Blunt’s treason in 1979, angrily stripping him of his knighthood, the Queen told her Prime Minister ‘It doesn’t surprise me one bit’ – which was hardly the response of someone who had been privy to the full and unpleasant truth about her Surveyor of Pictures for the past 16 years.353
Nor was the Queen alone in her probable ignorance. Official documents have since made very clear – astonishingly – that neither Alec Douglas-Home nor Harold Wilson, Britain’s two prime ministers in these years, was ever told about the high-level treachery of Blunt. MI5 limited the truth to the narrowest possible circle, and
one focus of Margaret Thatcher’s particular anger in 1979 was the arrogance of civil servants in concealing such dangerous betrayals – and their own mistakes – from their elected superiors.354
In this context, however, there is another more challenging interpretation of the Queen’s ambiguous ‘It doesn’t surprise me …’ remark – namely that Michael Adeane did brief her about Blunt’s treachery in the spring of 1964, but warned her that she should not share it with her current Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, nor, more importantly, with his likely successor, Harold Wilson, who was under some suspicion at that time of being himself a Soviet spy. As early as 1946, British intelligence had opened a file on Harold Wilson’s activities, tracking the contacts of the new young president of the Board of Trade (then aged 30) in the post-war Labour government as he started travelling to and from the Soviet Union. In 1956 the KGB (the Russian Committee for State Security, recently formed in 1954) opened an agent recruitment file of their own on Wilson, under the code name ‘Olding’, the title of this episode.355 And then, in 1964, US intelligence decided to focus their own high-powered attention on this potentially subversive new British Prime Minister, filing him as ‘Oat Sheaf’.356
The basis of all this suspicion were the frequent journeys – 20 or so in less than a dozen years – that Wilson made to Russia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the course of which he met such prominent Soviet statesmen as Anastas Mikoyan, Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikita Khrushchev, and delighted in introducing his Russian friends to the joys of cricket beside the Moskva River.357 The purpose of the journeys was to arrange timber sales to satisfy the demands of Britain’s post-war housing reconstruction – first on behalf of the government, then, after Labour’s 1951 loss of office, as the representative of various private firms and agencies.358
Though much-probed by all manner of intelligence agencies and journalists, no dishonestly pro-Soviet or anti-British purpose was ever linked to Harold Wilson’s commercial ventures in Russia – while as a Labour politician he gave little indication of pro-Soviet leanings. Through the 1950s Wilson distanced himself steadily from Aneurin Bevan’s radical left wing of the Labour Party, moving rightwards to join forces with the centrist and ‘safe’, Winchester-educated Hugh Gaitskell, Labour leader from 1955 and leader of the opposition. Wilson made his name while serving as Gaitskell’s clever and eloquent Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer – joining his colleague George Brown in deriding Swiss bankers who speculated against the pound and seemed to be holding British fortunes to ransom as the ‘Gnomes of Zurich’359 – while shrugging off whatever attempts that Russian agents may have made to recruit him. The Soviet recruitment file on ‘Olding’ was eventually closed with the regretful comment: ‘The development did not come to fruition.’360
Then, out of the blue on 18 January 1963, at the age of only 56, the previously healthy Hugh Gaitskell died unexpectedly of an obscure illness – systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) – and Harold Wilson was elected his successor as leader of the Labour Party a few weeks later. Instantly the Soviet rumours revived again, though this time with a more conspiratorial – and even melodramatic – edge: that the Soviets had poisoned Gaitskell in order to get their own man in place as leader of the opposition, poised for the imminent occupation of Downing Street.361 Anatoliy Golitsyn, the highest level KGB agent ever to defect to the West, gave credence to the accusation when he was interviewed by MI5 in the spring of 1963.362
But though Golitsyn provided MI5 with solid insight into the Cambridge ‘Ring of Five’ and other spy scandals of the time, his allegations against Wilson were no more solid than the suspicions surrounding Wilson’s timber trade travels. When pushed, the Russian defector confessed he had only heard a rumour that the KGB were planning a political assassination ‘somewhere in Europe’. He could produce no solid evidence about Hugh Gaitskell’s death – and lupus was an unpredictable cause of fatality in 1963, as it is today.
Nor could Golitsyn, or anyone else, explain why the Russians should want to murder Hugh Gaitskell in January 1963, when the solid-gold Labour No. 2 and favourite to succeed him at that time was the outspokenly anti-Soviet right-winger George Brown. Harold Wilson’s leadership victory had come as a last-minute surprise against the odds, after a succession of Brown’s mercurial and drunken gaffes had sabotaged his own cause.363 Courtesy of Private Eye, George Brown’s alcohol-fuelled behaviour came to inspire the expression ‘tired and emotional’.364
So, as events turned out, Britain’s most eminent Russian double agent of the mid-1960s did not occupy No. 10 Downing Street. As we see in this episode, the real double agent stalked the hallowed corridors of Buckingham Palace.
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** ‘MI5’ is the name of Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence and security service which still operates today, while ‘MI6’ designates the British intelligence service operating abroad. MI6 are ‘our’ spies, it has been said, while MI5 exists to catch ‘their’ spies. Until the end of the Second World War there were also Military Intelligence Sections 1 (Code-Breaking), 2 (Russia and Scandinavia), 3 (Eastern Europe), and 4 (Aerial Reconnaissance) with sections 7–19 covering projects like Propaganda, Signals and Aid to European Resistance Movements. MI5 and MI6 remain today as the only survivors of this numerical system.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘MARGARETOLOGY’
NOVEMBER 1965
BY THE AUTUMN OF 1965 PRINCESS MARGARET AND TONY Armstrong-Jones were the swingingest couple in all of ‘Swinging London’, both 35 years old, with two healthy children as evidence of their happy and loving marriage – to that date, at least. ‘Tony and Margaret were so good together,’ remembers their friend interior designer and torch singer Nicky Haslam. ‘They made a marvellous double-act, playing off each other with a rivalry that, in those days, was rather charming. There was always huge humour and great fun buzzing between them’.365
In exploring the ambiguous role which Princess Margaret played throughout her life as younger sister to Elizabeth II, Episode 302 contains a number of incidents that are not factually ‘true’. But the overall purpose of the episode is to explore the larger truths inside the Princess’s complicated character and royal role – starting with the episode title, ‘Margaretology’. An article in The New York Times in these years quoted someone who described himself as ‘a self-confessed “Margaretologist”’, and who could thus be defined as a devotee of ‘Margaretology’ – though it is difficult to say how many others belonged to this rarefied cult.
In the mid-1960s, Apartment 1A, KP (Kensington Palace) was the smartest address in London, where guests might encounter Dudley Moore playing the piano of an evening, or the glamorous Cleo Laine singing to the accompaniment of her jazz musician husband John Dankworth. Peter Sellers would roll out his ‘Bluebottle’ to Spike Milligan’s ‘Moriarty’, with the two comics wickedly embellishing the surreal humour of their groundbreaking The Goon Show that had come to command nearly two million listeners on the BBC Home Service – ‘You dirty rotten swine! You have deaded me!’366
Margaret and Tony shared a sense of style and a mutual love of the arts, along with a sexual chemistry that was clearly visible in their inability to keep their hands off each other. In 1965 Tony’s usually catty rival Cecil Beaton captured the image of the perfect family in a photograph that was taken outside Apartment 1A – with firstborn David (three) on Tony’s shoulders, and baby Sarah (one) sitting solidly in her mother’s arms while husband and wife both exude glamorous and well-groomed lovingness.367
There was, however, a sardonic edge to this togetherness. The clever couple had a code – ‘the bread game’ – by which they communicated with each other at dinner parties. Whenever someone round the table uttered a particularly fatuous remark or cliché, a piece of bread would be subtly torn off and quietly pushed across the table in that direction. The person with the most pieces of bread accumulated by supper’s end was the ‘winner’. The fun, of course, was that no one else was supposed to realise that the c
ontest was in progress – but as the years unfolded the joke turned nasty, with the couple starting to play the game against each other.368
Tony’s success in the months following the couple’s May 1960 marriage was busy and spectacular. In rapid succession he became a consultant to the Council of Industrial Design, artistic adviser to the glamorous new Sunday Times Colour Magazine, and was commissioned in 1963 to co-design an angular and much-praised aviary for the London Zoo – Tony affectionately called it his ‘bird cage’.369 As a mark of her mildly surprised pleasure with her brother-in-law, Elizabeth ennobled him as the Earl of Snowdon in 1961 and appointed him Constable of Caernarfon Castle two years later – in preparation for the investiture ceremonies of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales that were planned for the end of the decade. Welcome to the royal family, Lord Snowdon!370
1965 – Smiling Snowdons: Margaret, Sarah, Tony and David
Tony’s glamorous projects took him here and there – and quite often abroad when he carried out his photographic assignments for The Sunday Times. But they also took him increasingly away from his wife – who, in striking contrast, found it difficult to occupy her days. Margaret would seldom rise before 11am, taking tea in bed and completing The Times crossword before making contact with the world. Once dressed and downstairs, she might ‘do her desk’ for an hour or so, then go out to lunch, at which, friends noticed, she was developing the habit of drinking quite heavily. Back home she probably spent the rest of the day inventing things to do, like washing her collection of coral and seashells or shampooing her spaniel Rowley in the bath – she liked to finish Rowley off with a blow-dry.371