SHARED OPINION
How psychoanalysis will solve the mystery of the Missing Tories
FRANK JOHNSON Last week's flight of Mr Michael Hesel- tine and Mr Kenneth Clarke to a platform presided over by Mr Tony Blair was, of course, the most notorious since that of Burgess and Maclean or, indeed, of Rudolf Hess. What are the known facts about Mr Clarke and Mr Heseltine? All we know so far is that the two men, who had worked together for many years, disappeared from the Conservative front bench some time after 1 May 1997. According to the Sunday papers, at 11.40 a.m. on Wednesday of last week, they slipped into No. 10 Downing Street through a back entrance. They had been tipped off by Mr Chris Patten, the Third Man. In No. 10, they met whom some say were their controllers, Mr Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's press spokesman, and Mr Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister's chief of staff. The next day they appeared in public, espousing the cause of a foreign power alongside Mr Blair.
For some, then, the two Tories' motives are obvious. 'Traitors,' cried the Daily Mail headline. This is probably the most simple explanation, the one on which history will agree, though we cannot exclude the possi- bility that they were kidnapped and drugged. Part of me tells myself that the obvious explanation is the correct one: that they defected out of idealism; out of a belief, however perverse, in an internation- alist movement directed from Brussels. But the psychologist in me would also, because it is more interesting, like to believe that such idealism is the mere outward explana- tion for their departure, an excuse rather than a cause, and that the cause is to be found deep within their complex, disturbed personalities. Admittedly, this wish on my part immediately confronts the difficulty that one of the two — Mr Clarke — does not seem at all complex or disturbed. So, for the purposes of psychoanalysis, we shall just have to assume that the man's easy- going manner is just that — a manner. Inside him, all is turmoil.
Thus I find myself in the position of Cyril Connolly, the most fashionable literary type of his day, in his now hard-to-find pam- phlet, The Missing Diplomats, published in 1952 after the two Foreign Office men, Burgess and Maclean, disappeared but before they made it known that they had defected to Moscow. In his foreword to the pamphlet, Peter Quennell, another literary person, wrote that it was unlikely that the
problem of the diplomats' disappearance 'would ever be completely solved.. . The episode will remain a minor historical enig- ma — one of the most remarkable present- ed to us during the last 200 years.' In words which some may apply to Mr Clarke and Mr Heseltine, 'they are now representative, curiously tragic figures.. . The experiences which they have undergone have purged their characters of triviality. Were they helpless victims; high-minded, muddle- headed conspirators; determined but incompetent traitors? The story remains unfinished. Probably we shall never know.'
Actually, we knew already. Only aes- thetes like Quennell and Connelly did not. It was obvious from the start where Burgess and Maclean had gone. Their destination could be discovered from that source which aesthetes never consult: the popular press. That was why all my childhood neighbours were better informed than Quennell and Connolly. But such figures as Violet Bon- ham-Carter preferred to denounce the low prints for harassing Mrs Melinda Maclean, the wife who was left in Britain, though not for long since in due course she took her- self off to Moscow too.
Yet, while happy to jeer at them, I sym- pathise with Quennell and Connolly. As with me and the case of Mr Clarke and Mr Heseltine, they craved an explanation dif- ferent from that of the masses, as aesthetes invariably do. Connolly, who knew both missing men, begins by saying, 'If I did not believe (by instinct rather than reason) that the two people about whom I am going to write may well have been victims of some unforeseen calamity, the puzzle would not exist and I should have no more to say.'
As I said, the puzzle didn't exist, but Con- nolly could not concede that since, on his own admission, 'I should have no more to say.' Connolly plunges into psychoanalysis, which, as it does me, interests him, but which, unlike me, he believed in. He estab- lishes, without proving it, that both Burgess and Maclean were 'starved of love'.
But this is much more useful in the anal- ogous case of 'The Missing Tories', Clarke and Heseltine. We may speculate that Mr Heseltine has felt starved of love since 1985. In that year he was involved in an incident concerning a helicopter and the Cabinet. He stormed out and felt seriously injured; out of the Cabinet, that is, not the helicopter. There was a woman involved.
He certainly felt starved of her love. In Mr Clarke's case, the love of which he feels starved is that of the Conservative party. In 1997 it preferred a bald youth to him, a suc- cessful chancellor.
Incidentally, after pages of psychoanalysis, Connolly did get around to asking, 'Were they Communist agents?' His answer? 'Sure- ly the first duty of a secret agent is to escape detection, to express conventional views and rise in his career. The more communism they talked, the less likely they were to be agents. And Burgess talked a great deal . It is hard to see how they could possess the control to serve a foreign country coolly and ruthlessly for 20 years and yet work in execu- tive capacities of their own.'
The more vengeful Tory Eurosceptics hope that Clarke and Heseltine, like Burgess and Maclean, will never fmd hap- piness over there on the other side, among their former opponents, and that for them long years of regret and pining for home will stretch ahead. Mr Clarke and Mr Hes- eltine may already be regretting it. They do not speak the language. All around them, bumptious youths with pagers and laptops will babble about the Third Way, the New Middle, and joined-up government. Blairite food will be repellent and there will very lit- tle of it: just bits of old tuna, polenta and coriander. Mr Clarke's minders, in accor- dance with Department of Health propa- ganda, will soon start to restrict his ration of cigars and bitter. In the end, Mr Clarke and Mr Heseltine will live only for such supplies of marmalade, Huntley & Palmer's Bath Olivers and Mothers Pride sliced bread as may arrive from the home they have abandoned.
As the years pass, such visitors from the Conservative party as the authorities allow them to see will return with the message that these two sad men, now no longer any threat to anyone, would like to return if only they could be guaranteed that they would not be harmed. Of Mr Heseltine, in particular, it will be said that his dearest wish is that, in the evening of his life, he will be allowed to return to a Conservative party conference at Blackpool, shout into the microphone and wave his arms about, as he did long ago when he was loyal to his old party and it to him. Mr William Cash and Lord Tebbit will be unrelenting, but I for one will campaign for an amnesty, and for the homecoming of the missing Tories.
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