Deviation Posting – Anthony Blunt in his own Words

Apologies for another deviation posting away from China but this is interesting. You can’t help but be fascinated by the release of the Blunt papers. Blunt’s memoirs were lodged in the British Library in 1984, a year after Blunt’s death, on condition that they were kept secret for 25 years. Now they’re available.

They appear to be interesting in as far as they shed light on the man himself rather than the period as such or any operational tidbits – we have a pretty good idea of why Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Blunt (plus the other Cambridge types the security services have never bothered to tell us about) became agents of the KGB and passed secrets to the Soviets. Of course depending on your politics and fondness for the upper classes you can decide how much you understand them. Personally I think they saw themselves as an elite and though genuinely concerned with the rise of fascism remained snobs and were not politically committed enough to endure the hard slog of organised opposition or mixing with the great unwashed and so opted for espionage which by and large meant retaining their money, priveleges and lifestyles.  As intelligent men they should have understood who exactly they were working for – the old canard that they knew nothing of the realities of Stalinism doesn’t really hold much water.

Blunt wrote the 30,000-word document after Thatcher exposed him in 1979. Working as the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures he was stripped of his knighthood (oh, what an awful punishment!!!). What is interesting is that Blunt is an odd case in one respect – that he was posh, considered himself academically brilliant and a member of the ruling class are all just qualifications for treachery – but that he was a don recruited by a student is a reversal of the usual process.

Of course he could be being disingenuous (he was a spy after all) but he claims it was all a mistake – “The atmosphere in Cambridge was so intense, the enthusiasm for any anti-fascist activity was so great, that I made the biggest mistake of my life.”

Anyway – over the coming days presumably more details will emerge and the entire document somewhere.

One thing that has always annoyed me about Blunt was that after being unmasked in 1964 he confessed after being offered immunity and gave the authorities “all the information that I had about the Russian activities”. He was then allowed to go back to work for the Queen knighthood and social position intact etc. Who says the class system and privilege is dead in Britain!! I promise you that if Blunt had come from a more lowly and less socially connected background (like most of us) there would have been no immunity, no going back to work and getting paid (let alone for Queenie), no being let off (or indeed any chance to go to Cambridge in the 1930s either actually) and no embargoing your memoirs in the British Library for 25 years – for anyone else it’d have been life in Wormwood Scrubs. Being posh still works in Britain it seems.

Share this: