You Name It

Although Peter Hitchens is wrong to suggest that there was ever anything subversive (in the sense that he means - praise be, there certainly was in another sense) about the Anglo-Catholic Socialism of the Jubilee Group to which Rowan Williams was loosely attached back in the day, he is right that the values held in that age are still those "not just of the Archbishop but of many others who were students in those years and are now MPs, senior civil servants, BBC moguls, judges, police officers, newspaper editors, teachers, professors, Tory Cabinet Ministers, you name it." Dr Williams's and those of the Jubilee Group were as unlike those of the prevailing culture then as they are now, and for more similar reasons than might at first appear to be the case.

But among those who were swimming with the stream - which, as Chesterton said, even a dead thing can do, whereas only a living thing can swim against it - as students and who are still doing so today, there are indeed many Cabinet Ministers. Especially in a Cabinet drawn from the present one's social milieu. 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 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.

Who would look for them in the Conservative Party? Yet the seriously 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 within 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. (There was in fact a huge amount of patriotism and no shortage of social conservatism in the USSR, but that is another story.) The perfectly preposterous idea that Harold Wilson, of all people, and for goodness'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 reality.

I have written before about the convergence of the 1970s sectarian Left and the 1980s Radical Right in the present Political Class, and also about the extent to which the Conservative Party is now the willing and cheerful vehicle of choice for the Far Left, for Islamists and for Asian communal rabble-rousers. I reiterate all of that, and I shall doubtless return to it. But it would be wrong to assume that the extreme Left, its means changed from the economic to the social and cultural, has flowed into this only in the form of its creation and instrument, New Labour. Important though that is, at least as important for the present Government is the influence of Common Room and country house mentors, most dead but some still alive, who were introduced with a chirpy, "He's a Communist, you know". Not only that, but, unlike almost any proletarian, "he" was actually on the payroll. And "he" is still earning "his" pay, even if from beyond the grave.