DIARY
FRANK JOHNSON New serialisations, and Sir Robert Armstrong in Australia, mean another spy season. Not a moment too soon. Many of us had already read more than enough about Aids. Not that we should accept the modish view that spying is ridiculous, and that it is therefore harmless for it to be written about, and read about. It is just that some of it is. At a lunch to which I went this week, someone very respectable told the company that the late Capt. Henry Kerby, an MP of the old Tory imperial Right who sat for one of the grandest of seats (Arundel and Shoreham), was widely assumed to be a KGB agent. A glance later at Kerby's Times obituary and his Who's Who entry revealed that he was born in Russia in 1914 (presumably of British parents — but were they?). 'Educated on the continent.' Attaché, British legation, Riga, 1939-40. 'Specially employed, War Office, 1941-45' (an obvious euphemism for something or other). Unsuccessfully stood as a Liberal, 1945 (the KGB charac- teristically sending its man into what it thought was the party of the future). Elected as Tory at Arundel, 1954. Official interpreter for the Khrushchev-Bulganin visit of 1956 (presumably in our delega- tion). Dead at 56 by 1971. Could mean anything. Our informant also told us that Kerby was the mole in the 1922 Committee to the late George Wigg, Labour MP, Harold Wilson's busybody on 'security', and himself a security risk since he was a well-known dirty old man. Apparently, Wigg invariably gave the Labour leaders inaccurate information about the mood of the '22. That suggests that the KGB might also have been getting a poor service from Kerby about the Committee, as well as about the Labour leaders. That a right- wing Tory MP could be a Labour infor- mant suggests the main psychological and emotional characteristics of many spies; love of mischief, inability to keep confi- dences, the secret knowledge that you have power over others because you are bet- raying them. That seems to be true of Burgess. Presumably, Kerby was not really a KGB agent, and people just like to say he was. Who is the KGB's, and Labour's, man in the '22 today, one wonders? He would have to be right-wing, nasty and blackmailable? Depending upon your view of the contemporary Tory Party, there could either be plenty of candidates or very, very few.
Asure way of trivialising something is to put it on a T-shirt. I first suspected that President Reagan might not be a serious enemy of communism — or not as serious as his admirers and detractors claim when he recently held up a T-shirt saying: `Stop communism in Central America.' It confirmed a suspicion that Mr Reagan does not really intend to stop communism any- where because he knows that there is not much his electorate is really prepared to do about it. But he uses the trappings of the modern world to imply that he can. Had T-shirts been invented when we were a superpower, no British statesman would have done such a thing, except possibly Disraeli (`Victoria for Empress of India'). If Disraeli had done it, Gladstone might have felt he had to — although he would have been more verbose and would have had to go about with 'The Neapolitan constitution is the negation of God erected to a system of government' on his chest. In vain would his media advisers have urged a snappier 'Turks out of Bulgaria'. And would Churchill's cause have been taken seriously had he walked around in 'Stop Hitler in the Sudetenland Now'?
Iwas invited to Mr and Mrs Michael Cockerell's house to enjoy their hospitality and the first of Mr Cockerell's two brilliant programmes about politicians and televi- sion. He was the reporter who also made the offending Panorama programme about alleged right-wing extremist infiltration of the Tory Party. I was not on his side in that conflict. Most Britons who visit Germany give a Nazi salute, and do a Hitler imper- sonation, at one point or another during the trip. His evidence did not really amount to much more than that. Two fallacies, however, still need to be dispel- led. The first is that there is no left-wing bias in the BBC because Harold Wilson, as the second of these programmes showed, was also always complaining about the BBC. The point is that the BBC attacks then were also from the Left. The average BBC employee of the period had a down on Wilson for such reasons as his support for the Americans in Vietnam, and his cuts in the health service. The spirit of the BBC was then, is now, and always will be, left-to-Wettish. The second fallacy is that Mr Cockerell could not be all that hostile to the Government because his glorious wife, Bridget, recently stood as a Tory councillor in Kensington, and is the niece of the former Chancellor of the Exche- quer, Derick Heathcoat Amory. When the then Miss Bridget Heathcoat Amory was a secretary on Now! magazine, one of her duties was to type my column. One week I noticed, after it was published, that a certain sentence was missing, and told her that I felt sure I had dictated it. 'Yes, you did,' she said, 'but I left it out. No one would have taken you seriously if that had got in. It was boilingly right-wing.'
he news that the historian Lord Blake, when he retires next year as Provost of the Queen's College, Oxford, will be amicably succeeded by one of the Senior Fellows, the nuclear physicist Dr John Moffat, is a disappointment. No one should deny Dr Moffat the office. But could not the succession have been preceded by a bit of intrigue and drama? In our great colleges today, do they no longer have struggles of the kind immortalised in The Masters by C. P. Snow? Some of us have hopes of the search for a successor to Prof. Raymond Carr, as Warden of St Antony's, Oxford. The college specialises in international relations. That suggests the possibility of intrigue. Apparently, Sir Julian Bullard would like the job when he retires as our ambassador to Bonn. He is admired as the beau ideal of the diplomat, particularly by the Foreign Office young. That means that the FO's critics do not want him at St Anthony's. Efforts are being made to draft Lord Thomas of Swynnerton. Dr Ralf Dahrendorf's name is also being discussed. That complicates matters ideologically, but all complications are welcome.
Concerning Aids, one last observation. It is being used as an excuse by people who want to say crude or obscene things in public. They say they have to say such things because Aids means that we all have to be 'explicit'. But really it is because there is no limit to the juvenile desire of these people to shake the rest of us out of our complacency even when it is obvious that we are satisfactorily terrified already. It is to be hoped that the London left- winger, Mr Paul Boateng, is not in this category. On Sir Robin Day's Question Time last week, he used a crudity when the genteel phrase would have been perfectly sufficient to convey his excited meaning. If he does this all the time, the Aids issue is going to be even more boring. For a problem to be lethal and boring is quite a feat.
Frank Johnson is parliamentary columnist of the Times.
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