At a reception at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, on 4 October 1957, an usher handed an urgent message to Walter Sullivan of the New York Times. He was to telephone his office. When he came back from the telephone, he pressed excitedly through the throng, to reveal to his fellow scientist, and fellow American, Richard Porter, the news–‘It’s up!’1
He was referring to Sputnik, the polished aluminium sphere, no bigger than a basketball, which the Soviets had projected into orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 2 October. The sphere was now circumnavigating the planet at 18,000 mph, in an elliptical orbit which brought it to within 155 miles of the earth’s surface at some points, and 500 miles at others.
Only in the nineteenth century, when European mankind abandoned the idea of a personal God or a visitable heaven, did the moon change its status. In all previous generations of human history, the moon had been a symbol, sometimes a goddess. Selene, the Greek moon, was a divinity who drove a chariot, and her love of Endymion, sung by John Keats, was the sign and type of the awakening of human imagination. The moon goddess was sometimes identified with Artemis or Diana the huntress. She controlled the fortunes of her votaries. She was mysterious, changing and changeable, and in some mythologies the actual cause of mutability itself. The Greeks had begun each year after the first appearance of the new moon at the summer solstice. The Romans divided the year into lunar months. Only in the prosaic industrial age of nineteenth-century capitalism did the moon cease to be a symbol of human dependency upon fate or the gods and become yet another territory to colonise, yet another problem for science to solve.
In 1865 Jules Verne had published his fantasy From the Earth to the Moon, in which the passengers on this space journey are shot by a giant cannon. It was in the post–Second World War world that Verne’s fantasy seemed to be realisable. Vostok [the East] 1 was the first successful scheme for launching a man into space. It was in 1961 that the first man went into space–once again from Baikonur. Colonel Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, aged twenty-seven, was strapped into a tiny capsule 2.6 metres in diameter. He orbited the earth once, doing the trip in 1 hour 48 minutes. Of classically proportioned good looks, Gagarin was a hero not only in his own country but throughout the Western world, especially among the anti-American British young. His clean-shaven face, blown up to poster size, adorned the bedroom of many a teenaged suburban British girl. When his spacecraft landed, and he emerged in a potato field near Engels, he met an old peasant woman. This figure from the novels of a pre-revolutionary rural past was probably an old Orthodox babushka who believed that she was seeing an angel, but she allegedly framed her questions in science fiction terms:
Peasant: Have you come from outer space?
Gagarin: Just imagine it! I certainly have.
Peasant: I was a bit scared. The man’s clothes were strange and he just appeared out of the blue. Then I saw him smile, and his smile was so good that I forgot that I was scared.2
Whatever scientific purposes the space mission had supposedly fulfilled, its political significance was lost on no one. Before he set out, Colonel Gagarin had said, ‘To be the first to do what generations have dreamed of, the first to blaze man’s trail to the stars–name a task more complex than the one I am facing. I am not responsible to one man, or only to a score of people, or merely to all my colleagues. I am responsible to all of the Soviet people, to all mankind, to its present, to its future. And if in the face of all I am still ready for this mission, it is only because I am a Communist, inspired by the examples of unsurpassed heroism of my countrymen–the Soviet people.’ His successful return vindicated not only him, as a hero, but the whole political system which underpinned it. Such was the success of Soviet suppression of information that it was universally supposed, both within and without the Iron Curtain countries, that Gagarin’s triumph had come as a result of steady progress unmarred by disaster. There were in fact dozens of calamities. In October 1960, for example, when safety regulations were ignored trying to get a huge R-16 rocket to ignite, an explosion killed more than one hundred technicians, as well as Field Marshal Nedelin, but no one was informed. It was in fact the accident rate which eventually slowed down the pace of Soviet progress in space research and allowed the Americans to race ahead. In the first stages, however, in the 1950s, the ability to cover up mistakes was a help in the propaganda war, which the Americans appeared to be losing. And the comparative poverty of the Russians helped in the initial stages because they were compelled by necessity to keep their designs and equipment simple. Sergei Korolev, the great Soviet space scientist, used stainless steel, not aluminium or titanium, to build spaceships. They were fuelled by kerosene and liquid oxygen. They had to be small, and they were set simple objectives.
Like the Russians, the Americans from the first saw the space race as a political race for dominance. Whereas the old myth had the moon chasing a human being, and filling him with poetic imagination and dreams, the new myth saw man chasing the moon, overpowering the virgin huntress and enlisting her in the ideological battle between dialectical materialism and market capitalism, between Lenin and Abraham Lincoln, between a state which claimed possession of an individual’s mind, while promising to nourish his or her body from cradle to the grave; and a state which proclaimed liberty but allowed the poor to die without health care or education, and which still permitted outright discrimination on grounds of race.
Speaking to a Joint Session of Congress on 25 May 1961, the new young President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, announced, ‘I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or so expensive to accomplish.3
Perhaps the most important word in Kennedy’s second sentence was ‘expensive’. The space race would become a chance for the Americans to bust the Soviets at the poker table. For the early 1960s, the two great monster powers were neck and neck in the space race. Trying to match the triumph of Colonel Gagarin, NASA sent Enos into space, the super-chimp who was representing the Americans, followed shortly thereafter by John Glenn, the first American human being to make the journey. In 1962, Scott Carpenter made three orbits, only to be trumped in 1963 by the daughter of a Russian tractor driver, Valentina Tereshkova, who became not only the first woman to have travelled in space but also to have notched up more hours in space in one journey in her craft, Vostok 6, than all the Americans had accomplished in the whole Mercury Programme, which had just been completed. This people’s heroine did no fewer than forty-eight orbits in one trip. By 1965, however, the Americans were beginning to pull ahead, achieving longest times in space, and longest distances traversed. It was the Russians who produced the first pictures of the lunar surface, on 3 February 1966, prompting the Americans to speed up their Apollo Mission, the project actually to land on the moon. Apollo 1 in 1967 was a disaster, in which astronauts Edward White, Virgil Grissom and Roger Chaffee were incinerated. But then the Russian spaceship Soyuz [Union] suffered a comparable disaster, and a propaganda setback occurred in 1968 when, aged thirty-four, Yuri Gagarin was killed in a plane crash. By 1969, the crew of Apollo 11 was chosen: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. Apollo 10 was the dress rehearsal, which orbited the moon. In the mission of Apollo 11, from 16 to 24 July 1969, Columbia’s CSMS Eagle flew for 8 days, 3 hours, 18 minutes and 35 seconds. It landed on the moon. On the day it did so, a bunch of flowers appeared on John F. Kennedy’s grave in Arlington Cemetery, bearing the inscription, ‘Mr President, the Eagle has landed’.4
At 9.56:20 Houston Daylight Time, on 20 July 1969, the thirty-eight-year-old Neil Alden Armstrong from Wapakoneta, Ohio, dropped back on to the footpad of his spacecraft and lifted his left foot backwards to test the lunar soil, making furrows in the dust with the toe of his boot. Selene, Phoebe, the inviolable goddess, had been violated. Rather like spirits who, when communicating from the other side through a medium, seem capable of expressing themselves only in banalities, Neil Armstrong said, ‘That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Then Armstrong held the staff while Buzz Aldrin thrust the national flag of the United States into the surface of the moon to consummate the primary goal of the Apollo Program, the assertion of American dominance not merely of the earth but of the universe.5
The British never had the resources to be able to compete in such a momentous race. Britain was actually the fifth nation to put a satellite into polar orbit–the Prospero, which was launched in 1971. The Ministry of Defence gave it just £9 million. Its launcher, the Black Arrow, was distantly modelled on the V2 rockets which had rained down on London in 1944. Hydrogen peroxide, water with another oxygen atom added, will, when heated sufficiently, produce a magnificently inflammable gas. Engineers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment worked out that a three-stage rocket, based on the Black Knight rocket, could launch a satellite weighing up to 100kg into a 300-mile orbit. After two test launches and one failure, they succeeded in launching Prospero in 1971 from the Woomera Range in Australia. The satellite was to have been named Puck who, in Shakespeare, ‘Put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes’ but the aerospace minister Frederick Corfield did not trust himself to get the name right when announcing this British technological triumph to the House of Commons. It was renamed Prospero.
The clumsy gesture of American spacemen in helmets jabbing a flagpole into the moon dust must have reminded many British television viewers of their own Victorian past. Just such gestures had been made one hundred years earlier, in unlikely and remote places in Africa and Asia, establishing the British dominance not only of territory but of the spirit of the times. In our times, Britain was reminded of her place.
A great intellectual and spiritual battle was in progress for the soul of the planet. As well as being the natural policeman and administrator of the world, Britain had been accustomed to thinking that it was the world’s natural moral arbiter. The Second World War had only confirmed this British self-perception. Had not Britain ‘stood alone’ against the darkness, when the Soviet Union had briefly allied itself to Hitler and the United States had hedged its bets before entering the conflict? British values, British decency, British fair play had ‘beaten’ the vile doctrines of the National Socialists. The British continued to glorify the early years of the Second World War, when these simplified views of things could be seen to be, roughly speaking, true, and to play down the implications of the later years of the war, when Churchill was beginning to lose his grip, when the Americans and the Russians accomplished the business not only of beating Germany, but of bankrupting Britain and dismantling the Indian Empire as part of a condition of winning the war.
When the two giants themselves began the Cold War in the immediate post-war years, Britain was a little out of things. Of course, technically speaking, the British government and the British Foreign Office, whether the government was Attlee and his Labour Party, or Churchill and Eden with the Conservatives, was an ally of the Americans. But the metaphor of the space race was a powerful reminder of the fact that Britain could no longer afford to take part. And Suez heightened the sense Britain felt, not only that it was out of the running, but that perhaps America was not, after all, quite such a friend and ally as everyone had supposed in the days only a decade earlier, when Churchill, flown with the Victorian poet’s vision, gazed across the Atlantic with the words, ‘Westward, Look, the Land is bright!’
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 Hungarian 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 different 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.
For all the extreme distastefulness of the spies and their attitude to their own country, and their adulation of a system of murder and repression which they wished to spread to the West, they had remarkably little permanent effect on Britain itself. One of the central political paradoxes of our times was encapsulated in this fact. Left-wingery of various colourings might have been considered normal thinking in university common rooms and literary salons. This might have led, and undoubtedly did lead, to many writers and speakers of influence to express unpatriotic sentiments; and it might have led, and undoubtedly did lead, to some disastrous economic policies when a supposedly left-wing government was eventually elected to power in 1963. But in terms of actual infiltration, the Soviet bloc had no influence upon Great Britain at all. Far more wide-ranging changes came to Britain as a result of American, than of Soviet, influence. There is a paradox here, which would see its full flowering in the early twenty-first century among the English ‘neo-cons’: namely that those British patriots who had supported the United States against the Soviet Union in the Cold War found themselves in a position of commending American influences which did far more than Russia to destroy the old British way of life. The brasher of the ‘neo-cons’ of later times would come to welcome this fact, and regard the building of Denver- or Pittsburgh-style skyscrapers in small English towns in as favourable a light as the arrival of American hamburger chains to replace the small independent café. But small-c conservatives were less sure. If a prime objection to the spies and the crypto-Reds was that they were trying to undermine what made Britain British, then could not the same accusation be levelled against Britain’s greatest friend and ally?
This was one way of putting it. Another way of seeing things would be to suggest that, in the post-war trauma, Britain was undermining itself; it was changing willy-nilly. By this analysis, attempts to ‘blame’ Soviet agents, or American styles of cheap clothes and food and music, mistake the nature of the case. Neither the KGB, nor the Coca-Cola Company, were to be held responsible for something which was more mysterious, more general, a change which in another culture would have been seen as the will of the Fates, or the movement of History.