Sir: May I say, as a cousin of both Roger
Hollis and Richard Gott who has worked 21 years for the Guardian, voted three times for Margaret Thatcher and used to belong to the Conservative Party, that , its acceptance? both Richard's resignation and ts acceptance? Even if Richard was paid by the KGB for freelance advice, that would strike me as comic rather than shocking. The Guardian allows its employees to take on outside work. The Spectator approves of free enterprise. And Richard has always been demonstrably anti-Soviet. .Enoch Powell, Alfred Sherman and Joh° Men were among the many varied writers Richard got into the Guardian as features editor. He invented the Agenda page with its diet of politically very mixed discussion; But did he ever have a secret agenda' Roger Hollis seemed an irascible, We' tionary member of the Burnham-on-$I golf club — his supposed disguise•. watched the results of the 1964 electiol coming in at Roger's Notting Hill borne. t. am certain he was a Spectator man through and through. We are asked to regard Richard's states as a mole as more cleverly hidden th/ Roger's: the emperor's clothes. Richard broadcast his Maoist opinions. He organ- ised official Guardian outings to Mosee and Belfast — though I wasn't on thane. Linda Christmas's Russian article may hav earned her a hard time from him for quite understandable other reasons. To have been paid for giving odd opinions to the Russians is no more reprehensible th.r helping the CIA collect economic statistiesk,' Richard, with a similar snobbish back,' ground to Roger Hollis's, never had
LETTERS
sions that his theoretical egalitarianism was electable in Britain. Only illegal madcap violence would have made his ideas or his relations with the KGB improper rather than cranky. His resignation will, I believe, turn out to have been politically mistaken. Of course he could not have carried on his freelance KGB contacts and discussed them with Peter Preston. They were his private whim. Even if Peter had known when MI6 did, the only result might have been an irrelevant rejection of Richard as literary editor. After 1989, when he stopped being features edi- tor, Richard was away from the Guardian for well over a year. His rapid departure now is a loss for our readers, though his dramatic exit may later seem not so incon- venient to him. Your exposure reveals the agenda of the Right more than of the Left. It has nothing to do with public morality or corruption. If Richard's ideas have been Corrupt, that is not because of money or the KGB. I don't think he, as an editor, ever took a journalistic decision that was morally questionable, though I wish he had been braver and less part of the Establish- ment.
Torn Sutcliffe
12 Polworth Road, Streatham, London SW16
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