Thatcher’s losing battle to stop Spycatcher publication

The increasingly desperate, and futile, attempts by Margaret Thatcher’s government to suppress Spycatcher, the memoir of a renegade ex-MI5 officer, are laid bare in official files made public for the first time.

Peter Wright caused a sensation in the 1980s, with his lurid allegations that a former head of the Security Service had been a Soviet mole and that M15 officers had plotted against Labour prime minister Harold Wilson because they believed he was in the pay of Moscow.

After ministers blocked release of his book in the UK, his publishers turned to Australia triggering the start of a fought to keep it off the shelves.