Why leakers leak
From Mr Frederick Forsyth Sir: In seeking to persuade us that the Labour leaker must have been a now- departed civil service bird of passage with vicious Tory tendencies, Sion Simon (`The mole in the guacamole', 22 July) evokes the old Latin tag cui bono?, and even quotes a line or two from Dumas.
Let me counter with a writer much near- er home. 'Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,' wrote Congreve, and he was right. During the Cold War KGB officers were highly privileged in their own society, the cream of the cream. Yet it was startling how many turned on their masters and, while staying in place, worked for years for the West.
They did not do so because they had embraced capitalism, or loved our sweet backsides, or had come to loathe their homeland and the Russian people. Just the reverse. Being insiders, they had come to understand the full measure of the cor- ruption, jobbery, nepotism, cronyism and utter contempt for the masses by the party bosses in private. They became disgusted by what they saw, aware that their KGB was not a shield to protect the people from outside enemies but a device to con, gull, dupe, deceive and enthral the masses and thus keep the apparat in eternal power.
You do not need to know much of British politics to understand that the Armani suits entertain a private contempt for Old Labour stalwarts. It would not take more than a couple of years for someone who had worked man and boy for what Gaitskell once called 'the party I love' to realise that New Labour has betrayed Real Labour (borrowing an RAF vulgarism) from arse- holes to breakfast time.
People do not like being betrayed. It
LETTERS
makes them angry. It even makes them vengeful.
Frederick Forsyth
Hertford
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