Czech List

The proto-Thatcherism of Ray Mawby tied in perfectly with the political position of, until today, the only British Minister ever known to have been an agent of the Soviet Bloc, and specifically, like Mawby, of Czechoslovakia.

He was John Stonehouse, the Labour MP most closely associated with the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs in the days when it was still trying to persuade both main parties, and later the only MP ever to have sat in the English separatist interest, before, having left Parliament, he joined the SDP. Sue Slipman, one of David Owen’s closest allies, had been a Communist Party member of sufficient prominence to be made President of the National Union of Students, a position by then openly in that party’s gift, only a very few years before joining the SDP that she told to “retain the classless opportunities provided by Thatcherism”, to “civilise the Thatcherite project”, and to “be a friendly critic of Thatcherism”.

Working and lower-middle-class Conservatives ought not to be the only, or even the principal, objects of investigation as this aspect of history is examined. Mawby was susceptible to specifically financial inducement, whereas many of his co-partisans would not have been. But the upper classes were the only section of society in which, right up to the fall of the Soviet Union and even beyond, it was perfectly respectable to profess oneself a Communist. It was just dismissed, in an attitude unknown to the rest of Britain at the time, as an amusing little eccentricity such as any proper toff is obliged to have. Not everyone might have known that the then Sir Anthony Blunt was a KGB agent, but everyone, including Her Majesty His Employer, knew that he was a Communist, and snobbish as only Marxists ever quite are.

Then as now, and really at every point in between, anyone who was sufficiently grand could secure advancement in the Conservative Party, and it was considered vulgar to enquire as to specific political opinions, then as now, and really at every point in between. Who would look for them in the Conservative Party? Yet the utterly posh world of MI6 and the upper echelons of MI5 was absolutely riddled with them right up until the bitter end, to the point that it had become a standing joke even among the general public. Everyone knew that the KGB’s main recruitment ground was not the patriotic, socially conservative trade union movement or anything like that, but Oxbridge in general and Cambridge in particular, and only the public school rather than the grammar school circles even there.

The perfectly preposterous idea that Harold Wilson, of all people, and for heaven’s sake even Ted Short and George Thomas in the more recent versions, were somehow Soviet sleeper agents continues to serve what has always been its purpose, that of pure distraction from what ought to be the blindingly obvious.