POLITICS
Detective Inspector Falkender and the Big Fat Spider strike back
FERDINAND MOUNT
Harold was by now so carried away by his compulsive need for conversation that he launched on a not very clear but very protracted revelation about what he was going to say at his Question time that afternoon. He had, he said, turning to me, established that BOSS (the South African Bureau of State Security) had been involved in the Thorpe affair. 'It's been a great detective exercise, I can tell you. Detective Inspector Falkender has been up to her eyes in it. . . . No minister or political party is safe unless we expose this. . . .' Those of us who were left by this time were completely mystified.
Many of us shared the mystification that Barbara Castle confided to her diary. And since Harold Wilson resigned a week later, our fertile little minds have been kept quite busy ever since. Nor was our curiosity stilled when Sir Harold, as he then became, two months later, in May 1976, told two BBC reporters that — the words are so glorious that even now, ten years afterwards, to copy them out again, gives one the most intense pleasure: I see myself as the Big Fat Spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes! speak when I'm asleep. You should both listen. Occa- sionally when we meet, I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you some- where.
What was it, is it all about? What were Lady Falkender and the Big Fat Spider on to or up to? The most convenient explana- tion at the time, that they were both off their trolleys with paranoia, has finally been destroyed by Mr Peter Wright in Australia. According to him and to two other ex-MI5 officers who have told their stories, there were indeed dirty tricks afoot, some in Northern Ireland, some organised by South Africa to bring out the Norman Scott affair and so destroy Jeremy Thorpe (who had advocated bombing the Rhodesian rebels), some organised by dissident officers within MIS in order to bring down the Labour government with its tiny, disappearing majority ('destabilise' is scarcely the word, the government was already about as stable as a skiff in a hurricane). Servants of the Crown, it seems, were lying, forging and burgling all over the place.
Now these are criminal, perhaps treasonable activities. The confessions or boasts contained in Mr Wright's book would, by all accounts, justify a longish jail sentence. In a simpler age, he would have been shot.
Yet public attention has so far been entirely concentrated upon the present Government's ham-fisted efforts to sup- press the book. Our gaze is directed to the 'extraordinary coincidence' that Sir Robert Armstrong was the senior (according to him, a senior) official in the Home Office responsible for links with the security services at the time of the hanky-panky. He, therefore, is. said to 'know where the bodies are buried'. In fact, the coincidence is not so very remarkable. Since Cabinet Secretaries since the war have all come either from the Home Office or the Treas- ury, I'd say it was roughly an evens chance. Sir Robert's ubiquity is no more significant than would be the discovery that most ministers are in the habit of using Kleenex when suffering from a heavy cold.
The significant thing is what the Big Fat Spider himself did. He had summoned the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, and told him about his suspicions. Oldfield had admitted that 'there's a section of MIS which is unreliable'. Oldfield said he was going to bring all this out. But Wilson heard no more. Wilson had also, in the preceding summer, 1975, summoned the head of MI5, Sir Michael Hanley, who had said much the same thing: there was within his service 'a disaffected faction with ex- treme right-wirig views'. But again Wilson heard no more and himself did nothing more.
The situation so far revealed is pretty peculiar: MI5 agents spreading all sorts of smears about Wilson (that he and Marcia ran a Communist cell in Downing Street was the central one); security chiefs well aware of their underlings' disaffection and no doubt of some of their antics as well; Wilson himself, still Prime Minister, in- formed that his suspicions were not groundless. And, as far as one can see, nobody does anything about it.
Talk about dogs not barking in the night. All this is surely much odder than the events, of the following summer, 1977, when Wilson's suspicions about the secur- ity services surfaced in the Observer and led to questions in the House from Peter Blaker and others and thus to Mr Cal- laghan's little inquiry. This was a routine stalling device. Messrs Rees and Jenkins are clearly right in telling us that it covered only the allegation of bugging at Number Ten, although the wording of Callaghan's statement in August artfully suggested a wider remit.
There is not much mystery about why Lord Wilson and the security services, both British and South African, were so susPi- cious of each other. At least four Labour MPs, including two ministers, had been named as Soviet or Czech spies. One of them, Bernard Floud, had gassed himself after being interviewed by MI5. The South Africans had, in Wilson's earlier pre- miership, been receiving Cabinet papers from a short-hand typist in the Downing Street 'garden room'. Above all, everyone was extremelY jumpy, after the first two miners' strikes. It would be surprising if Cecil King's noto- rious lunch for Lord Mountbatten and Solly Zuckerman were the only vision of tanks on the streets. The Big Fat Spider himself was alarmed by the joint police and military anti-terrorist exercises at Heath- row. He told the Detective Inspector that 'the alert itself could trigger off a plan for 9 coup'. But he did not lift a finger. why? Because he was too tired? Because some- thing nasty about Wilson and the Labour government would come out if he had directly challenged the security services? A more boring, but no less plausible explana- tion is that Wilson, like all his successors, was highly nervous of challenging the tradition laid down by the Maxwell Fyfe Directive of 1952, that, in order to keep the Security Service free from any political bias or influence, ministers 'do not concern themselves with the detailed information which may be obtained by the Security Services in particular cases, but are fur- nished with such information only as may be necessary'. And the Security Service is the judge of what is 'necessary'.
Not so much a Big Fat Spider, in fact, more a rabbit mesmerised by a bunch of stoats. In her early years, Mrs Thatcher seemed refreshingly ready to stare down the spooks, particularly in the Blunt case, and ignore their pleas about the necessity. for total secrecy. But now they seem to have ground her down. It would do her no harm to revert to her earlier self, and have everything out in the open. It was all ten years ago, and most of the cast are dead or gaga.
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