(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 43)  | |||
| Summer 2002 |
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Issue 43 | |
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Public Servant, Secret Agent: The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave
Paul Routledge
London: Fourth Estate, 2002, £16.99
In Lobster 39 (p. 23) I reported the snippet of information from a recent biography of James Callaghan that Mrs Thatcher, while leader of the Opposition, in 1977 had twice gone to to see Robert Armstrong, then Home Office liaison with MI5, to put the beliefs of her and those around her that Harold Wilson and assorted other people in the Labour Party and trade union leadership were ..........well, anything from ideologically unreliable to Soviet agents. In the Callaghan extract the only specific cited from Mrs Thatcher's conversations with Arm-strong was the claim that Geoffrey Goodman, who had briefly been a minor figure in the Wilson government in 1975/6, was a subversive of some kind. I came across this just before Lobster 39 went to the printer and didn't pursue it. I should have. The following references are from Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State (London: Fourth Estate, 1991)
Geoffrey Goodman was repeatedly burgled in 1976, one of many among Wilson's inner circle who were being burgled in this period. (p. 293) The fact that Mrs Thatcher raised Goodman with Robert Armstrong supports the assumption that the burglaries of Goodman (and the others) were being done in a search for evidence of the Soviet connection with Wilson presumed by the paranoid right, which then included Mrs Thatcher.
Thatcher's approach to Armstrong occurred in the period when Wilson was giving the little information he had on the smear campaign against him to journalists Penrose and Courtiour (Pencourt) resulting in 'questioning pressure' from the Cabinet Office on the then ex-Prime Minister. (p. 320 )
In the House of Commons on 14 December 1977 Stephen Hastings MP, a former MI6 officer, using Parliamentary privilege, ran the disinformation attributed to the former Czech intelligence officer Joseph Frolik that a group of British trade unions leaders were 'agents' of Soviet intelligence. Frolik was being run by the CIA. (p. 321)
These incidents, at the end of the remarkable sequence of events in the three years preceding Hasting's statement to the House of Comments which are documented in Smear!, show that the conspiracy theories of the subversive-hunters of the British right - Brian Crozier et al - had 'captured' a significant section of the leadership of the Conservative Party which had actually tried to use them to damage the elected government of the day.
None of this is included in the Routledge biography of Airey Neave and it should be, for Airey Neave was Mrs Thatcher's closest advisor at the time and must have been involved in the extraordinary decision to go to the MI5 liaison and suggest that the former Prime Minister and/or his close advisors were enemy agents. Routledge does try to cover the 1974-77 period, 'private armies', Neave's contacts with Colin Wallace, Peter Wright and all, but doesn't do it very well or thoroughly enough. Either it was too complicated to handle properly in the time he had or Routledge doesn't quite take it seriously.
The important part of Neave's career began with his organising Mrs Thatcher's victory over Edward Heath in the 1975 contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party; the bit before that is neither here nor there. Yet that pre-1975 section gets 248 of the 362 pages and the private armies/subversion material gets only 30 of the rest. He does a decent job rehashing Neave's role in the election of Thatcher as Tory leader in 1975 and assembles an interesting but inconclusive collection of the speculation around his assassination: did INLA do it? Did the CIA? (Enoch Powell's view.) Did elements of MI6, afraid that Neave would be appointed by Thatcher to clean house in the intelligence services?
In one sense it is a pity that Routledge gave the 'Wilson plots' material such short shrift and gives us nothing new. In another maybe we should be grateful that a mainstream political journalist has taken some of this parapolitical material on board, even if he doesn't do the material justice and does preface most of it with the comment on p. 270: 'If this does strain credibility....'.
It certainly strained the credibility of Anthony Howard, that great defender of parliamentary democracy and right thinking. In his review of this book in the Sunday Times Magazine of 3 March, Howard dismisses Routledge's account of Neave's conspiratorial activities thus:
'This aspect of the book is unconvincing. If there is one thing Neave insisted on, it was the rule of law.'So that's all right then!
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