Enemies Within. Richard Davenport-Hines

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СКАЧАТЬ saying that … “we” could make Parliament – transforming or reforming it as “we” went – into an instrument to give legal sanction to the people, as they took the power into their own hands’.³⁷

      Humour or lack of it was a leading point in appraising public servants. Thus Vansittart on ‘the Bull’, Lord Bertie of Thame, Ambassador in Paris: ‘Snobbish, sternly practical, resolutely prosaic, he knew no arabesques of humour or irony, but only hard straight lines’; Sir David Kelly, Ambassador in Moscow during the Cold War, on Vansittart: ‘his witty comments always imparted a cheerful and soothing note into our frenzied conveyor-belt of files boxes’; and the insider who wrote the enigmatic obituary in The Times of Hugh Miller of MI5: ‘Captain Miller’s marvellous knowledge of human nature … [and] his never-failing humour … established his undisputed authority in a select circle’. It was recognized that geniality might help in handling Stalinist officials. Alan Roger of MI5, recommending cooperation with the Russians in running a deception campaign from Tehran to Berlin in 1944, insisted that a measure of mutual trust could be won from Soviet officials ‘by persistent good humour, obvious frankness, personal contact and a readiness to be helpful in small things’. Jokes all but extenuated communist activism. Charles Moody was a dustman in Richmond, Surrey who was industrial organizer of the Thames Valley branch of the CPGB in the 1920s and took subversive literature to army barracks, went underground in the 1930s, and in the 1940s was used as an intermediary when the atomic scientist-spy Klaus Fuchs wished to make emergency contact with his Russian cut-out – a go-between who serves as an intermediary between the leader of a spy network and a source of material – or to defer a meeting. After 1950 he underwent several interviews with MI5’s prime interrogator without any incriminating admissions. ‘Mr MOODY continues to impress as being a very likeable man,’ declared an MI5 report of 1953, before praising his ‘quiet sense of humour’. It is hard to imagine US or Soviet counter-espionage investigators appreciating a suspect’s jokes.³⁸

      Trust was an important civilizing notion in the 1920s and 1930s. Men subdued expression of their feelings if they could. ‘We possess one thing in common,’ Masterman had been told in adolescence, ‘the gorgeous … power of reticence, and it binds, if I may say so, tighter than speech.’ The initiators of personal conversations were distrusted by the English: the poet, painter and dandy Villiers David advised his godchildren in 1943, ‘Never speak first to anyone you really want to know.’ If men refrained from intimacies, they often talked without guard of impersonal matters. The inter-war years were a period of careless Cabinet talk. Speaking at a dinner of parliamentary correspondents in 1934, George Lansbury, then leader of the Labour party, ‘derided the superstition of Cabinet secrets – had, he felt sure, told many because he hadn’t realised that they were secrets’. Collin Brooks of the Sunday Dispatch described the Cabinet of 1935 as ‘a chatterbox Gvt’.³⁹

      Senior ministers discussed at dinner parties confidential material which had been circulated to them, including Foreign Office telegrams and dispatches, without any glimmering that they were being culpably indiscreet. The position of Sir Eric Phipps as Ambassador in Hitler’s Berlin was weakened because Cabinet ministers were circulated with his dispatches about the Nazi leadership and recounted them for laughs at social gatherings. Above all there was Phipps’s famous ‘bison despatch’, in which he described a visit to Göring’s country estate:

      The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naïveté of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and bathing beach, his blond ‘private secretary’, his wife’s mausoleum and swans and sarsen stones, all mere toys to satisfy his varying moods … and then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.

      After Phipps’s transfer to the Paris embassy, he was cautioned by Vansittart against candour about French politicians in telegrams that had a wide circulation among members of the government.⁴⁰

      Embassies and legations, like the Office in London, were cooperative, hierarchical organizations in which mutual trust was indispensable. This was not a matter of class loyalty or old-school-tie fidelity, but an obvious point about raising the efficiency of its staff. Sir Owen O’Malley estimated that about one-third of his ambassadorial energy went into making his embassy work well. ‘It begins to lose power whenever one man gets discouraged or another too cocky or a third jealous … when wives quarrel it is hell.’ It was indispensable for an ambassador to be trusted by the government to which he was accredited. ‘One of the many illusions about diplomacy is that it consists in diddling the other fellow. Nothing could be further from the truth. It consists more than anything else in precision, honesty, and persuasion, which three things should hang together.’⁴¹

      ‘Democracy is not only a theory of government, but also a scale of moral values,’ the economic historian Sir Michael Postan insisted in a 1934 essay on Marx. As someone born in Bessarabia under tsarist despotism, who had escaped from the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1919, Postan valued parliamentary democracy as a flower of the European tradition of humanitarian individualism. ‘It accepts human personality and individual man as an end in themselves, the sole purpose and the only justification of a social system. It judges political actions by the good or evil they do to individuals, rather than by their effects on the collective super-individual entities of race, state, church and society.’ Postan countered the modish communists in his university who excused collective authoritarianism: ‘majority rule, representative institutions, government by consent and respect for opinions are merely broad applications of humanitarian ethics to problems of state government’. Social networks were central in Postan’s model society, where transactions were characterized by trust, reciprocity and the absence of avarice – but never led by the popular will. Maynard Keynes, Cambridge economist and Treasury official, thought on similar lines to Postan. ‘Civilisation’, he said during the looming European catastrophe of 1938, ‘was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved.’⁴²

      After the transformative crisis of 1914–18, and despite the widespread earlier qualms about Victorian imperialism, most of the administrative leaders who helped to govern inter-war Britain believed that they represented a civilizing force in the world: ‘all my life and all my strength’, as Eric Holt-Wilson declared with staunch sincerity of his work for MI5, ‘were given to the finest cause on this earth – the ennoblement of all mankind by the example of the British race’. There were self-seekers and time-servers, of course, but also efficient, modest men, who took pride in doing the best possible job that they could. Sir Alan Brooke, the most effective Chief of the Imperial General Staff in history and afterwards Lord Alanbrooke, wrote on New Year’s Day of 1944: ‘Heard on the 8 am wireless that I had been promoted to Field Marshal! It gave me a curious peaceful feeling that I had at last, and unexpectedly, succeeded in reaching the top rung of the ladder!! I certainly never set out to reach this position, nor did I ever hope to do so, even in my wildest moments. When I look back over my life no one could be more surprised than I am to find where I have got to!!’⁴³

      Such men as Holt-Wilson and Brooke were convinced upholders of values which required the practice in their working lives of such personal virtues as pride in service, individual self-respect and group responsibility. Cynicism was thought a sign of mediocrity. It is easy to scoff that these beliefs covered hypocrisy, selfishness, bullying, prejudice and inefficiency; but many public servants upheld these beliefs, which were at the core of their self-identification and a vital motive in their work. They were rich in the social capital of group loyalty, and therefore rich in trust. Although the British Empire rested on force, and its diplomats exerted coercion, it was the pride of Whitehall that it worked by influence rather than power.

      ‘Power’, to quote Lord Beveridge, ‘means ability to give to other men orders enforced by sanctions, by punishment СКАЧАТЬ