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.

Trump and Wolff: a fine tradition of obtuse authoritarianism

Excellent. I’ve taken delivery of my copy of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. 

My Kindle edition of Fire and Fury
Now I'll decide whether or not I read it, not some tinpot autocrat

I previously had little intention of buying it, and couldn’t have until next week anyway, but Donald Trump’s attempts to block publication made purchasing the book more attractive and brought the launch date forward.

Thus we rush more quickly to our fate by lashing out against it…

This experience evokes a strong sense of nostalgia in me. In 1987, during the heady days of the height of Maggie Thatcher’s power, she was more inclined than ever to indulge in spasms of complete battiness. One concerned a rather bad book, Spycatcher by a certain Peter Wright, formerly of the spook service MI5.

Maggie decided that the book represented a security threat to our fine kingdom. She seems not to have cottoned on to the obvious fact that anything the book contained would have been known by our then principal foes in Moscow, probably well before Wright had got around to writing it down.

She set out to ban publication of the book. Since her writ never ran quite as far as she would have liked – which would have been worldwide (at least) – she was only able to block UK publication.

The result was glorious: the book could be bought anywhere in the world, including in Moscow, but not in Britain. You might almost have wondered whether Thatcher was trying to prevent her own electorate reading about the ineptitude of some of our spies, rather than trying to protect secrets from the Soviet Union.

I wasn’t particularly tempted to read the book, but I was damned if the iron lady was going to stop me. I persuaded a friend in the US to buy a copy and mail it to me, which he kindly did. As it happens, I didn’t read the blessed book for years and when I did, I found it turgid and unconvincing. I struggled to finish it. But at least, I’d made it my choice, and not Maggie’s, whether I read it or not.

The point of this story is that Maggie’s fixation with banning the book turned an obscure third-rate work into a worldwide publishing sensation. Just as Trump’s rantings against Fire and Fury have taken the book from 48,449th on Amazon’s list to the number 1 spot.

By the way he has tried to block a book that claims he’s unfit for office, Trump has demonstrated just the kind of incompetence that makes the case against him. In fact, his reaction to the book condemns him far more powerfully than the book itself possibly could: it no longer matters if the book is entirely false, his reaction to it is authentic and visible to anyone. At least, to anyone with the eyes to see. 

There’s nothing new about any of this.

Nearly three centuries ago, Voltaire spent three years exiled in England. Such was his talent, he not only learned English, he mastered it well enough to write a book in the language, a book that sparkles with humour and provocative insights. His Letters on the English would have made the King of France as apoplectic as Trump is over Wolff – only in the French case, most of his officials would have agreed.

The English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise Government where the Prince is all-powerful to do good, and, at the same time, is restrained from committing evil.

Resisting Kings? Restraining their freedom to act? Oh, no, Louis XV would have taken a distinctly dim view.

There was worse still.

An Englishman, as one to whom liberty is natural, may go to heaven his own way.

What? There might be a way to heaven that didn’t go through the one true Church? The clergy would have been as incensed as the King.

No wonder Voltaire didn’t publish.

Well, at first he didn’t. But it must have gnawed at him to have a book that good mouldering in a bottom drawer. He gave in to temptation. He published, though only in English.

Still. Voltaire’s natural audience was his countrymen. Could he bear to deny them something that would enhance his reputation so forcefully?

It seems, naughty boy, he’d prepared a translation and adaption which he called the Lettres Philosophiques. And he let a printer see them. And then another. And then, for good measure, a third. Under strict instructions not to publish.

But they could see how well the book would sell. And when they discovered that others held the manuscript they began to fear that one of the other two would publish it first, creaming the most profitable part of a lucrative market.

Eventually, the book appeared. Without the permission legally required, a permission the authorities would certainly not have granted anyway. And Voltaire was in trouble – worse trouble than Michael Wolff because eighteenth-century France had few restraints on the power of the authorities to make their displeasure painfully known. Trump might envy them their unbridled authority but he doesn’t have it.

Voltaire’s friends got him away from Paris and into the deepest provinces. Eventually they persuaded the powers-that-were to leave him alone, on condition he stayed there, kept quiet and behaved himself.

But something had to be punished, if only for the form of the thing. So the authorities seized a copy and condemned it to be shredded and burned on the steps of the Palace of Justice. A sentence that was carried out in all its brutality.

Except that – actually, it wasn’t. The public executioner could spot a market opportunity as well as anyone else. In his hands was a first edition of the Lettres Philosophiques, a book that was selling (clandestinely) like hot cakes. He was going to burn it? Not a chance.

He substituted some inoffensive and far less marketable text for shredding and burning. Keeping the Voltaire work as a nice little nest egg for later.

Three centuries ago it was clear that obtuse autocrats trying to prohibit a provocative book would only make it more attractive and enhance its sales.

Louis XV was an obtuse autocrat. Clearly, we have another such in the White House today. As Michael Wolff points out, “not only is he helping me sell books, but he’s helping me prove the point of the book”.

I doubt Wolff’s book will be as good as Voltaire’s. But it belongs to the same fine tradition. It’s in that spirit that I’ve bought it.

And I, rather than Trump, will decide whether I read it or not.