The sensationalist in me hopes that Churchill threatened to jail two ministers in 1940
FRANK JOHNSON
The December issue of History Magazine has a sensational story, or at least a sensational allegation. The magazine has been in the shops for several days. Yet the story has appeared in no newspaper.
Admittedly, it is not about Mr and Mrs Beckham or a couple of that stature. This perhaps restricts its interest to the contemporary press. Also, the events to which it refers took place just under 60 years ago, and all the characters are male, white and dead. So I myself am beginning to doubt the story's significance. The spirit of the age gets to us all in the end, even those of us who try not to live by it, or to defy it. Perhaps the story is a bore, and I was wrong to allow it to excite me. But let the reader judge.
The story is, or the magazine presents it as being, about Rudolf Hess and his flight to Britain in 1941. At this point, I realise that I have probably lost the attention of the sort of people who, I hope, read this magazine in general and this column in particular. I tend to share such readers' temperament. We have a limited appetite for Hessiana. We have no idea why he flew here in 1941, but suspect that the reason was simpler than some think: he had gone mad. We give no credence to the claims of that Welshman who says that the man who stood trial at Nuremberg and served his time in Spandau was not the real Hess but a double planted by the Germans.
So when, on a page entitled News, History Magazine had a big picture of Hess, and the headline 'Hess interrogation leaked to appeasers', one's inclination was not to read it. Nonetheless, the eye wandered down the column. It was signed 'Peter Day' and began: 'The secret interrogation of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess after his flight to Britain in 1941 was leaked to British Nazi sympathisers, according to a newly declassified MIS file at the Public Record Office, Kew.'
It added that MI5 wanted to prosecute Kenneth de Courcy, 'a friend of the Duke of Windsor', who died two years ago aged 89, for receiving the leaks, but was overruled. De Courcy, it went on, had been an unofficial emissary for the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, before the war. The story went on to say that one of Hess's guards — son of Captain Pierse Loftus, Conservative MP for Lowestoft — gained his confidence. The younger Loftus briefed de Courcy. The Director of Public Prosecutions considered prosecuting those concerned, but decided not to. 1 found all this interesting, but not startling. De Courcy is one of those dark figures who lurk on the fringes of high politics and great events. There are several of them in our own time. They tend to have knowledge of, and dabble in, the intelligence world. They often know important or interesting things, and are sometimes of use to politicians, though they can also do politicians harm. Churchill made use of them, especially when in the wilderness in the 1930s. Lady Thatcher seems to have made use of them both in opposition and in government.
But, en passant, the magazine item did indeed startle. It harked back briefly to 1940. This de Courcy, it said, 'made secret peace overtures to Germany in 1940 on behalf of foreign secretary Lord Halifax and his junior minister "Rob" Butler. Churchill found out and threatened to jail both ministers.'
Those are my italics. The sentence demands no less. Here is a claim that a prime minister contemplated, or at least 'threatened', sending the men in 1940s trilby hats and macintoshes around to arrest his foreign secretary and Rab — the latter being the figure who went on to become the very personification of the good Tory, though mainly in the eyes of Toryism's opponents.
I was so excited that I telephoned History Magazine for more information, and eventually contacted Mr Day, a freelance journalist. He was extremely helpful. What was his source for the possible arrest of the foreign secretary and his junior minister? Mr Day was at first not sure that he could remember it correctly. He said that he would look at his notes, and telephone me back. This he did.
He was pretty sure that it was in a book about Hess by a Mr Peter Padfield which Weidenfeld originally published in 1991, and which Cassell recently reissued.
At the time of writing, I have not had a chance to consult this book, so I hope that I have not misquoted Mr Padfield. I was so amazed by Mr Day's revelation about the contemplated jailing that, as an old reporter, I thought I had a duty to rush into print with it and worry about any developments later. Which raises another question: where are the old reporters on this story? Or instead: where are the newspaper diaries when we need them, or at least when those of us interested in dead white males need them? Will it always have to be Miss Hurley and Mr and Mrs Beckha:m?
When I was ADC in the late 1980s on the Sunday Telegraph to its then editor, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, one of my duties was to write much of the diary: Mandrake. My natural inclination would of course have been to write, as newspaper diarists do today, about such unrigorous topics as the Hurleys and Beckhams of the period; involving, as they do, few visits to the Kew archives. But I knew that I could never get them past Sir Peregrine. He wanted mischief-making about people in high places, and he did not mind if the people were dead. There is no evidence that it damaged circulation; quite the opposite. In this present matter, Sir Peregrine would have seen scope for troublemaking follow-ups.
For example, since BBC directors-general are always unpopular, there is scope here to make trouble for him. The BBC publishes History Magazine. What is Mr Dyke doing allowing such a traducing of public servants who cannot answer back, and causing distress to their descendants and any surviving relatives? It is irrelevant that, to Mr Dyke, Halifax is Halifax Town FC rather than a former foreign secretary. There are still plenty of people interested in the latter, though one would not know it from the broadsheets these days. That the BBC can find a market for a history magazine — a market that can already buy History Today — is proof that the past is commercial; likewise the number of excellent history programmes now on television_ I suppose that there is nothing much in the story of Churchill's putative great arrest. But I would not be a true sensationalist if I did not hope that there is.
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