The Peace of Amiens

by Nicholas Sumner

  ​It was obvious that the world situation was becoming more dangerous. The British called the London Imperial Defence Conference to convene later in the year. Its purpose was to formulate an Empire policy to the rapidly changing world situation after the collapse of the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the London Naval Conference. There it was announced that in the opinion of the UK government, the prospects for war had become much more likely than they had previously appeared. This caused surprise and consternation among the delegates but after some debate there was general agreement that the rising power and latent expansionism of Germany, Japan, Italy and the Soviet Union were all real and immediate threats. The only dissenter was the delegation from India.

  From ‘The Mosley Years’ by Andrew MacDonald, Little Day and Co. 1995

  In April 1932 Harry St. John Bridger Philby, a former British colonial officer who had been dismissed for misconduct, arrived in London a hero after his crossing of the empty quarter of Arabia. Philby was a mercurial character whose dislike of the British government was already well known in Whitehall, though strangely the attitude of the British government to Philby was a mixture of tolerance and ambivalence. [41]

  Philby’s views were a rag–bag of petty resentments and schoolboy politics and he had ‘gone native’ by adopting Arabian dress, customs and converting to Islam. Nevertheless he was known to be Ibn Saud’s most trusted advisor and his influence over the ruler of most of the Arabian peninsula was considerable.

  Mosley understood the potential advantages of securing the rights to the Saudi oil exploration concession for Britain then being sought by the British company Anglo-Persian Oil which represented British Petroleum and Shell. He was eager to close the deal and beat out the American company Standard Oil which was also showing a keen interest in it. Shortly after taking office on 3rd July 1932, he urged his Foreign Secretary, Harold Nicholson [42], to impress upon Andrew Ryan (the British Minister in Saudi Arabia) and Stephen Longrigg (the chief negotiator for Anglo-Persian) the importance of gaining the concession. It wasn’t so much the possibility of finding oil that was significant to the Prime Minister; it was the progress of British interests and influence in the world. To Mosley the Saudi oil concession was a trophy and a way of sending a message to the international community. It was imperative that Britain did not lose out to another power – in this case the Americans – who were also in the hunt for it.

  One of the ways Mosley changed UK politics was in his respect for strength and his willingness to use it to further his ends. Nevertheless with Philby he decided to take a more subtle approach. He arranged a meeting with Philby at 10 Downing Street on 20th July 1932, ostensibly to congratulate him for his journey across the Empty Quarter and inform him that he had been awarded a KCSI (Knight Commander of the Order of the Star Of India) in honour of the achievement. The meeting was necessarily brief and unbeknown to Mosley it came shortly after Philby had accepted a bribe from Standard Oil through Francis B. Loomis a former US Undersecretary of State. Loomis was representing Standard Oil’s agency SoCal, and the bribe was to ensure that Philby acted on their behalf in the negotiations. [43]

  Philby was very impressed by Mosley. Mosley’s re-born Labour Party seemed to hold out the promise of the kind of hard-edged Fabianism that Philby had embraced in his youth becoming the main force in the British political landscape. Better still, the new Prime Minister seemed determined to turn Britain into what today is known as a ‘meritocracy’ rather than a class-bound society based on privilege. Resentment of what Philby felt was his exclusion from that privilege was his overriding obsession in life and the justification for his betrayals.

  Mosley does not mention the meeting in his memoirs and refused to be drawn when asked about it by journalists and biographers until his death in 1980. Philby describes the meeting in his diary as ‘cordial’. Unusually, the meeting was in private so no official record exists of what was said, but it is known that Mosley offered Philby ‘a high position’ with the Foreign Office in the Middle East. He also promised to see that the Tamini affair, which had recently re-surfaced, be swept under the carpet, easing Philby’s re-inclusion in the British Foreign Service. All this was conditional on Philby using his influence over Ibn Saud to secure the Saudi Oil concession for Britain. [44]

  Philby left the UK on the 19th October 1932 with his wife Dora to drive back to Saudi Arabia through Europe. He was driving a car which he had bought with the bribe that SoCal had paid him. The six weeks drive offered him ample time to consider his position and he must have weighed his options carefully.

  On the one hand, the Americans were offering a good deal for his friend Ibn Saud, a way in which he could solve his considerable personal financial problems and a way he could thumb his nose at his political enemies in Britain by ensuring American success. His antipathy at this time was less with Britain than with individuals – later he became genuinely anti British.

  On the other, the British were also offering a good deal for his friend Ibn Saud, also offering a cure for his financial problems and also offering a way that he could thumb his nose at his political enemies by being re-instated to the British Foreign Service.

  The Philbys arrived in Jidda in mid-December and negotiations began in mid-February 1933. Philby’s loyalty was to Ibn Saud and the various offers he had received were seen by him as a way to increase the bidding. In the end he did not want to return to British service. Philby always bit the hand that fed – if it were a British hand – and he worked unceasingly against British interests in the negotiations. These were concluded on the 8th May, the concession, the greatest commercial prize in the history of the world, went to the Americans.

  When news of Standard Oil’s success and Philby’s part in it reached London, Mosley flew into a rage. He regarded Philby’s actions as an affront and a deliberate insult, as well he might, and immediately began to think about revenge. Mosley’s obsession with strength meant that he could not, in these circumstances, show weakness to the world or to his colleagues. He had to send a clear message and that message must be that you did not cross Oswald Mosley. There was also a deeply personal dimension to his anger. Mosley, the arch seducer, had tried to politically seduce Philby and been rejected. Now he reacted with all the fury of a jilted suitor.

  The Tamini affair was bought back into the light and a thorough investigation of Philby’s activities was ordered; in fact not just Philby was to be investigated, but every member of his family also. Mosley planned to do the political and social equivalent of burning Philby’s crops and sowing his fields with salt. Word went out in the Foreign Office that the Prime Minister wanted any and all evidence that could be used against Philby to be found.

  There was certainly no want of proof. Philby’s animus for the government he served was well-known and little that was new came to light but, taken in sum, Philby’s many misdemeanours amounted to a damning body of evidence. The case against him was sufficiently strong that a warrant was issued for his arrest on charges of espionage and treason. While Philby was in Saudi Arabia he of course enjoyed the personal protection of Ibn Saud, but the warrant meant that not only was he disgraced but that he could not set foot in any British territory without risking arrest. Although Mosley was unable to ‘see that blackguard Philby hanged’ as he put it, he was utterly discredited and St John Philby never left Arabia until his death in 1960.

  Philby’s brother Tom, a nautical advisor to the government of India, came under investigation too, as did Philby’s son Harold, an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, who was known to his friends as Kim. No blame could be attached to Tom, but the investigation of Kim had wide repercussions.

  In addition to Mosley’s desire for revenge against Philby senior, there was his desire to neutralise the far left of his own party and reduce the influence of Communism in Britain. Kim Philby might have been less thoroughly disgraced had not problems with Communists within the Labour Party been endemic. Labour’s far left were always Mosley’s stronges
t opponents and in attacking Communism in British society generally, the Prime Minister sought to address the specific problem of extremism in his own party.

  ​The loss of the Saudi oil exploration concession did not, of course, leave Britain without oil. The vastly lucrative Iranian concession was safely in British hands as was part of the Iraqi concession. Oswald Mosley was to remember the importance of oil later in his career when crafting the Mosley Report in 1942.

  From: ‘The Apostles Scandal’ by Mark Halliday, Pantillera Publishing 2003

  One incident from Mosley’s first year in office illustrates his temperament and the profound changes he bought to British politics and British government. What has sometimes been characterised as ‘Oswald Mosley’s anti-Communist witch hunt’ took place at a time of expanding Communist influence in British society and within Mosley’s own Labour Party. The King and Country debate of 9th February 1933, in which the Oxford Union accepted the resolution: ‘That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’ by 275 votes to 153, had shaken patriotic confidence and it was easy to see the debate as a symptom of the influence of the far left.

  ​Mosley, a decorated veteran of World War One, had thundered against the Oxford Union, declaring it ‘Despicable, base and cowardly.’ In 1933, in the wake of the loss of the Saudi Oil concession due to the activities of St. John Philby, the investigation by MI5 of Philby’s son Kim (which Mosley had directly ordered to gather evidence against his father) revealed that he and his circle of friends were Communists. [45] Worse still, one of them, Donald Maclean, was about to enter the British Civil Service.

  ​Because of this, Mosley issued a directive that no-one who had been found to have, or to have had Communist sympathies would be eligible for recruitment to any branch of the Civil Service. This edict was almost certainly designed to exclude not just Donald Maclean, but also Kim Philby, as it was known that Kim’s parents hoped that he would make a career in the Foreign Office like his father before him.

  This caused consternation within the Labour Party. It seemed unfair and arbitrary that people should be punished for ‘youthful indiscretions’, but Mosley did not relent. If the Prime Ministers initial motive was petty revenge on St. John Philby by getting at his son Kim, it was soon eclipsed by more pressing imperatives. Mosley wanted to neuter the power of Communism in his own party certainly, but in the Apostles Scandal he also saw a way to confront the establishment and consolidate his power. The academic world, which was initially broadly supportive of Mosley, was beginning to turn on him. To them, he was a thug and a brute; he had been educated at Sandhurst rather than one of the hallowed seats of learning at Oxbridge and he showed little in the way of respect for academia.

  To Mosley the fight was a way to confirm his authority. If academia and the establishment didn’t like it, then so much the better. Though a product of upper-class privilege, Mosley drew much of his support from the lower- and middle-class. In attacking the country’s vested interests, he was not just championing the cause of his supporters, he was consolidating his own power.

  Mosley used his friends in the press to break the scandal and stir it up. Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, at the time an ardent supporter of Mosley and his policies, went public with the scandal in mid-August at the height of the ‘silly season’ (the summer recess of the UK parliament when newspaper circulation is low and papers are traditionally likely to publish stories that would not normally be broken). In many ways it was blown out of all proportion. The subjects of the scandal were callow and immature young people of limited abilities and uncertain prospects. Kim Philby was not even a member of The Apostles. [46]

  As well as Kim Philby and Donald MacLean the men implicated by the scandal were: Guy Burgess – an alcoholic and indiscrete homosexual; Anthony Blunt, a fellow of Trinity College and also a homosexual; and Michael Whitney Straight, the son of an American publisher who had been Blunt’s lover for a time.

  The details were unpleasant and quickly stirred up anger and disgust in the public. The Apostles were presented by the press as a group of self-appointed know-it-alls who had come from a background of wealth and advantage, lived a hedonistic lifestyle and had turned on the society that nurtured them. They were ‘Vipers in our Bosom’ ‘Ungrateful Prigs’ and ‘Bollinger Bolsheviks’ to quote just some of the opprobrium heaped upon them.

  The homosexuality of three of them also figured heavily. Homosexuality was then a criminal offence in the UK, and the salacious revelations that accompanied the political aspects of the scandal did nothing to decrease the popularity of the story.

  The battle lines then, were drawn. It was Mosley versus academia and the establishment, two groups who were showing signs of turning against him. He relished it; it pitted him against some of the highest in the land.

  ​Guy Burgess was the son of a Royal Navy officer; Maclean the son of a former cabinet minister (now deceased); Blunt was related to Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the wife of the Duke of York who later became King George VI.

  Along with the King and Country debate, Mosley presented the Apostles Scandal as more evidence that the universities were turning out ‘worthless men’. At the Labour Party conference in the autumn of 1933 in his address to the delegates he said:

  ‘The universities are breeding men without loyalty and without honour, as we in the Labour Party work to create a country where all may rise on the basis of merit rather than favour, where all may partake of the rewards of opportunity if they have earned them; these vested interests seek to hold back those not gifted by accidents of birth and furthermore they seek to undermine the very nation that nurtured them.’ [47]

  It was explosive stuff and in hindsight it was completely fair. Mosley was trying to create a meritocracy – a society where engineers and entrepreneurs could get the acknowledgement they deserved. He posed the question; ‘Was academia still an asset to the Great Britain?’ The academics, who had been uncertain about Mosley up to this point, now hated him. They accused him of being anti free-speech and anti free-thought. They branded Mosley’s crusade as ‘persecution’, ‘a pogrom’ and ‘a squalid attempt to muzzle conscience’.

  The consequences of all this were far reaching. The scandal died down by Christmas and with it the debate. By early 1934, the Austrian Emergency completely eclipsed all other stories in the news. But Mosley had made a mark in British political circles and used the scandal to set out his agenda. Philby, Burgess, McLean, Blunt and Whitney Straight were just collateral damage in Mosley’s crusade to consolidate his power by reducing that of academia and the establishment.

  All of those implicated in the Apostle’s Scandal were disgraced. Whitney Straight fled back to America; Blunt went to live in France where he made a career in the art world. Philby was in Austria when the scandal broke, he never returned to the UK. True to his beliefs perhaps, he died in Russia in 1942 while reporting on the fighting there for an American newspaper owned by Whitney Straight’s family. Burgess was murdered while drunk in an Illinois brothel by a jealous former lover in 1951.

  MacLean drifted and did various jobs all the while protesting his innocence. But the story of the Apostles Scandal was to have a Coda. In 1943, because of the chaos in Russia, a defecting Soviet agent bought his way into Britain with the revelation that Mosley’s ‘persecution’ was in fact of individuals who had been recruited by Soviet intelligence to become spies. He also revealed that the fifth member of the cabal was John Cairncross, a British civil servant, then working at Bletchley Park, the code breaking centre of British Intelligence.

  Mosley, though no longer Prime Minister by this time, was utterly vindicated. Blunt, Burgess, Philby and Maclean as well as those who had supported them were discredited. Cairncross was thrown out of the civil service and both he and Maclean were tried for Treason. They were convicted and executed in 1944. [48]

  The policy that no one tainted by an affiliation to Communism could serve in the British Civil Service was almost reversed in 1939, but the Mol
otov-Ribbentrop pact and the subsequent Russian invasion of Poland made the reversal seem imprudent.

  CHAPTER 8: SUNDAY 8TH SEPTEMBER 1935

  The fetid heat of the Louisiana night hangs heavy around the walls and shutters of Our Lady of the Lake Hospital; the rhythmic sound of cricket’s throb in the still air. Doctor Arthur Vidrine stands on a third floor balcony. One hand is pushed into the pocket of his white coat, the other holds a lit cigarette. He looks out into the blue darkness and in the distance the lights of Baton Rouge cast a yellow glow on the low clouds. Above his head, moths swirl like snowflakes round the light. He can hear the wavering buzz of their wings as he draws the last of the cigarette into his lungs, grinds the butt beneath his heel and exhales. There is no more time to be lost; he is going to have to operate. He turns and walks back into the sick room.

  The patient is a forty-two year old man; he has been shot in the abdomen. Over the past hour his pulse rate has slowly risen while his blood pressure has fallen and fallen again, he is haemorrhaging internally and if the bleeding isn’t stopped he is going to die. It is a simple prognosis and a simple decision, but what makes Vidrine hesitate is the fact that the patient is ‘The Kingfish’ – Senator Huey Long, the former Governor of Louisiana, one of the most powerful men in the state and an absolute crook.

  He is conscious but growing weaker, lying in bed, his face is clammy, his breathing laboured and his skin ashen; he has the inward, preoccupied look of a dying animal. Vidrine smiles, it is a smile he does not feel, he is trying to look confident, Long looks up and his eyes are suddenly bright as he says, “Getting about time to operate is it Doc?”

  ​Vidrine nods, “I’m afraid so Huey, I don’t think we can wait any longer.”

  ​Long’s eyes fall. “No word from Maes or Stone.”

  ​“I’m sorry Senator, no. Do you have any objections to my performing the operation?” Long looks crestfallen for a moment, then shakes his head.