Our Times

by A. N. Wilson

  I have, for many years, appeared on radio and television programmes; and, for this reason alone, my name might reasonably be described as ‘a household name’, as it has been in the Sunday Mirror. On many occasions I have been photographed, at their request, with people who have claimed to be ‘fans’ of mine; and on one occasion I was photographed, with my full consent, in my flat (which is also my office) with a gentleman who came to see me, accompanied by two friends, in order to ask me to take an active part in a business venture which seemed to me to be of interest and importance. After careful consideration I turned down this request, on the ground that my existing commitments prevented me from taking on anything more, and my letter of refusal is in his possession.

  I have since been told that some years ago the person concerned was convicted of a criminal offence; but I knew then, and know now, nothing of this. So far as I am concerned, anyone is welcome to see or to publish any photographs that have ever been taken of me.

  I am satisfied that the source of all these sinister rumours is the Sunday Mirror and the Daily Mirror. I am not a homosexual.* I have not been to a Mayfair party of any kind for more than 20 years.* I have met the man who is alleged to be a ‘king of the underworld’ only three times, on business matters;* and then by appointment in my flat, at his request, and in the company of other people.

  I have never been to a party in Brighton with gangsters–still less clergymen. No one has ever tried to blackmail me. The police say that they have not watched any meetings, or conducted any investigations, or made any reports to the Home Secretary connected with me. In short, the whole affair is a tissue of atrocious lies.

  I am not by nature thin-skinned; but this sort of thing makes a mockery of any decent kind of life, public or private, in what is still supposed to be a civilised country. It is, in my submission, intolerable that any man should be put into the cruel dilemma of having either to remain silent while such rumours spread, or considerably to increase the circulation of certain newspapers by publicly denying them. If either the Sunday Mirror or the Daily Mirror is in possession of a shred of evidence–documentary or photographic–against me, let them print it and take the consequences. I am sending a copy of this to both.

  Your obedient servant

  Boothby

  (*In the previous paragraphs, the phrases followed by an asterisk are demonstrable falsehoods.)

  In 1964 £40,000, one of the largest sums ever paid in compensation for a libel, was paid to Boothby and the editor of the Sunday Mirror was sacked. It was a good demonstration of the powers of the libel laws to intimidate journalists. After the debacle of the Profumo affair, issuing writs for libel was the most usual way employed by rich villains to muzzle the press. The cost of bringing such proceedings to court, and the possibility that, even if the case were successful, a judge might not award full costs, guaranteed that only the rich and powerful could use this law to protect themselves. Boothby won his case by committing perjury.19 He wrote to his QC, Gerald Gardiner, on 10 August 1964–‘We were lucky in having Mr Goodman’s help, as he is one of the shrewdest bargainers in the business. It is, I think, the fastest and largest settlement of the kind ever made. So it should have been.’20

  Whether you believe that Ronnie Kray and Boothby had no sexual relationship, there were many who would raise an eyebrow at Ron’s description: ‘It was strictly a business relationship which later became a friendship–a friendship based on the fact that we had both been so badly smeared by the national press.’21 It was a bizarre business relationship. It was a good example of how small Britain was, and how, as in the roman-fleuve of Anthony Powell, the unlikeliest characters turned out to know one another. Not that Powell ever touched upon the criminal underworld. For that the reader would be directed to the raffish novels of Simon Raven. Nevertheless, a colourful figure such as Boothby, even if he did not attend very many of the Krays’ parties, provides a link between, on the one hand, a Prime Minister and one of the great ducal families, with, on the other hand, hatchet men and protection racketeers.

  The relationship with Dorothy Macmillan had begun as long ago as 1929 and remained the dominant one throughout her life. ‘It was Dorothy who seduced Boothby and dominated him. He not only fulfilled her sexually, but gave her the fun, glamour and exciting company that her husband was unable to do.’22 Though Lady Dorothy begged her husband for a divorce he refused to allow her emotional satisfaction to come in the way of his political career. But, by the time that ambition had been satisfied and Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister (aged sixty-three), Macmillan and his wife had become friends, and indeed, they returned from the Commonwealth tour of 1958 as a sort of Darby and Joan. None would have guessed, from her substantial appearance (comparisons were made with the comic actress Margaret Rutherford) or her aristocratic contempt for conventions, of the strange emotional secrets the Macmillans shared. At Birch Grove, the Macmillans’ country house, the police patrolled the gardens by night before the visit of General de Gaulle, and were disturbed to note a light bobbing about outside the house. They were surprised to find the Prime Minister’s wife, wearing only a slip and gumboots, a miner’s lamp on her forehead and two hot-water bottles strapped to her ample midriff–‘I got a bit behind with the bedding out’.23 Confronted by CND demonstrators, she leaned from her car window to tell them what she thought. ‘Where did you learn that language, m’lady?’ asked her chauffeur. ‘From the grooms.’ As with her husband, however, there was surely a strong element of self-consciousness in all the cultivated eccentricities, as when she turned up in a television studio wearing her old tweed skirt beneath, but a clean silk shirt, adorned with important Cavendish jewels on her top–the only part, as she observed, which would be seen by the audiences at home.

  It was surely the playfulness of the Macmillans which made them charming. When J. Enoch Powell scornfully dismissed Harold Macmillan as an actor manager, he was observing a set of qualities which he disliked, but which are probably necessary in public life. What mysteriously seems to have happened to Britain during the Macmillan era is that the artifices by which, hitherto, public life was carried on, were stripped away–in the names of truth, or subversion, or the unmasking of hypocrisy, or simple mischief. It was the time when the Island of Apollo truly became the Island of Dionysus. The Macmillans, with their divergent public and private masks, their firm sense of a distinction between the two, were appropriate rulers during such a transition, yet they could not have envisaged in their wildest nightmares in 1957, the things which would come to pass by 1963.

  In foreign policy Macmillan faced three enormous and unavoidable questions, which can be summarised in three words–America, Commonwealth, Europe. The Suez debacle had left Anglo-American relations all but shattered. For Macmillan, whose mother was American, and who had enjoyed the comradeship of General Eisenhower during the Second World War, the Anglo-American alliance was the natural bedrock on which Britain’s foreign policy must be constructed, the more so since the Empire was in rapid dissolution, and her position vis-à-vis Europe was, at best, ambivalent. It was obvious that, since the end of the Second World War, Britain had all but lost its status as a world power. If it was to maintain any position of influence in the world, any sense of itself as worthy of its place on the Security Council of the United Nations, it could only do so as a special ally of the United States.

  These are the years (Eisenhower’s presidency lasted until 1961, when he was succeeded by John F. Kennedy) when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union very nearly escalated into actual war; and when the ever-volatile Middle East saw crises which, in the case of the Lebanon, literally demanded American intervention, and in the cases of Egypt, Israel and Iraq and Jordan required American steerage against Russian intervention. They were delicate times in which Britain had no capacity, post-Suez, to act directly, but in which the restraining word here, the patient extra negotiation there, the piece of local or diplomatic experience in another area could be seen, with hindsig
ht, to have made a difference.

  Macmillan’s meeting with Eisenhower in Bermuda within weeks of taking office went some way towards overcoming the distrust which had grown up between the two nations over Suez. When, the following year, events in the Middle East became inflamed, the British and the Americans were able to work together; or, if not together, more closely than would have seemed possible during Eden’s premiership. In May 1958, the President of the Lebanon, Camille Camoun, appealed for American help. Inspired by Nasser of Egypt, and with Russian armaments imported from Syria, the anti-Western opposition parties threatened Camoun’s government, and the Lebanon, with civil war. The strongest ally the West had in the Middle East was Iraq, whose young King Faisal had been educated in Britain (like his Old Harrovian cousin the King of Jordan). In July, Faisal was killed at the age of twenty-three. It looked as if the Kingdom of Jordan would likewise be overthrown by a combination of Soviet-inspired communism, discontented Islamism and Nasser-induced bloody-mindedness. Within six hours the US 6th fleet was heading for Beirut. ‘You are doing a Suez on me,’ quipped Macmillan to Eisenhower by telephone.24

  It was a good, bitter joke, underlying the essential irrationality of American foreign policy over the previous two years. Either they did accept the British (roughly speaking Imperialist) attitude to the region, namely that the West had a need, or even a duty, to police the Middle East, keeping its more ‘extremist’ elements under control, or they should have been prepared to leave it alone, with the inevitable consequence that the fledgling State of Israel would be devoured in its nest. The Foreign Office in London urged Macmillan to befriend the new government in Iraq, partly for the sake of peace, partly to ensure the West’s continued access to the oil fields south of Basra. But it required some sleight of hand to be able to do this while retaining the friendship of Jordan, whose grief-stricken King, mourning the death of his royal cousin in Baghdad, felt let down by the British. Macmillan kept the 2 Parachute Brigade at Amman airport throughout the crisis to assure King Hussein that Britain would support Jordan against a comparable revolution to the one which toppled Faisal, but the American support for this particular part of the summer’s Middle Eastern crises was lukewarm. Fifty years and more after those events, Britain and America had still not satisfactorily decided upon their role in the Middle East. The summer of 1958, however, in which Ike ‘did a Suez’ and intervened in the Lebanon to keep at bay the insurgents, had quickened the American sense of the nature of the problem.

  The brinkmanship in American relations with Russia was, as far as world peace was concerned, more immediately alarming. In Eisenhower’s last year in office, East and West seemed close to an agreement on the reduction in nuclear armaments. Khrushchev, the Russian leader, wanted to play the double game of reducing arms, and punishing the West by constant and not unjustified observations about the ever-increasing proliferation of American missile stations all over Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, and of the burgeoning espionage industry. John le Carré’s novels of moral ambivalence and mutual distrust were the best things to emerge from the murky history of Cold War diplomacy. The closer the spymaster George Smiley came to unearthing Karla, his opposite number in Moscow, the finer seemed the lines, not only between the dirty tricks one side was prepared to play on the other, but also between the moral worth of either side’s set of values. Indeed, the achievement of le Carré, best seen in retrospect when the Cold War was over, was the implication that what we were confronting here was an extraordinary case of displacement. While politicians on both sides moved from one particular summit meeting or diplomatic crisis to another; while agents in the field pulled off yet one more dirty trick, or double-crossed another opposite number, their activities, whose puerility seemed well coloured by the affinity so many of the English spies felt with school, and prep school at that, became emblematic of cultural identity crisis on both sides. Macmillan had the sense that there were not going to be many more politicians who could straddle ‘this strange modern age of space and science’ and ‘the great past–of classical learning and Christian life’. If learning and Christianity were to be scuppered, what would come in their place? What stories would the West be able to tell itself, if it could not claim that its political institutions were the inspiration of Demosthenes, and its religious strength from the Church by law established? A similar sense, however, as the West would learn from reading the novels of Solzhenitsyn, possessed the Soviet mind, a sense that their creeds–in this case Marxist-Leninism–were based on a chimera in which nobody really believed. To hide from themselves their lack of self-belief, the superpowers moved to yet more violent displays of fundamentalist strength, as though the evaporation of faith–in the classical past, in Christianity, or in dialectical materialism–was not the fault of doubt within the soul, but from outside infiltration, the enemy at the gates.

  In America’s case, the gate at which the enemy lurked was Cuba. In the New Year of 1959, Fidel Castro had ousted the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar and established, only a few miles across the water from Florida, a Marxist-Leninist state, equipped, armed and financed from Moscow. The new President, John F. Kennedy, fulfilling a plan which had been hatched by his predecessor, organised a landing at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba of a brigade of anti-Castro Cuban dissidents, trained in Florida. There were 1,500 men armed with American tanks and guns. They lasted just forty-eight hours before being captured by Castro’s crack troops. By October of the following year, the Russians had installed medium-range offensive missiles in Cuba, with a range of 1,500 to 2,000 miles, and Kennedy contemplated an air strike to remove them. There was even talk of a full-scale invasion of Cuba to ‘finish with Castro once and for all’. In the last week of October 1962, it looked as if the USA and the Soviet Union were preparing the ultimate horror, nuclear war, prompting Bertrand Russell’s verdict that ‘Kennedy and Macmillan are the wickedest people in the story of man’. Had the Russians not dismantled their missile bases in Cuba, the unthinkable holocaust could have happened. But if we are right in our analysis of what was going on in the psyche of both sides, a nuclear war was never going to happen. Armageddon occurs because the Reign of the Saints and the True Believers is about to begin, when differing certainties come to blows in the Last Battle. But the Cold War was fought not between fundamentalisms but between self-doubters posing as fundamentalists; not between certainties but between uncertainties. Both sides in the poker game knew they had almost worthless hands.

  Cold War, bluff, confrontation, spying, arrests, threats, glooms, silences were to characterise the times, not battles, which had scarred the 1930s, the time of certainties.

  The emblem of the pointless stalemate was the Berlin Wall.

  Although many Western intellectuals persisted in the belief that communism was a plausible economic-political philosophy and the Soviet Union its worthy guardian, those who were obliged to live beneath its murky shadow took a different view. As early as 1949,59,245 East Germans had left the German Democratic Republic for the West. By 1953,331,390 had left, and in Berlin, isolated behind the Iron Curtain, but, in its French, English and American sectors part of the Free West, the refugee crisis was not only a visible disgrace to the government of Walter Ulbricht, but also an administrative catastrophe. Who would heal, who would administer, who would teach the East Germans when, for example, 5,000 doctors and dentists had left the country by 1961, hundreds of scientists, many academics (the entire Law Faculty of the University of Leipzig)? In 1961 even Miss East Germany defected to the West. How could they stop the flow?

  In spite of the West’s enormous Intelligence Service, and its innumerable agents and double agents in the East, not one of them guessed what Ulbricht was going to do, even when, during a news conference about the refugee crisis, he darkly quipped, ‘No one is going to build a wall.’25

  In the early hours of 13 August 1961 Soviet and East German troops moved around the city, and the Westerners became conscious that some form of blockade was bein
g erected at the inter-Berlin border. As light dawned, it became clear that a barbed-wire barrier had been erected, soon to be followed by the great concrete wall itself. Willy Brandt, Mayor of West Berlin, who had been on a train to Hanover the previous night, hurried back to the city by plane and went directly from Tempelhof to Potsdamer Platz. As he walked about among the quiet, shocked crowds, he was persistently asked, ‘When are the Americans going to come?’ The Wall was in flagrant violation of the Four Power status of post-war Berlin, as agreed by the United Nations. West Germans feared that the building of the Wall would be the prelude to the Soviet invasion of West Germany itself–a groundless fear as hindsight knows. It was assumed by the Germans that some action would be taken by the Western powers. Macmillan was telephoned the day after the Wall went up. He was having a golfing holiday in Scotland at the time, and he did not think it necessary to cut short his pleasure. ‘Nobody is going to fight over Berlin,’ he remarked. Nor would Adenauer leave Bonn to show solidarity with the people of Berlin.

  President Kennedy, who sent his deputy president Lyndon Baines Johnson on a visit to Germany shortly after the Wall had been built, did not get around to visiting until June 1963, by which time East Germany was firmly and safely behind its concrete prison wall. His speechwriter was able to come up with a quotable sound bite: ‘All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner.’ Only he wasn’t a Berliner, and those who were might have welcomed more support at the time. When Willy Brandt publicly declared the contents of his letter to Kennedy, back in 1961, imploring the West to do something, Kennedy was furious. THE WEST DOES NOTHING complained the newspaper Bild. Crowds of demonstrators massed in West Berlin displaying banners which read WE APPEAL TO THE WORLD… But it suited the world (or so the world supposed) to have a divided Germany. Still haunted by the spectres of the two world wars, the Western powers continued to believe, in the absence of a scintilla of evidence, that a strengthened Germany would turn into a militaristic Germany, or that a united Germany would somehow ‘threaten’ the West. The Soviets had urged restraint upon the East German authorities, which is why they asked for the Wall to be a barbed-wire barrier in the first instance in case American tanks and troops were moved in. Then, in all likelihood, the Soviets would have backed away. But Erich Honecker, First Secretary of the East German Communist Party, was a man who had clocked the Western idea. He had urged from the beginning that the Wall should be unassailable, and built of concrete. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen in history. Kennedy thought that the Wall was ‘a hell of a lot better than a war’. Apparently that was what most people supposed. The Americans and British, who, either separately or together, were prepared to rattle sabres in small countries such as the Lebanon or Jordan, had reverted to the old appeasement policies of the 1930s when it came to a power with muscle.