by A. N. Wilson
The British could not afford spaceships and rockets. The Union flag was never going to be planted on the moon, but in the ideological conflict between big clumsy market-led democracy and big brutal Marxist-Leninism, a certain breed of British could indulge in skills which they had perfected at their public schools: double-think, lying and treachery.
The double-think is especially important if we are to understand the spies, and the creepy-silly-undeveloped-schoolboy world they inhabited. The British government during the Second World War was for many British people an ideal. At the head of it was a Victorian aristocrat who was politically sui generis, who had belonged to two major political parties and been at home in neither, and who symbolised greatness, self-confidence and humour. But this great Churchill had presided over a government which was effectively Soviet in the degree of control which it had exercised over the people. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, Britain had seen a fair distribution of food, through the ration systems. While the middle classes howled about powdered eggs, the working classes, for the first time, had protein and vitamins in their diet. Schooling and medicine, even before the Attlee revolution post-1945, had been planned for all the people along socialist lines. To these experiences of home-grown socialism must be added the military fact that, after Russia had been invaded by the Germans, the Red Army became Britain’s greatest ally. The Red Army, just as much as Eisenhower’s US forces, saved Europe from the Nazis. That was how a majority of British, taught by newsreels, saw things. There was therefore every reason for double-think about the Soviet–American Cold War.
In John le Carré’s incomparable novels about espionage during the period, there is captured something more: the resentment at the loss of British power in the world fed into a hatred of America, which derived real satisfaction from the notion of joining forces with the only power in the world which could at that date plausibly challenge the military muscle and political influence of Washington.
In May 1951, the cover was blown on two British diplomats in the embassy at Washington–Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Burgess, an outrageous, boozy homosexual, and the snooty heterosexual Maclean both had many friends in London society. They were clubmen, diners out, known to ‘everyone’. They had been recruited as Soviet agents when they were still undergraduates at Cambridge. Goronwy Rees, an Oxford academic who was involved heavily in the world of espionage (probably only as a spy for the West, rather than as a double agent), remembered a conversation with the Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. This learned art historian believed that Burgess had been swayed by ‘his violent anti-Americanism, his certainty that America would involve us all in a Third World War’. Burgess, according to the Courtauld director, was ‘the Cambridge liberal conscience at its very best, reasonable, sensible, and firm in the faith that personal relations are the highest of all values’.6
The man who delivered this judgement to Goronwy Rees, sitting by the river bank near Oxford, was Anthony Blunt, himself a Soviet agent, whose cover was blown in 1964, but who was not publicly exposed, stripped of his knighthood and hounded by the press until November 1979, shortly after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. By then Britain was a very different place and its relations with the rest of the world had altered considerably. In the 1950s, however, the exposure of the spies, educated at public schools and Cambridge, made a humiliating dent in the way Britons perceived themselves. The officer class had been vilified and hated by class warriors since the time of the First World War, but both world wars had created a sense of comradeship across the classes–something which was extended to some degree by the continuation of conscription to National Service for all British males aged eighteen and over. The defection of Burgess and Maclean, and the gossip, turning to common knowledge, that the Foreign Office and the Intelligence Services had been riddled with traitors, created a profound unease. Far from wishing to perpetuate their position of duty and privilege as the governing class, these public school boys had been engaged since the 1930s in passing secrets to the Russians. Many agents died in the field because of the treachery of Burgess and Maclean, and probably thanks to the activities of Kim Philby, a drunken journalist who joined his comrades in exile in Moscow in 1963. Blunt does not seem to have been personally responsible for any deaths. But the existence of the spies, and their class, gave the (accurate) impression that as it began to rot and die, the old Britain was actually corrupt at its centre. Just as Churchill himself as Prime Minister began to look and sound like a dissipated old soak, so, much further down the hierarchy of things, there were these men who used all their intelligence and skill to undermine, to destroy, to dissipate British strength. Their actual crimes, thrilling enough for lovers of espionage adventures, represented only a part of what made them disconcerting. Burgess, Blunt, Philby, Maclean and their army of less famous and distinguished traitors were not merely criminals. They were emblems of a national disease. Malcolm Muggeridge, who had himself worked in Intelligence, and who was no stranger to alcohol, described a drunken evening in Guy Burgess’s flat at which were present, ‘John Strachey, J. D. Bernal, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, a whole revolutionary Who’s Who…There was not so much a conspiracy around [Burgess] as just decay and dissolution. It was the end of a class, of a way of life; something that would be written in history books, like Gibbon on Heliogabalus, with wonder and perhaps hilarity, but still tinged with sadness as all endings are.’7
The ambivalence of the intellectual and academic classes about the Soviet Union is one of the most extraordinary features of the age. Those in Britain who had misguidedly supported the Italian or Spanish Fascists in the 1930s were well advised to keep the matter dark; and those who had expressed any sympathy with Hitler, even in the 1930s, long before any implementation either of war or genocide, remained social outcasts forever. Diana Mosley, for example, who had had conversations with Hitler before the war, and who refused in after times to deny that she had enjoyed them, was regarded as an embodiment of evil in most sections of the British press, even though in her autobiography, A Life of Contrasts, she made clear that she deplored the acts of war, and the extermination camps. Eric Hobsbawm, who joined the Communist Party while at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1936–39, and was friends with Philby, Burgess and Maclean, merely said that the massacres perpetrated by Stalin were ‘excessive’. Asked on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1995 whether he thought the chance of bringing about a communist Utopia was worth any sacrifice, he said, ‘Yes’. Even the sacrifice of millions of lives? ‘That’s what we felt when we fought the Second World War’ was his reply. He was rewarded with professorial chairs of History at Birkbeck College, London, and at Cambridge and, in 1998, with the Companion of Honour. Far from being regarded as a malign intellectual eccentric, Hobsbawm was fawned upon by the London dinner-party circuit. His book The Age of Revolution was published by the bon vivant networker George Weidenfeld. His fellow academics, even if not themselves Marxists, could share the view of the Warden of Goldsmiths College, Ben Pimlott, that Hobsbawm ‘thinks on a grand scale’. Dispassionate readers might ask in what sense the word ‘think’ is being used in such a sentence. ‘We knew of the Volga famine in the early’ 20s,’ Hobsbawn admitted, ‘if not the early’ 30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the West, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing.’ When the Soviet Union collapsed, with all its secret police, its prison camps, its systematic intimidation and torture and suppression of free speech, Hobsbawm saw it as ‘an unbelievable social and economic tragedy’.8
The treason of the spies was to be explained in part by youthful enthusiasm for a cause, in part (certainly for Burgess) by sheer anarchic malice. But the treason of the clerks–the treason of the academics–had a much more profound effect. They persisted in blinding themselves to the essential violence on which Marxist regimes had always established, and maintained power. Decades before the H
ungarian Uprising of 1956, the nature of Leninism and Stalinism had been made clear. As long ago as 1923, the simplicity of it all had been explained by Bertie Wooster, when his friend Bingo Little dallies with a group known as the Red Dawn. ‘Do you yearn for Revolution?’ one of them asks Bertie. ‘Well, I don’t know that I exactly yearn. I mean to say, as far as I can make out, the whole nub of the scheme seems to be to massacre coves like me; and I don’t mind owning I’m not frightfully keen on the idea.’9 In February 2008 the MP Diane Abbott expressed the view on television that some people thought Mao had ‘done more good than bad’. Rod Liddle remarked in the Sunday Times, ‘There are two possible explanations for this. The first, and kindest, is that Ms Abbott is pig-ignorant. The second is that she is perfectly well aware of the millions upon millions of people Mao starved to death during his “Great Leap Forward” and the millions more who were killed or had their lives destroyed by his cultural revolution–but thinks that, by and large, these are trivialities, mere footnotes to history.10 Long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the death of Mao Tse-tung in China, the most brutal forms of communism found their defenders in the university lecture halls of Britain. Like a headless chicken still capable of running round the yard, socialism enjoyed an afterlife in intellectual and academic circles when it had ceased to have any plausibility in the world of practical politics. It did much harm.
The Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph was one place where the antics of the fellow-travellers were treated with the angry derision they deserved. It was begun by Colin Welch in 1955. Welch was one of the many brilliant people of our times who chose to be a journalist. Steeped in European (especially German) literature and music, intellectually serious, emotionally chaotic, in earlier ages he would in all likelihood have been a don. He was partly a journalist as a gesture of opposition to the follies of the age. The same was true of Malcolm Muggeridge, his predecessor as deputy editor at the Telegraph, or Peregrine Worsthorne, another brilliant polemicist. Both Welch and Worsthorne were guided by the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (1901–90), arguably the greatest British political philosopher of the twentieth century. Oakeshott stood in opposition not only to socialism, but to the unthinking commitment to ‘the Enlightenment’ from which socialism sprang–as his obituarist put it, ‘the whole post-Enlightenment style of thought, according to which everything can be understood quasi-scientifically, and reduced to a set of clear-cut “problems” to which there must exist equally clear-cut solutions’. He once said, ‘I am a member of no political party. I vote–if I have to vote–for the party which is likely to do the least harm. To that extent I am a Tory.’ A fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, he became professor at the London School of Economics, in succession to the socialist Harold Laski, in 1951. ‘When Oakeshott left Cambridge for Laski’s chair at LSE, Laski’s students were appalled. They listened with horror to his inaugural lecture which told them their hopes of a better world were false and their guides wiseacres.’ Upon his retirement, he lived in a tiny cottage in Dorset, without heating; but he was no ascetic, enjoying wine, women and chain-smoking. His friend Worsthorne was influenced by his bohemianism as well as by his luminosity of thought. While professor at LSE, Oakeshott was the lodger of Perry Worsthorne and his beautiful French wife Claudie at Cardinal’s Wharf, a rickety, elegant little house reputed to have been the residence of Christopher Wren when he was designing St Paul’s. It is on Bankside and looks across the river directly to the cathedral. ‘My only regret about Michael as a lodger was that I could never get him to talk about “Conservatism” in which I was supposed to be interested. “Leave talking about politics to the Left,” he used to say. “They have nothing better to do.” Yet in his way he was a guru. No piece of writing has ever influenced me as much as his famous essay Rationalism in Politics. By comparison, all the other political writers of the time–Laski, Cole, Bertrand Russell, not to say Marx–seemed vulgar and commonplace, not to say stuffy and pretentious.11
It was to puncture this pretentiousness that ‘Peter Simple’ devoted himself. Colin Welch handed on the column in 1957 to Michael Wharton, a saturnine figure destined for legendary status in Fleet Street. Half his ancestors came from the gritty weaving towns of Yorkshire and the other half from the Jewish ghettoes of Russia. Wharton had a circle of wits to help him with the column–including Claudie Worsthorne, Dick West, Roy Kerridge, and his wife, Kate, whom in a bizarre manner he lost to Colin Welch, while remaining Welch’s closest friend. No one could say that these upholders of Toryism in a vapid socialist world were great exemplars of bourgeois marital habits.
Wharton continued writing his Peter Simple columns over four decades, filing his last piece of copy shortly before his ninety-second birthday. The column was a mixture of comment and fantasy, peopled with a gallery of characters all too recognisable in the Britain of Macmillan, Heath, Harold Wilson and John Major. Many of them inhabit a bleak-sounding town, or, rather, conurbation, called Stretchford. Other towns in the Wharton world were the northern Soup Hales and Nerdley. Dr Spacely-Trellis, the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon, or Dr Ellis Goth-Jones, the popular Medical Officer of Health for Stretchford, or Julian Birdbath the Man of Letters, were slightly more than mere types: they had a zany, Swiftian life of their own, and the humour of the columns was cumulative. Wharton’s alternative universe–he often wrote as if he was inhabiting the Middle European domains of some Prince Bishop of the Holy Roman Empire–both did and did not resemble our own. His distaste for the objects of his satire never let up, nor did his inventiveness. One of his finest creations was undoubtedly Mrs Dutt-Pauker of Hampstead.
‘I have hated Hampstead for her Left-wingery, but I have loved her for her strange, leafy soul. Nowhere in London are green thoughts so green, especially in a rainy June, when the grass grows high in her innumerable gardens tame and wild.’ It is here that the walker comes across Mrs Dutt-Pauker’s Queen Anne house, Marxmount. Wharton believed that near this house, in a densely wooded part of the Heath, was to be found ‘a tribe of Left wing pygmies of cannibal habits and strong views on racial integration’.
‘That would be the among the least of the perils I might have to face as I pushed on through the dense foliage or paused to eat my bread and cheese by some gay flowerbed, watched by indignant progressive eyes from a book-lined study or seized and dragged indoors to take part in a discussion on comprehensive education and the need for Socialist play-groups.’12 One of the strangest things about the Britain of the last half-century was that, while socialist politicians vanished from the world stage in the 1980s, and from the House of Commons in the 1990s, Mrs Dutt-Pauker remained a perennial figure in British life, to be met, even in the twenty-first century, whenever there was a meeting of PEN or Amnesty International, and even to be heard occasionally on the political panel discussions on TV and radio. Though intellectually discredited, she was still welcome at college guest nights at Newnham and Somerville, her views less shakeable than the concrete walls and barbed-wire encampments erected by her heroes to enslave the human race.
This chapter’s related themes, of the exploration of space and the British sympathisers with Soviet Communism, were to colour the following decades, which is why they have been treated here in a broad way, carrying us beyond the chronological sequence which will follow. The spies, and their friends in the academic and literary world, made little secret of their hostility to the country, and culture, which had given them birth. They hated Britain, as a political entity, and sided with its enemies. At the same time, they were often conservative in everything except their politics. Alan Bennett was to capture this paradox in his play about Guy Burgess, An Englishman Abroad, in which Guy Burgess, living in exile, persuades a visiting actress, Coral Browne, to order a suit for him at his Jermyn Street tailors when she returns to London. It is a charming play–beguilingly subversive. Browne manages to get Burgess’s shoes copied from his shoemaker’s last in St James’s Street, and his suit made by the tailor. But she has difficulty in a dif
ferent shop when she tries to order him pyjamas in the style he had always favoured.
The shop assistant refuses, and, as the stage direction says, ‘Her Australian accent gets now more pronounced as she gets crosser’…‘You were happy to satisfy this client when he was one of the most notorious buggers in London and a drunkard into the bargain… But not any more. Oh, no. Because the gentleman in question has shown himself to have some principles, which aren’t yours, and, as a matter of interest, aren’t mine. But that’s it, as far as you’re concerned. No more jamas for him.’13
It is an electrifying moment dramatically, and a good deal less cloying than E. M. Forster’s notorious claim that if forced to choose between betraying his friends and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the guts to betray his country. Plays do not have to state every point of view, so the audience can both savour the drama and notice the unfairness of Coral Browne/Alan Bennett’s arguments. They don’t allow for the possibility that the shop assistant’s refusal to send comfortable and expensive pyjamas to a traitor could have been actually based not upon stuffiness, but upon principles of his own. Would Coral Browne, or Alan Bennett, have felt differently (if only slightly differently) about sending pyjamas to, let us say, Lord Haw Haw in prison? Or to Ribbentrop, who probably also shopped, when Ambassador in London, at the same Jermyn Street tailors and outfitters as had been patronised by Burgess? We are not told. But, as Bennett himself made plain, both in the play and in the Preface written in 1989, the issue was odder than that. ‘I have put some of my own sentiments into Burgess’s mouth. “I can say I love London. I can say I love England. I can’t say I love my country, because I don’t know what that means”, is a fair statement of my own, and I imagine many people’s positions.’14 As a matter of observable fact, Alan Bennett was completely right. This was ‘many people’s positions’, the more so as our times progressed. It was always easy, at any stage of the period, to notice extreme cases of alienation, whether it was the Cambridge-educated spies at the beginning of the 1950s or the Yorkshire-born Muslim terrorists of the twenty-first century. But what is striking is that so many other inhabitants of the archipelago felt like strangers here–or should that word be ‘there’? By the end of the period, it was not simply political outsiders or immigrants who felt like ‘displaced persons’: it was part of the very nature of inhabiting these islands. The phrase ‘my country’–which would have been perfectly intelligible in the middle of the nineteenth century–became harder to define towards the end of the twentieth. And if that is the case, then the beginnings of this dissolution–the disappearance of what made the phrase ‘my country’ translatable–had begun to happen in the post-war years. The treason of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean can be seen in this setting to be symptoms of a generalised confusion rather than overt causes of destruction.