Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Admiral Yi]

I get the impression you think you're being clever. But I don't know what you're trying to say with this.
People get away with criticising dodgy Muslim regimes all the time without being blasted as islamophobic (by anyone who gets listened to anyway. Obviously some try it. ).

If Tamas sets the lower boundary at shouting death to Muslims and the you set the upper boundary at criticizing dodgy Muslim religions, that still leaves a lot of territory between them undefined.

[Tamas]

I get the impression you think you're being clever. But I don't know what you're trying to say with this.
People get away with criticising dodgy Muslim regimes all the time without being blasted as islamophobic (by anyone who gets listened to anyway. Obviously some try it. ).

What I wanted to confirm was what I suspect(ed) that you do not endorse the same "tolerate and contain" approach when it comes to anti-Muslim sentiment.

[Josquius]

I get the impression you think you're being clever. But I don't know what you're trying to say with this.
People get away with criticising dodgy Muslim regimes all the time without being blasted as islamophobic (by anyone who gets listened to anyway. Obviously some try it. ).

What I wanted to confirm was what I suspect(ed) that you do not endorse the same "tolerate and contain" approach when it comes to anti-Muslim sentiment.

That's not my view of anti semitism.
And the two situations just don't compare. As said, people get away with criticising Muslim regimes all the time without anyone who matters crying islamophobia.
Remember the fuss around the world Cup for instance. Those who attempted to insist anyone complaining was just an islamophobe were an ignored minority.

[Sheilbh]

I see that Labour and the Mirror are attacking the Foreign Secretary for the cost of chartering a private plane, for example, for his multi-stop tour of Central Asian Republics last week and accusing him of "acting like a Kardashian". Luckily there is absolutely no way the Tories or right wing press will be able to use this line of attack against a Labour government.

Always remember reading about Lord Carrington being appointed Secretary General of NATO and noting how surprisingly threadbare the provision was for travel, accommodation, hosting etc - only to be informed by Secretariat that it was at the insistence of the British government who were very resistant to the idea money was being spent on "fripperies".

[Tonitrus]

The UK doesn't have a government plane(s) for the Foreign Secretary?   

[Sheilbh]

Always impossible to know the truth in stories like this, but seems circumstantially possible and I wouldn't put it past our stalwart wartime ally

Soviet double agent Anthony Blunt may have helped Hitler too
In 1979 the art historian was outed as one of the Cambridge spies recruited by Stalin. Shocking new evidence suggests he may also have passed deadly secrets to the Nazis, Robert Verkaik reports

Left, a 1963 portrait of the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, when he was surveyor of the Queen's pictures, by Lord Snowdon. Right, allied paratroopers over the Netherlands during Operation Market Garden, September 1944. Their mission was betrayed to the Germans
SNOWDON / TRUNK ARCHIVE, GETTY IMAGES
Robert Verkaik
Saturday April 27 2024, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times

This is not the story I intended to tell. I set out to write a book about a distant relative, Eddy Verkaik, who had fought in the Dutch resistance during the Second World War. Eddy had helped alert the British to the treachery of a fellow Dutch resistance fighter — a terrifying giant of a man known as "King Kong": Christiaan Lindemans.

Lindemans had betrayed Operation Market Garden, the ambitious and ill-fated Allied airborne mission that dropped thousands of paratroopers into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the 80th anniversary of which falls this September. Had it succeeded, it would have kicked open the door to the heart of Germany and brought the conflict to a speedy end. In the event the Allies lost more than 17,000 men in what was to be their final defeat of the war.

But one day in the archive everything changed. I discovered a second double agent had betrayed Operation Market Garden to the Germans — a spy codenamed Josephine, whom history had all but forgotten and whose identity has never been revealed. As I started to pull on that thread, who should pop out but Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge spies — the group of upper-class double agents who, for years during the Second World War and the Cold War, passed British and American secrets to their communist masters in Russia.

For decades Blunt has widely been regarded as one of the more harmless of that group. But my research would suggest he was perhaps the most devastatingly treacherous — and without realising it I had uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century, a story with ramifications that are still felt to this day.


Anthony Blunt, left, with fellow students at Cambridge, 1929
GETTY IMAGES

Of all the Cambridge spies, the privileged sons of the British establishment recruited by Stalin in the 1930s, Blunt remains the most elusive. He was a polymath, a multilingual mathematician, world-famous art historian, surveyor of the Queen's pictures, knight of the realm. Rumours had swirled about his loyalty for years. In 1964 he secretly "confessed" to being a Russian spy — but extraordinarily was allowed to keep his job in the royal household.

So when, in 1979, he was named publicly as a double agent by the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, the establishment of the day went into a frenzy of damage limitation. Blunt lost his knighthood, but otherwise survived remarkably unscathed.

Most of the Cambridge spies had defected to Russia: Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled there in 1951 and 12 years later they would be joined by Kim Philby. While they were drinking themselves to death in their dingy Moscow flats, Blunt continued to bask in the approval of rich and powerful friends who were all at pains to point out that he had passed secrets to the Soviets only while they were our allies during the war. That wasn't treachery, they said; it was misplaced idealism. Nothing like the others, who were busy passing on nuclear secrets and betraying agents in the field at the height of the Cold War.

That, to a large extent, is still the general view of Blunt, who died of a heart attack at his home in Highgate, north London, in 1983, aged 75: the most benign of the group in terms of the damage done and the betrayal wrought; notable as much for cropping up in the Netflix show The Crown, played by Samuel West, as anything else.

But his story never really made much sense. The son of a well-connected Hampshire vicar and a distant cousin of the Queen, Blunt had got to Cambridge on a maths scholarship but took a first in modern languages and then almost single-handedly created art history as an academic discipline in the UK. He was an intellectual with a global reputation.

After a brief stint in army intelligence Blunt joined MI5, the UK's domestic intelligence and security agency, in 1940, by which time he was already working for the Russians. Once he got his foot in the door his career grew wings. During the Blitz he was the personal assistant to the head of counterintelligence; by the end of the war he was writing Churchill's personal security briefings with a pivotal role at the heart of Allied intelligence. As the spy writer Nigel West put it, "Few spies in history could ever have been presented with such a spectacular opportunity." Given such a unique position, could he have really done so little with it?

What I would go on to discover was that his betrayals had directly and intentionally aided the Nazi war machine and caused the deaths of thousands of soldiers and civilians. I would come to realise that the establishment version of Blunt as a high-minded, unworldly figure somehow removed from the grubby realities of his treachery was not just a myth but that he was truly monstrous, far more so than any of the other Cambridge spies.

The last Allied defeat of the war

Operation Market Garden retains a romantic hold on the national imagination that puts it alongside Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. Despite its failure, it is still regarded as the greatest airborne operation in history: 40,000 paratroopers and glider troops (Market) were to be dropped in the Netherlands to secure six bridges over the Rhine, clearing a path for the tanks of XXX Corps (Garden) to push into Germany.

The D-Day landings in June 1944 had brought the Allies to the brink of victory. One final blow and the whole Nazi carapace would come crashing down. Had it succeeded, the road to Berlin would have been opened. The war could have been over by Christmas, with hundreds of thousands of lives saved.

The brainchild of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, it was a huge gamble. The marshy terrain of the polders made for treacherous going. Above all, the air drop was at the limit of operational range and on a scale never attempted before. British tanks would have 48 hours to cover 64 miles and link up with the 1st British Airborne Division, who were to land by glider and parachute around the town of Arnhem and secure the last bridge over the Rhine — immortalised in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far.

At 2.30pm on Sunday, September 17, the tanks of the Irish Guards started their advance towards Eindhoven. After just half an hour, the antitank guns of Kampfgruppe Walther, a unit cobbled together by the German commanders, ripped into the British column. Sixty miles away, 20,000 British and American paratroopers had landed and marched to Arnhem and Nijmegen. They too ran into unexpected resistance from the improvised 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions.
Advertisement

German reinforcements flooded in. Bitter fighting ensued for three days, until the last paras at Arnhem surrendered with the tanks of XXX Corps just ten miles away. The losses were devastating: Allied casualties amounted to more than 17,000.

Consequently, it was to be the Russians who would win the race to Berlin, redrawing the map of Europe and paving the way for the Iron Curtain.

At Arnhem the Allies had expected little resistance, but were met by a German force that was resilient and prepared. Was that just because they were battle-hardened veterans or had Market Garden been betrayed?

The King Kong problem

I was deep into my research of the biggest German counterintelligence coup of the war, Englandspiel — the England Game, and how Christiaan "King Kong" Lindemans, a hero of the Dutch resistance, had been passing secrets to the Germans. After the D-Day landings, when Allied victory was all but inevitable, he mystified the Germans by volunteering to continue to spy for them. Lindemans would cross and recross the front lines, bringing intelligence to his Nazi paymasters and in particular warn them — several times, in increasing detail — of the vast airborne attack.

In truth, Lindemans's story is far from unknown, although experts disagree on how important a figure he was. In the UK most military historians have little regard for the impact of his treachery. The story is very different in the Netherlands, whose people suffered so terribly, and certainly in the immediate aftermath of Market Garden there were many senior figures who regarded his betrayal as crucial. The point everyone can agree on is that the Germans did an unexpectedly brilliant job of improvising a defence.

After a couple of years of following the archival trail, I found a secret report in the National Archives in Kew dating from 1946 about a meeting between a British intelligence officer and Lindemans at the prison in the Hague where he was being held on treason charges. According to the files, the officer discovered that Lindemans and his wife were working for the Russians. Lindemans then named leading communist agents operating in key positions in the West. Within days Lindemans was dead, supposedly by suicide — although there is strong evidence he was the victim of a poisoning. (The Kremlin playbook hasn't changed very much over the years.)

The second spy: who was 'Josephine'?

The Russian link was an unexpected twist that led me to a separate file in Amsterdam, and a reference to another warning that the Germans had received about Market Garden. This second briefing was sent to Berlin the day before the Allied airborne assault by a spy codenamed Josephine. What was even more puzzling was that it was clear that the accuracy of this second warning was far greater than the intelligence passed on by Lindemans.

If I was surprised, the reaction from British intelligence and Allied military planners at the time was something close to panic. Who on earth was Josephine? It turned out that because of a bureaucratic error the warning didn't reach the German generals until the armada of Allied aircraft, carrying the first lift of paratroopers, had already crossed the Dutch border and so those historians who were even aware of it have dismissed its significance. Yet this intelligence included a detailed order of battle and strategic objectives.

Josephine even neutralised MI5's own double agents who had been sending deceptive messages to the Germans saying that any airborne attack in the Netherlands would be a dummy run and the real target was Scandinavia. On September 17 the German high command issued a briefing to field commanders warning them of this.

The view from the British intelligence establishment at the time was far from sanguine. MI5 had assured the cabinet that there was not a single Nazi spy on British shores who hadn't been exposed and arrested or turned. Now it appeared the Nazis had a mole at the heart of the war effort. The British codebreakers of Bletchley Park, alerted by the American Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA, had been monitoring Agent Josephine for more than a year, since mid-1943, when an MI5 officer described her reports as "the best illicit intelligence derived by the enemy from this country which I have seen".

By late summer 1943 British intelligence had identified the German spymaster running Josephine as Karl Heinz Kraemer, a lawyer operating out of the German embassy in Stockholm. Kraemer's reports were so trusted that they were read verbatim by Hitler himself. Alfred Jodl, the German chief of staff, and Walter Schellenberg, the head of the Nazi secret service, also regarded Josephine as their top source of Allied intelligence.

The threat from Josephine was all too real and MI5 handed the job of tracking her down to one of their top men, a rising star who was already tipped to be director general — none other than Anthony Blunt.

Blunt's investigations in 1943 were supported by a cast of sub-agents, many of whom were his former lovers. Blunt, who was gay, recruited them independently and ran them outside of MI5. He and his team chased a succession of leads that led nowhere. But then at the end of the year there was an apparent breakthrough by MI6, the intelligence agency that runs a network of spies overseas.

As luck would have it, MI6's man in Stockholm, Peter Falk, had befriended Kraemer's housekeeper earlier that year and persuaded her to pass on intelligence. As well as copying documents that she found in his office, she managed to press the key to Kraemer's personal safe into a pat of butter. From the impression it made, Falk was able to send measurements to London. By some miracle the key they sent back fitted perfectly, giving London a line deep into the mystery of Josephine. The problem was Kraemer himself didn't appear at all sure who Josephine was, or where her information came from.

One tranche of papers was deemed so sensitive that Falk decided to fly back to London to deliver the information in person. On December 23, 1943, he met Blunt for dinner at the Reform Club and passed across the table documents that seemed to suggest a Russian link to Josephine. Falk records in his unpublished memoir that Blunt became uncharacteristically angry, insisting that there could be no such connection, before gathering up the papers, warning Falk to say nothing and promising to investigate. There is no record that Blunt did any such thing, nor that he made any report of what he had been told.

Shortly afterwards Blunt was to identify Josephine as a loose-lipped Swedish diplomat called Frank Cervell, to whom he had been able to feed false intelligence: sure enough, the flow of Josephine's accurate and damaging material was stemmed. It looked as if Blunt had got his man. But then a strange thing happened. As preparations began in earnest for the D-Day landings of June 1944, Josephine piped up again.

The D-Day deception

D-Day, the British and American invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, was one of the greatest intelligence coups of this or any war. British intelligence (it was a joint MI5/MI6 operation) had an agent in Spain, one Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed Garbo, masquerading as a fanatical Nazi who passed information to the Germans and deceived them into believing that any attack in Normandy was a feint and that the real attack would come around Calais. It was stunningly successful; the Germans held back vital Panzer tank reinforcements for days in anticipation of an attack that never came. Despite the fact that he had got it so wrong, Pujol was even awarded the Iron Cross for his services to the Reich.

Garbo was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war, known only to a tiny number of intelligence officers — one of whom was Anthony Blunt — and yet it transpired that Josephine had been passing on the same disinformation to the Germans. When this fact emerged after the war, Lieutenant Colonel Roger Fleetwood Hesketh, who had been a key member of the D-Day deception team, was baffled and dismayed to discover that "Josephine had been playing with our toys". After the war, Jodl, the chief of the German staff, was adamant it was Josephine's intelligence that had been the most significant reason for Hitler holding back reinforcements.

After D-Day, Josephine's tactics changed: she now began to pass on worryingly accurate information about the Allied war effort, culminating (but not ending in) the hugely detailed Market Garden intelligence, which, at the time it was sent to Kraemer, was still known by only a handful of senior Allied officers.

Clearly Blunt had got the wrong man. And it was at this point that I began to seriously wonder what he had been up to. It was as if he was deliberately looking the wrong way. Could it be that Blunt was Josephine and had been tasked with investigating himself? How could that make any sense? After all, Blunt was a Russian spy not a German one.

The race to Berlin

Of course in 1944, after the success of D-Day, it was unthinkable that a senior British figure could be passing secrets to the Nazis. Apart from anything else, who would be willing to risk execution for treason in pursuit of a losing cause?

However, thwarting Operation Market Garden was of strategic importance not just to the Nazis but to Russia too. Stalin had wanted D-Day to succeed because it would open up a second front in Europe and draw German troops away from the Russian front. But if Market Garden was successful the Americans and British would arrive in Berlin first, while Stalin's troops remained stranded hundreds of miles to the east. As Vladimir Putin recently reminded us, Stalin was less concerned about the struggle against fascism than winning the "great patriotic war". It was about advancing Russian interests and, above all, that meant getting to Berlin and dominating eastern Europe. Without that victory, there would have been no Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, the line of communist rule that cut Europe in half at the war's end, would have extended barely beyond the borders of Russia. Josephine's leaks align with Stalin's strategic goals to a remarkable degree.

On May 12, 1945, a British special forces unit based in Denmark captured Kraemer, the German spymaster who was the conduit for Josephine's intelligence, in an office at Flensburg, a town in the north of Germany that was serving as the country's foreign office. Five days after being roused from the bed he was sharing with his secretary, Kraemer arrived in England for interrogation. Leading the investigation was Anthony Blunt.

MI6 continued to insist that Kraemer was being fed intelligence by a source in London and asked Blunt to investigate links to Moscow, following reports that Kraemer was working for the Russians. According to one of the MI5 memos, Blunt responded by saying this line of questioning was "flogging a dead horse" and that he strongly believed Kraemer was mostly telling the truth about his contacts, who he said were Japanese diplomats and Hungarian agents operating from the Iberian peninsula.

By now many of Kraemer's colleagues from German intelligence had also fallen into Allied hands. One of them was his boss, Walter Schellenberg, who was certain that Josephine had helped the Germans by providing a detailed description of Allied battle plans around the Dutch town of Arnhem, near the German border — a critical point in Operation Market Garden.

At 3pm on September 17, just two hours after Allied paratrooper and glider landings had begun, two SS Panzer Divisions, the 9th and 10th, were sent immediately to engage the enemy at Arnhem and nearby Nijmegen, an order that is credited with playing a decisive role in securing the German victory. There is a strong case to be made that the speed of their deployment was as a result of the intelligence the Germans had received.

MI6 continued to faithfully pass on the Arnhem information to the MI5 interrogators, but none of these allegations were ever put to Kraemer. Instead, just as the year before, a succession of false leads were followed and went nowhere until, on Blunt's orders, the case was quietly dropped and Kraemer was sent back to Germany on October 26, 1945.

He was declared by the British to be an "inveterate liar", a justification that MI5 used as the reason for refusing to share its reports on Kraemer's interrogation with the Americans. Given that it was American intelligence that had first alerted the British to the existence of a high-level Nazi agent codenamed Josephine, this must have seemed an act of extraordinary hypocrisy.

It was one of Blunt's last official duties as an MI5 officer. He spent much of early 1946 in Germany, where, among other things, he recovered Edward VIII's deeply compromising fan letters to Hitler. It seems likely there were numerous other royals to be disentangled from their enthusiasm for the Nazi cause, as well as royal art to track down, and that all this was to provide him with a healthy store of kompromat against the royal family that was to protect him for the rest of his life, as well as get him his job as surveyor of the King's pictures.

The elusive 'Major Blunt'

The official story of Josephine is told in a 300-page report commissioned by the British secret services in the 1970s. Written by the retired intelligence officer Patricia McCallum, it calls itself, simply enough, a report into "the Kraemer (or Josephine) case". No explanation is given as to why, thirty-odd years after the event, MI5 were still scratching their heads.

The report was declassified in 2003 when MI5 quietly released it into the National Archives. It painstakingly examines how Kraemer had received the Arnhem report from Josephine on the eve of Market Garden, and presents in great detail how MI5 and MI6 had mounted a forlorn hunt to establish the mole's identity.

McCallum noted that MI6 and MI5 had bitterly disagreed over the provenance of the intelligence. MI6 were convinced Josephine was a real agent working out of London. MI5, guided by Blunt, had come to deny her very existence and said Kraemer had invented her to hide from Berlin the fact he didn't have any real agents. Certainly Kraemer never met Josephine and had no idea who or what she was. He merely received her intelligence from a variety of sources and passed it on to his masters in Berlin.

McCallum notes how odd it is that no investigation into the Arnhem betrayal had taken place immediately after it came to light. Thirty-plus years later, having been asked to conduct her inquiries, she concludes that it is impossible to discover who had given away the Arnhem intelligence. She writes: "Finally, it must be admitted that the Kraemer case is and will always remain something of a mystery."

Yet there is one name at the heart of the Josephine inquiry that raises questions the report doesn't even begin to address. A certain "Maj. Blunt" strolls in and out of its pages without the author once mentioning that this is that Major Blunt, the Russian double agent. When McCallum came to write her report, Blunt had admitted his treachery a decade earlier. So why wasn't his double agent status taken into account? It is surely worth a mention if one is looking into how vital operational intelligence came to be passed to Britain's enemies?

Why was Blunt being treated as if he was just another bona fide intelligence officer? Why was it that McCallum makes no reference to the fact that Blunt had also led the 1943-44 investigation into the identity of Josephine? McCallum refers to the earlier investigation often, but without ever mentioning Blunt. The oddities mount up, but perhaps the most startling is the moment when, in reference to the D-Day deception, she writes cheerfully: "One thing is certain. Had Josephine been a real agent, she would have had to be a member of the deception staff!'' Anthony Blunt was a member of the deception staff.

The reality is that just as Christiaan Lindemans's treachery only really makes sense when seen through a Russian lens, so it is that Josephine only really makes sense as Blunt. The alternatives are either that there really was a fervent Nazi at the heart of the Allied war effort who operated in secret and then disappeared from view having fooled every single intelligence agency in the world, or that Kraemer was such an inspired liar that he was able to invent Allied battle plans with startling accuracy. Neither alternative stacks up.

The cover-up: Kim Philby steps in

A smoking gun, if there is one, is hidden in the files of either the British or Russian secret services and there it will for ever remain. But Anthony Blunt had motive, means and opportunity in spades. He could also rely on a highly organised and well-resourced network of Russian agents and British traitors working out of London and Stockholm. Russian intelligence had a large official presence in London from 1941. It was all too easy for him to pass on at least 1,700 secret documents to Moscow and, if he was Josephine, then he was the apex of a well-oiled Russian disinformation machine cherry-picking what to feed back to the Germans.

By 1944 Blunt was writing Churchill's security briefings; he was the liaison for intelligence sharing between MI5 and MI6; he had an oversight role on the deception committee. He was also in charge of the Triplex operation, still secret today, that intercepted every single diplomatic bag from Allies and neutral countries with embassies in London. It was this role that gave him the most likely means to pass on intelligence to the Nazis. The Arnhem warning was delivered directly to Kraemer by diplomatic mail. If that failed there were regular commercial flights to Stockholm from Scotland and he even had the extensive Iberian spy network of his fellow Cambridge spy Kim Philby to call on.

The day after the Arnhem betrayal an emotional Blunt contacted his Russian handler to say that he was quitting. The Russians responded by love-bombing their agent and at the end of September 1944 Blunt met his handler, Boris Kreshin, in London. The Russians wanted to pass on to Blunt how delighted they were with their English spy and Kreshin took great pride in reading out a commendation from the Kremlin. It was accompanied with a £100 payment, worth about £6,000 today. Until then Blunt had always been careful not to accept money from the Russians as he maintained his treachery was motivated by political ideology. This time he gratefully accepted the cash.

Tellingly, it was Philby — then in charge of anticommunism as head of MI6's Section IX — who oversaw the handling of the Kraemer case after Blunt's retirement from the secret services in 1945, at the age of 38. And it was Philby who kept the Americans at bay when they began asking tricky questions about Josephine and Kraemer.

Philby would become the most famous of the Cambridge spies. But if Blunt really was Josephine then that not only places him as the most important member of the group, but arguably the most influential spy in history. His actions contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of Allied servicemen and women and countless civilians who perished as a result of a prolonged war. The million or more German women who were raped by the Russians in the aftermath of their victory can also be laid at his door, as well as the decades of brutal oppression under the Soviet yoke suffered by millions more citizens of eastern Europe. His actions shaped the history of the 20th century and continue to shape the world today.

The Traitor of Arnhem by Robert Verkaik (Headline £20) is published by Headline on May 9. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Discount available for Times+ members

The "high-minded idealist" who accidentally became a spy for one of the most inhuman regimes of the 20th century is a trope I always find a little frustrating in British culture. Not just the Cambridge Five, but, say, Melita Norwood who spied for the Soviets for decades from Britain's nuclear industry - ultimately revealed and instead of being imprisoned gave her version of events, and ended up being played by Dame Judi Dench in a biopic.

[Sheilbh]

The UK doesn't have a government plane(s) for the Foreign Secretary?   

The Prime Minister doesn't have a plane and I don't think the King does either. I believe the UK's the only G20 country which doesn't have a dedicated plane for the head of government or state.

I think there were proposals to buy one but they were attacked as wasteful spending (and, obviously, nicknamed "Blair Force One) and seen as a symptom of our politics becoming more presidential. I think things have moved on a little since and there's now a fleet of about 4-5 government planes but they're for all of government (including diplomats, senior military, royals and all ministers). Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary complained that there never seemed to be one available for the Foreign Secretary. So I think there's a fair amount of chartering basically luxury private jets, which is expensive and then gets attacked for the cost.

I don't want to say it's all the overdominance of Gladstonian Treasury brain infecting everything in British life - but we do seem to have a particular objection to capital expenditure Which means, in the long run, everything is more expensive but I sense that's easier than convincing the Treasury to sign any big one off cheques on the promise of long term savings.

[Valmy]

The "high-minded idealist" who accidentally became a spy for one of the most inhuman regimes of the 20th century is a trope I always find a little frustrating in British culture. Not just the Cambridge Five, but, say, Melita Norwood who spied for the Soviets for decades from Britain's nuclear industry - ultimately revealed and instead of being imprisoned gave her version of events, and ended up being played by Dame Judi Dench in a biopic.

I was going to speculate that this is a class thing. When you are a Cambridge grad you can pretty much do anything and get away with it in the UK, we certainly have a version of this over here. But Melita Norwood was no Cambridge grad so...I don't know.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - also fairly sympathetic portrayals of George Blake (played on the stage by Stephen Fry) who is not a Cambridge spy.

I think class plays an enormous role with the Cambridge Five. But it is more general. I think there is a bit of almost admiration for (left-wing) spies of conviction, not people who were paid off but were communists - as I say, I don't think that extends to fascist regimes. I don't really have any sympathy for it because 90% of these people signed up after the Holodomor (which was reported), during the Great Purge (which was reported) and carried on spying after 1956 when communist parties across the West collapsed - these were not the cuddly kind of New Deal-ish fellow travellers you can kind of sympathise with but people who knew exactly the type of regime they were spying for.

But also to be honest I don't think people really see treachery as a serious crime. You think of the EM Forster line, that if he "had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country", but also I think it's seen a bit like a sort of victimless crimme in a way.

Obviously people affected by it felt very differently - I think it's what makes Le Carre (identity and agents revealed by Philby) so great. He has a fairly limpid perspective on the cynicism of states and intelligence agencies themselves, with a fairly unforgiving rage for the traitor.

I think there's an interesting comparison to be done with the Cambridge Five, early post-war espionage (a lot of it very much post-war) and what happened in the US - both with Hiss and the Rosenbergs, but also the McCarthy and James Jesus Angleton side of things.

Edit: I've always thought Hiss in particular in comparison with the Cambridge Five would be interesting - and the Chamber-Hiss confrontations but also its afterlife for a very long time as a heavily contested issue that people had really strong opinions on for decades that I think was probably only publicly able to be put to bed in the 90s.

[HVC]

Do lady spies just get off easier? Poor weak willed woman led astray and what not.

[Syt]

The UK doesn't have a government plane(s) for the Foreign Secretary?   

The Prime Minister doesn't have a plane and I don't think the King does either. I believe the UK's the only G20 country which doesn't have a dedicated plane for the head of government or state.

I think there were proposals to buy one but they were attacked as wasteful spending (and, obviously, nicknamed "Blair Force One) and seen as a symptom of our politics becoming more presidential. I think things have moved on a little since and there's now a fleet of about 4-5 government planes but they're for all of government (including diplomats, senior military, royals and all ministers). Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary complained that there never seemed to be one available for the Foreign Secretary. So I think there's a fair amount of chartering basically luxury private jets, which is expensive and then gets attacked for the cost.

I don't want to say it's all the overdominance of Gladstonian Treasury brain infecting everything in British life - but we do seem to have a particular objection to capital expenditure Which means, in the long run, everything is more expensive but I sense that's easier than convincing the Treasury to sign any big one off cheques on the promise of long term savings.

So having government planes is bad and wasteful, but the Britannia was seriously considered?

[Sheilbh]

Well I think "seriously" is doing a lot there

Christopher Hope, formerly of the Telegraph, used to write about 5 stories a year about a new royal yacht. It was money for old rope: Tory MP calls for a royal yacht = "Pressure Mounts..."/"Calls Grow..."; Minister responds politely saying they'll look at the idea = "Government Considers...". Telegraph readers loved it and in recent years I think it gets pretty solid hatesharing too

But since Hope moved from the Telegraph to GB News, I don't think there's been a single story about it. It's a much mourned national tradition

Separately reports that Humza Yousaf is planning to resign.

He'd fired his Green coalition partners, losing his majority (he has bafflingly since said, "I didn't intend to make them as angry as they are" :huh). He then found the terms of support from Alex Salmond's Alba too problematic (not least, I suspect reports that Salmond wanted the SNP to stand aside in certain constituencies in favour of Alba).

Then he wrote to the Scottish Tories and Lib Dems asking for talks - both of those leaders rejected the offer and shared their response letters on social media. Which left Labour.

So Yousaf's only remaining option is either face a vote of no confidence and be required to step down as First Minister, or go before he's shoved. And he's going - and they're really living up to the "tartan Tory" nickname.

Although I'm still not sure a new SNP leader will be like to get through a confidence vote as First Minister, which means it may just be delaying the inevitable.

[Josquius]

Last week there was some chat at work when somebody said they were tracking the royal chopper heading to a colleagues house seemingly.
I was surprised Charles would be taking a helicopter. He's usually pretty good on environmental matters.
Turned out no. It was a minor royal going to an event in Leeds
This is the key one with government jets and choppers for me.
The penny pinching over MP expenses is insane. Too many people just have no grasp of money once it gets into the crazy stratospheric levels of government spending. They can't see 500k or whatever it might be is small change.
It could be said on the environment too one flight is nothing.
But I do think our politicians should be setting an example wherever possible on these matters.
If they've got a meeting with the German Chancellor then of course they should fly there. Taking the train is just impractical.
But an event in Manchester? Take the bloody train.

[Sheilbh]

Separately thought this piece was very interesting. I think this will be a big fight for Starmer and Labour - and I think more generally they are going to come under sustained attack from the left from day one and hope they're ready for that.

Some of that will be from Corbyn ultras like, say, Owen Jones etc who just want Starmer to fail, but some of it is going to be from slightly liberal, middle class, Guardian style pressure groups like these. I think it's going to be quite challenging.

Obviously everyone makes the point that the country is not set alight with Starmer-mania - but I'm really struck by just how negative Guardian coverage is, there's the Corbynites and Starmer's policy agenda will put him on a crash course with groups like these in the article. I could be wrong, but I think Labour will be more hostility from their own "side" than any incoming, election-winning government I can think of - I don't think Thatcher in 79, Blair in 97 or Cameron in 2010 had this lining up for them: 

The eco groups ready for battle over  Keir Starmer's climate plans
Ben Spencer, Science Editor
Sunday April 28 2024, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

Sir Keir Starmer will undermine his own climate plans if he trashes the countryside in his drive for wind and solar power, green groups have warned.

Nature charities are concerned that Labour's plan to decarbonise the power grid by 2030 and build thousands of homes on the green belt are not accompanied by sufficient protection for nature.

They also complain that Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, is yet to outline detailed policies for reform of farming, which is a bigger emitter of greenhouse gas than the power sector.


Campaigners protested in Westminster against the proposed Lime Down solar farm in Wiltshire that would cover hundreds of acres of arable land with panels
ALAMY

Britain's biggest rural charities — which have nearly eight million members between them — called for a far more ambitious policy to protect and regenerate nature.

Beccy Speight, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said: "Absolutely we have got to get to net zero — but we have to do it in a nature-positive way."

Labour has said it will change planning laws to allow more onshore wind and solar power, to try to eradicate gas and coal from power generation by the end of the decade. That transition will require rewiring the electrical network, with a vast network of pylons expected. Green groups said that while they backed renewable energy, it must not be installed at the expense of nature.

Ingrid Samuel, director of placemaking and heritage at the National Trust, said: "The climate crisis does not exist in isolation. Our politicians have a choice. Do they decarbonise our energy system in a way that respects and restores nature, coast and countryside, or will they push through development irrespective of impacts on our landscapes, communities and our natural environment? The next government must get it right."

Richard Benwell, chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link, a coalition of 83 nature groups, said: "Sir Keir's mission for better insulated homes and clean power by 2030 would make a brilliant contribution to climate action. However, that ambition would be totally undermined if Labour were to forge ahead with low-carbon infrastructure in a way that heedlessly harms nature. At the moment, the balance is way off."

If Labour forms the next government, those problems could come to a head early in its first term. Decisions on huge new energy schemes, such as the unpopular Botley West solar farm near Oxford, could end up on the desks of ministers trying to balance the need for green power with preservation of rural areas.


Botley West near Oxford would be the largest solar farm in Europe, covering 3,400 acres
PHOTOVOLT DEVELOPMENT PARTNERS (PVDP)

Last week Reed attempted to ward off criticism in The Guardian, promising for the first time to stick to targets laid out in the 2021 Environment Act and honour an international agreement signed last year to reverse species loss and protect 30 per cent of land and seas by 2030.

Green groups greeted the article as a welcome statement of intent, but called for Labour to go further. "It's good that Labour have committed to those targets but we need a lot more than warm words," said David Walsh, head of public affairs at World Wide Fund for Nature UK.

Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, said Labour would not have time to obfuscate. "There is a huge job to do in the first term of a Labour government if they win the election. They are going to have to hit the ground running — they need a really detailed plan about what's needed to meet our legally binding domestic and international targets."

He added: "We haven't seen any detail from any of the parties. Whichever party forms the next government has got to stop treating nature something that's bolted on and separate from everything else. It has got to be integrated into the renewal of Britain that people are talking about."

Labour has overtaken the Conservatives in many of its traditional rural strongholds for the first time in two decades, according to polls. Starmer's party has been bullish about converting that into electoral success, pledging to "park our tanks on the Tories' fields".

But that support is fragile. A Survation poll earlier this year of England's 100 most rural seats — 96 of which are held by the Tories — put Labour at 37 per cent against the Conservatives on 34 per cent. But only 25 per cent of respondents said they would trust Labour to revamp the rural economy, behind 30 per cent for the Tories.

Joss Garman, executive director of the European Climate Foundation, said if Labour made progress in some contested areas it might win support for its other priorities. "Starmer may find he can deliver his planning reforms with less resistance in the countryside if he can win support in these places with a strong package that supports nature protection and farmers," he said.

The Labour leader has attempted to court the National Farmers Union as part of its wider campaign for rural votes. He has pledged to stick with the environmental land management schemes, first proposed by Michael Gove to pay farmers to protect the environment, but detail has been lacking and green groups want Labour to go further.

Starmer has also pledged to "get tough on the blockers" to release far more land for housing. This would include rewriting green belt rules to create a new category of "grey belt land", which would allow development of "ugly" land including "poor quality scrubland".

Speight said this language raised immediate red flags. "What is ugly? And some scrubland is really good for nature."

Roger Mortlock, chief executive of the CPRE, the countryside charity, said: "What we are fearful of is that in the race to build new infrastructure, we miss the input of communities, and that input isn't always nimbyish. We also need a detailed land use framework, which is really critical when we're looking at big-ticket items like new infrastructure and housing."

But Reed defended his policies. "Labour will embrace a decade of national renewal with the countryside at its heart," he said. "We will put money directly into the pockets of our farmers by lowering energy bills and slashing trade barriers to get our great food exports flowing again. And we will turbocharge nature's recovery by cleaning up our water and air, and growing nature-rich habitats for wildlife to thrive."

Again on the "race" to build new infrastructure, we haven't built a new reservoir in 30 years and are now facing water rationing measures despite it being a very wet year and in order to hit our climate targets we need to build more national grid infrastructure in the next 6 years than in the previous 30. We are very much in a race.

We've done the low-hanging fruit of getting coal out of the power mix. The rest is difficult: it's decarbonising through electrification (and an increase in grid capacity and renewables) especially in industry, homes and transport, it's renovating homes for better efficiency and (somehow) decarbonising agriculture. Whatever we do will require a lot of building work and I think in this country environmental still equals conservation in people's minds, which I don't think is right if the goal is to hit net zero. Pushing back against the King Charles/hobbit version of environmentalism is going to be important but also tough.

[crazy canuck]

Sheilbh, thank you for posting that article on Blunt.  Brilliant read.