At Athens he changed planes and bought a bottle of ouzo – he’d never tasted the stuff and, besides, it would be a beakerful of the warm south to take into the Russian winter. He also bought the Sunday Post. An outrageous price and nearly two days old, but he desperately wanted an English paper.
‘Where is Leigh-Hunt?’ ran the headline, and underneath it was another version of what Said had told him, bylined to Arthur Alliss, ‘our Middle Eastern correspondent’. The piece concluded that Charlie was in Russia. Troy turned to the inside pages. A leader, the work of his brother-in-law Lawrence Stafford, called upon the Foreign Office to clarify the matter – had Leigh-Hunt defected or not? ‘Mr Woodbridge was forthright in his denial of rumours alleging that Charles Leigh-Hunt was a Soviet agent some six years ago. It is not for him to remain silent now. Where is Leigh-Hunt? Who is his paymaster?’
Troy thought ‘paymaster’ a bit histrionic, but then writing about spookery brought out all the clichés.
Under Home News, eclipsed by the Charlie scandal, was an item on the Labour Party leadership. The chief contenders to replace the late Hugh Gaitskell were Harold Wilson and George Brown – both of them politicians swept into the Commons in the great tide of 1945, just like Rod. But Rod’s name was nowhere.