Another voice
Mein Kampf
Auberon Waugh
Last Thursday 73 policemen, some arm- ed, surrounded the home of Mr Maurice Dann, a well-known Plymouth dog-breeder. When armed officers even- tually burst in, Mrs Dann had hysterics and their young daughter was quietly sick. It was part of a gigantic operation involving 200 police officers, a helicopter and team of divers which raided over ten homes in the West Country after a tip-off suggested that they might be harbouring secret arms dumps for the IRA and stocks of forged banknotes. Operation Pizza, as it was code- named, was the biggest and most secret police operation ever mounted in Devon and Cornwall. No doubt local people will be talking for many years about the dramatic events of Thursday the Tenth when there was the noise of running boots in the farmyard, chickens flying in every direction, sheep-dogs and young calves go- ing berserk, the angry rat-tat-tat of bare knuckles on the farmhouse door and a peremptory order to open up in the name of the law. But they found neither arms nor forged banknotes. Secret intelligence sup- plied by MI5 or Special Branch did not, as we journalists say, stand up. The tip-off was a dud.
It is very seldom that either M15 or Special Banch acts on any of the informa- tion it collects and stores, day after day, year in and year out. Soviet agents in politics and journalism may have an enor- mous secret file on them in Curzon Street or elsewhere in the Home Office but nobody is ever allowed to see it, and they are most unlikely to be charged with anything. Honourably enough, so far as I know the Security Service does not even conduct secret whispering campaigns to tip off party managers, television executives and newspaper editors about the existence of Soviet moles or stooges on the pay-roll. The information, if such it is, simply accumu- lates in the files as a sort of abstract exercise in data processing and information technology. On the rare occasions it is taken out and tested in the light of day — as in the mysterious prosecution of an old Labour and Co-op MP called Will Owen some years ago, or Thursday's Operation Pizza — it as likely as not proves unreliable or inadequate.
Which is all very well, so far as it goes. Newspapers pursue dozens of dud stories every week, and some of them sometimes get into print, resulting in a shower of libel writs and grovelling retractions. But the files of MI5 and Special Branch are prac- tically never tested in this way, as I say, and it is safe to assume that an enormous amount of material in them is pure rubbish.
But entertaining rubbish, no doubt. My purpose is not to argue that the government is wrong to release MI5 files for general perusal after a reasonable period of time but merely that we should not attach too much importance to them. The key docu- ment among the Mosley papers released, last week would appear to be an unsigned MI5 report dated 8 October 1934 and addressed to Sir Russell Scott, Permanent Under- Secretary at the Home Office, naming peo- ple who were suspected of having con- tributed to the funds of Mosley's British Union of Fascists.
Among those named are Lord Nuffield (who always denied it, nor does the alleged gift of £50,000 appear in the list of his gifts over £25,000, amounting to £10,698,000 in 45 gifts, which appears in a special Appen- dix of the 1938 Complete Peerage), Lord Lloyd, who was Colonial Secretary when he died in 1941, and Sir Charles Petrie, the historian, who, although possibly rather a boring man, was certainly no fascist and spent the war as an Official Lecturer to the Forces.
The interesting point about these last two names is that the 1934 MI5 report was presumably on their files when they were appointed respectively Colonial Secretary and Official Lecturer to the Forces in 1940. Unless one is to subscribe to the eager- beaver view of the diligent David Pryce- Pilger and see the entire British upper class establishment as a gigantic conspiracy of fascists and anti-semites, then we must sup- pose either that nobody bothered to look at their MI5 files when they were appointed to these posts, or that people knew that MI5 suspected them of active fascist sympathies and decided to ignore or disbelieve the charges.
Then one reads on and observes that the MI5 report itself says that it had been im- possible to verify the information, which came from Labour Party and Communist sources, and suggests that it might be wrong in the cases of Lord Lloyd and Sir Charles Petrie. Yet one would not have guessed how heavily qualified was the suggestion if one noticed only the glee with which news- papers printed what had been kept from them for so long. What would, in other cir- cumstances, have been given about as much weight as a colour section or Grovel paragraph in Private Eye has become, as the result of all the secrecy which previously surrounded it, something approaching an official truth.
Under these circumstances, I was par- ticularly alarmed to read, in the 16-page Special Branch Report of 1 May 1934, that fascist cells had been set up in three public schools: Winchester, Stowe and Beaumont. It reminded me of a time when, at the age of 15, my imagination was caught by an organisation calling itself the League of Empire Loyalists and I tried to set up a cell of Empire Loyalists at Downside. Perhaps I had better spill the beans now, before the newspapers get hold of it in 30 years' time. So far as I remember the League had no particular doctrine on the Jews (Pryce- Pilger will no doubt put me right about this) but consisted of a few right-wing remnants who used to attend Conservative meetings and shout 'Traitor!' at Sir Anthony Eden in a general protest against the retreat from Empire.
In retrospect this does not appear a par- ticularly useful occupation but it seemed a good idea at the time. My greatest difficulty was in getting any subscriptions out of my fellow conspirators, who did not trust their leader with the five shillings involved. But I succeeded in inviting a man with a flaming red beard to address the Downside Numismatic Society, of which I was also founder. Ile delivered a fiery address on patriotism to my slightly bemused group of coin collectors under a nice young monk who was the school's art master and who had agreed to sponsor the Numismatic Society on the strength of owning a few electro-types of ancient Greek coins which were solemnly passed around at every meeting.
Next term the Numismatic Society was suppressed after I had advertised a meeting with a poster of the devil, designed by a contemporary who is now, I believe, a pro- sperous and successful painter. Later still, the nice young monk jumped over the wall to a life of freedom. But my own connec- tion with the League of Empire Loyalists came to a sad end in the holidays, when I had arranged to take the League's secretary, a buxom young woman called Miss Greene, to a Downside Ball in Lon- don. The League had bought two tickets and the idea was that I should infiltrate Miss Greene, who would then engage my school fellows in conversation about the betrayal of Empire etc as she foxtrotted around the Hyde Park Hotel ballroom.
Unfortunately for this plan I fell in with a convivial railwayman on Gloucester sta- tion who shared most of a bottle of gin I had brought with me. I was taken off the train in a tired and emotional state at Stroud. My father's Diaries (Weidenfeld 1976) record one sequel to this sad episode, when he arrived to collect me from the cells at Stroud police station, but not the fate of Miss Greene who found herself alone among the schoolboy revellers. The League lost its enthusiasm for Downside from that moment.
I imagine all this is to be found in the ap- propriate Special Branch or MI5 file, and
only hope I have not betrayed any Official Secrets by revealing it before the 30-year period is up.
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