SIR,—I have read your correspondence on Mr' Maclean and 'the
Establishment,' and you comments on it, with interest. Mfy I add soli further comments'?
(1) It now seems probable that Mrs. Ma( lean was a Communist. It also seems de o ttqt she lied in disowning a telephone convel sawn with the Daily Telegraph, just as di Daily Express lied in converting a telephon conversation into a personal meeting. Bo first, did the newspapers, which pursued Mr' Maclean and her children so uncivilly, puns u them (as they now virtuously claim) becaus they knew or suspected that she was a Cool munist, or was it merely because they regard her as a source of news about Maclean—I' which case their retrospective virtue vanishes And secondly, even if they did suspect Mr' Maclean of Communism, does such suspicio justify such persecution? The newspaper concerned seem to argue that even if othe citizens have personal rights, suspected Coro munists have not. 1 hope the Spectator doe not support this view. The theory of an outlas party seems to the worse than the supp001 fact of an 'Establishment.' ir •
t,
5.
d 9
;.
n (2) No doubt you are right in supposing that there is an 'Establishment,' though it is hardly a novel discovery to observe that there is here and now, as everywhere and at all times,
governing class. Since this is a necessary condition of social existence, the best we can hope for is that this 'Establishment' should not be (as it is in some countries) so held to- gether by conscious or institutional solidarity that it escapes competition and criticism. For- tunately—as your correspondence itself shows --this is not so: the British 'Establishment' is loose, heterogeneous and fissile. This being so, t is absurd to suggest that 'the Establishment' as such supported the Macleans. It was the Foreign Office which culpably kept Maclean so long in its midst. Lady Violet Bonham Carter intervened, rightly or wrongly, not as a constituent element of 'the Establishment' but as a friend. Mr. David Astor defended Mrs. Maclean against. journalistic • pressure (which he may or may not have misconstrued) not because he is a limb of 'the Establishment,' but because he felt, as I feel, that citizens have a right to privacy even if they are suspected, Perhaps rightly, to be Communists. It seems to me that those who, like that agile nihilist Mr. Muggeridge, are converting this incident into a general attack on 'the Establishment' are attacking, in the name of an abstraction,
personal loyalties and human rights. If they arc going to criticise, their criticism should be directed at something much more precise: the particular persons who—perhaps because they too, like its critics, had too rigid views about 'the Establishmene—navigated Burgess, Mac- lean and certain others past the obstacles which should have kept them, or thrown them, out of the Foreign Office.—Yours faithfully,
Previous page
