Rapscallion Magazine Radio Review: Spies, Stalin and Sir Anthony Blunt analysed in David Cannadine’s radio expose – and the evening I sat opposite the Cambridge spy and ‘fourth man’

Radio Review: BBC Archive on 4 programme Anthony Blunt: A Question of Retribution?

By Harry Mottram: It’s not everyday you sit opposite a Russian spy in the lounge bar of a London pub. I was sipping a Fullers’ beer in The Coach and Horses pub on Kew Green when I realised the man chatting in old school received English to his friend was Sir Anthony Blunt. It was 1981 and the former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures had been exposed as a spy by Margaret Thatcher for the Soviet Union in the 1930s passing British state secrets to Joseph Stalin’s Russia. Once exposed he made a less than an apologetic explanation, becoming something of a hate figure described in the press as ‘treacherous Communist poof’. Posh, gay, privileged and arrogant he didn’t exactly help himself – but here he was in West London talking within earshot of yours truly about how he had been hounded by the press and how aggrieved he felt that his reputation as an art historian was in tatters.

In a BBC Radio Archive on 4 programme available on BBC Sounds, David Cannadine, the current President of the British Academy, reassessed Blunt’s career before his exposure in 1979 by Margaret Thatcher as well as the fallout afterwards. In the conversation to his friend in the pub he was indignant at the way he had been treated after an interview he had given to the media in which he showed no sign of contrition. I couldn’t quite believe my ears that someone who had no qualms about betraying British agents to the KGB in Russia in the build up to World War 2 just didn’t get it.

Cannadine took the story back to those Cambridge University days of the 1930s when as a left wing intellectual Blunt like many of his friends saw Russia as the only opposition to German expansion and Nazi ideology. The Russians had backed the Spanish Republican Government in the civil war against Franco with guns, ammunition and planes while the democracies of Europe stood by and did nothing. Britain came perilously close to war with Russia when the Red army invaded Poland a few days after Hitler’s troops crossed the border to start WW2 – but Stalin’s army also invaded Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia before being fought to a standstill by the Finns.

Miranda Carter contributed to the programme after writing Blunt’s biography and she confirmed it was Guy Burgess who recruited Blunt to become the ‘fourth man’ of the Cambridge Five. Historian Richard Davenport-Hines explained that Blunt ‘wasn’t interested in the sufferings of the poor’ as he was aloof from the realities of Stalin’s collectivisation policies but only interested in the world seen through the eyes of art history. It was also the attraction of being part of a secret group – that of Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby – and also the camaraderie of The Apostles – an undergraduate group of left wing students.

The programme is a fascinating insight into the establishment of the 1950s of which Blunt was a part but also of how there was a link from the 1930s to the 1980s in British and Russian relations. Blunt was given assurances in the early 1960s he would not face prosecution which is why he was able to continue as professor of art history at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Why he was forgiven by the British authorities after the war shows how who you know and your background somehow trumped your wrong doing as a spy – and the Government didn’t want another scandal after Profumo. It seems incredible since he shared 1,771 top secret documents with Russia – whether those secrets were of use to the Soviets is open to question as the programme reveals. But as he sat opposite me in the Coach and Horses pub he clearly thought he had put his conscience and his Cambridge friends first and his country’s struggle against Stalin and Hitler second. Radio at its brilliant best.

The BBC Archive on 4 programme Anthony Blunt: A Question of Retribution? Can be found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000jszt

Rapscallion Magazine is an online publication and is edited by Harry Mottram and is published his own interest.

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Email:harryfmottram@gmail.com
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