England their England

It’s been fun to re-read Ben McIntyre’s biography of Kim Philby.

These days, Philby’s name may not be as well-known as it was in my youth. He was the man once tipped to lead Britain’s counter-espionage service, MI6, and who was involved in practically every major operation it had run between 1940 and 1951. Then he fell under suspicion of being a spy for the Soviet Union, and having therefore betrayed every single one of those operations, but the charges weren’t proved at the time. Indeed, four years later he was back in British intelligence and spying for both his masters – MI6 and the Russian KGB – until he was finally and conclusively exposed in 1963 when he defected to Moscow.

The biography’s title is apt: A Spy among Friends. Philby was recruited by the Russians in the 1930s, but waltzed into MI6 in 1940 with barely a question to answer. He had been educated at one of Britain’s great public schools (as we confusingly call our major private schools) and one of the ancient universities, Cambridge. He belonged to an elite of friends or at worst friends-of-friends, who knew that each could trust each of the others.

Kim Philby: a joy to his friends. Whom he joyfully betrayed

His closest friend, and the man he therefore duped most comprehensively, was Nicholas Elliott, who explained his own recruitment into MI6:

There was no serious vetting procedure. Sir Nevile [Bland, a senior diplomat] simply told the Foreign Office that I was all right because he knew e and had been at Eton with my father.

Membership of this elite group simply opened all doors and Philby, like Elliott, simply slid through them into the very heart of Britain’s secret world, where he could betray and harm the most.

That leaves me with some contradictory feelings. I find that sloppy, incompetent elite deeply unpleasant. It runs the country still, chiefly through its control of the top positions in business, the services and politics (principally through the Conservative Party). A fine example of that elite would be David Cameron, who was Prime Minister from 2010 to 2015 and whose legacy is Brexit.

In a sense, then, I suppose I should approve rather than censure Philby. He acted out of communist conviction. A man of the left taking on a deeply entrenched, massively incompetent and shamefully complacent group of rulers firmly anchored to the right. But I just can’t see anything admirable in what he did.

Perhaps it’s because of the cold-bloodedness and cruelty of his treachery. For instance, several hundred young Albanians were sent by the CIA and MI6 into their homeland to foment unrest against the then Communist government of Enver Hoxha. It strikes me as a brainless thing to have done, undoubtedly illegal, and violent in intent. But I can’t bring myself to like the action taken by Philby, who ensure that they went to their deaths by betraying them to the Soviets. Still worse, several thousand others died with them: relatives, friends, sometimes even people unfortunate enough to share a surname with one of the infiltrated subversives.

I don’t know. I don’t find anything admirable in that. In much the same way as I find it hard to admire a murderer, however unpleasant the victim.

Then there’s another reason. Because another possible title for McIntire’s book could have been An Englishman Abroad, had the title not already been taken by an excellent TV film about another of the Soviet spies who worked inside MI6, Guy Burgess. Even when Philby made it to Moscow, he never stopped hankering for English things. Phillip Knightley, from the spy-hunting service, MI5 – MI6’s rivals – claimed to know what Philby longed for in Moscow:

He’s a totally sad man, dreaming of a cottage in Sussex with roses around the door.

When Philby’s third wife left him in the Soviet Union, his gift to her was telling: the school scarf he had kept since his time at Westminster. He clearly felt a deep bond of loyalty to the very institutions he was betraying.

The Soviets recognised his Englishness. When Philby married his fourth wife in Moscow, the KGB’s present was a quintessentially English tea set in bone china. Even Philby himself described himself as “wholly and irreversibly English”.

Strangely enough, I too feel profoundly English. But mine is a different England from his. I recently watched The Happy Prince, a TV film on Oscar Wilde’s decline into death. In it, Wilde at one point describes England as the natural home of hypocrisy. That’s the England that Philby belonged to, champion of deception that he was.

Sadly, it seems to me that Brexit Britain has chosen to become that kind of nation. Certainly, the like of Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg, leaders of the Brexit movement, belong to precisely the same type of entitled, self-selected, public-school and ancient university-educated elite that spawned Philby.

I belong, in some deeply-rooted sense, to England. But that kind of England is not where I want to live. Which is why I don’t live there any more.

The story of Kim Philby reminds me of exactly why.