The Blunt Affair: Official secrecy and treason in literature, television and film, 1980–89

By Jonathan Bolton

The case of the Cambridge spies has long captured the public’s attention, but perhaps never more so than in the wake of Anthony Blunt’s exposure as the fourth man in November 1979. With the Cold War intensifying, patriotism running high during the Falklands War and the AIDS crisis leading to widespread homophobia, these notorious traitors were more relevant than ever. This book explores how they were depicted in literature, television and film throughout the 1980s. Examining works by an array of distinguished writers, including Dennis Potter, Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard and John le Carré, it sheds new light on the affair, asking why such privileged young men chose to betray their country, whether loyalty to one’s friends is more important than patriotism and whether we can really trust the intelligence services.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526148452

Book preview

Figures

1 Rupert Everett and Kenneth Branagh, from the stage play Another Country (1982).

2 Our lot are in. England's safe again. Jason Cavendish (Donald Pleasence) and daughter, Christabel (Phoebe Nicholls), from Blade on the Feather (1980), dir. Richard Loncraine.

3 Guy Bennett (Rupert Everett) and Harcourt (Cary Elwes), dinner date at the Fox & Hounds, from Another Country (film), dir. Marek Kanievska.

4 Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) parades the streets of Moscow in his Savile Row suit, from An Englishman Abroad (1983), dir. John Schlesinger.

5 Like it or not, … you're one of us. Goronwy Rees (Michael Williams) and Guy Burgess (Anthony Hopkins) from television film Blunt: The Fourth Man (1986), dir. John Glenister.

6 Barbara Jackson (Ellen Burstyn) and Agent Stewart (Alan Bates) from television film of Pack of Lies (1987), dir. Anthony Page.

7 Stephen Ward (John Hurt) and Christine Keeler (Joanne Whalley) in Scandal (1989), dir. Michael Caton-Jones.

8 Guy Burgess (Tom Hollander) and Anthony Blunt (Samuel West), from Cambridge Spies television mini-series (2003), dir. Tim Fywell.

Acknowledgements

A number of colleagues and friends have assisted in the development of this book. I wish to thank especially my English department chair, Jeremy Downes, for the research leave and travel support necessary to complete this project. I also received helpful financial and moral support from Auburn University's College of Liberal Arts, including a summer grant to support research and travel to the UK. I wish to thank research librarian, Jaena Alabi, and digital technology specialist, Chris Mixon, at the Ralph Brown Draughon Library for invaluable assistance in tracking down books, films, articles and digital images to which I might otherwise not have had access. Thanks also to Callum McKean at the British Library for allowing me to view uncatalogued documents in the Julian Mitchell archives, and Nicola O’Toole and Oliver House at the Bodleian Library for access to the Alan Bennett archives. I also wish to thank Rohan McCullough and Michael Thomas for responding so promptly to my queries, and director Jeff Bleckner for generously loaning me a DVD of and script to Concealed Enemies. I am especially indebted to Matthew Frost at Manchester University Press. Without his support and guidance this book never would have seen the light of day. And, a special word of gratitude to Claire Wilson, who listened with patience and keen interest to my endless anecdotes about the Cambridge spies.

Introduction: The Blunt Affair and its impact on literature, television and film in the 1980s

Secrets, and the exposure of secrets, were part of the murky air we breathed.

Treachery was the theme-song of the times.¹

—Blake Morrison

You just take a walk and look in any back kitchen around [Liverpool] and you'll soon see food shortages. Look lad! Going to Russia can't be worse than living around here.²

—Letter to Brezhnev

In November 1979, biographer, veteran intelligence officer and longtime BBC writer Andrew Boyle published Climate of Treason, a book that offered new information about the Cambridge spy ring and disclosed the existence, if not the precise identities, of two additional traitors. Since KGB cells were known to have operated in groups of five, Boyle's book promised to end years of speculation in intelligence and government quarters about the identities of additional spies—agents that could still be sharing secrets with the Soviet Union. Two members of the Cambridge spy ring, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had been known to be Soviet spies since their defection to Russia in 1951. Kim Philby was identified as the third man in the spy ring in 1963, when he vanished from his post in Beirut and turned up in Moscow six months later. Instead of naming the fourth and fifth men in the spy ring, Boyle and his publisher used the pseudonyms Maurice, after the titular hero of E. M. Forster's novel, and Basil, after a character in Evelyn Waugh, to guard against libel.³ Just prior to the release of Boyle's book, however, journalists at the satirical magazine weekly, Private Eye, deduced the real identity of The Fourth Man in Boyle's book and named him in the issue of 8 November 1979. Maurice, they claimed, was Sir Anthony Blunt, an eminent art historian, Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures.

Upon publication of the Private Eye story, the Thatcher Government was pressed to explain how Blunt had escaped detection for so many years. From MI6 they learned that it was Thatcher's own Conservative Party, under Alec Douglas-Home, that had granted Blunt immunity in order to curtail a surge of negative publicity in the wake of Kim Philby's defection, the Profumo scandal and the disclosure of other spy rings in the early 1960s.⁴ According to Blunt's biographer, Miranda Carter, Margaret Thatcher felt personally affronted by Blunt's immunity … She had no time for liberal interpretations of his motives; a traitor was a traitor, and she found the whole episode thoroughly reprehensible and reeking of establishment collusion.⁵ The Prime Minister went before House of Commons on 15 November to confirm that Anthony Blunt, whom she called a contemptible and repugnant man,⁶ was indeed the fourth man, that he had recruited agents for and passed secret information to the KGB since the late 1930s, and that he had been suspected of being a spy since the time of Burgess's and Maclean's defection in 1951. (It was later determined that Blunt had abetted their escape.) That same day Thatcher approved the Honours Forfeiture Committee's recommendation that Blunt be stripped of his knighthood. Given his immunity status, she could do little more.

After Thatcher's speech in the House of Commons, The Blunt Affair became the tabloid sensation of late 1979, and the personal and professional details of Blunt's life were scrutinized and assailed by the media. Because his aesthetic tastes were highbrow and continental (Blunt was an expert in the French baroque classicism of Nicolas Poussin), he was denounced as an effete intellectual. (He in fact championed social realism over abstract art). He had a privileged and cosmopolitan upbringing that included frequent stays in Paris as a child and a public-school education at Marlborough. He was also a Cambridge Apostle, a secret society of intellectuals associated in the public mind with cultural elitism and unconventional sexual proclivities.⁷ Perhaps the greatest source of outrage among tabloid readers was the fact that, like Guy Burgess, Blunt was gay and his homosexuality, which some journalists adduced to be consonant with leftism, artsy-ness and treason, was viciously castigated in the tabloids. (The Evening Standard, for instance, referred to Blunt as an aesthete pansy, and the Daily Express called him a treacherous Commie poof.)⁸ Five days after Thatcher's revelations in the House of Commons, Blunt overcame thoughts of suicide, emerged from seclusion and delivered a mea culpa on national television. He admitted to having made a grievous error in spying for Russia, but he professed not to have turned over anything to the Russians but intelligence about Nazi Germany that he felt should have been officially passed on by MI5 anyway, and he insisted that he had acted according to his conscience. To an audience predisposed to loathe him, Blunt's testimony came off, as George Steiner put it, as icy and dispassionate, lizard like, his eyes as flat and chill as glass.⁹ For John le Carré, Blunt's patronizing voice made [him] angrier than anything [he] could recall in recent times.¹⁰ Blunt ended the interview by expressing his desire and expectation to return to his career as an art historian and curator, a rhetorical miss-step that, for many, showed a casual disregard for the crimes to which he had just confessed.

Mercifully, for Blunt, public outrage was momentary, as the tabloids moved onto other scandals and sensational news. With the support of friends and former students, he overcame the suicide attempt of his partner, John Gaskin, endured journalistic harassment and public confrontations with his legendary reserve, vacated his position at the Courtauld Institute on an indefinite leave of absence, and accepted passively a succession of punitive measures that stripped him of all honors and distinctions. He would die three years later of a heart attack. Yet, as a direct result of The Blunt Affair, the Cambridge spies became immediately topical to a wide range of writers and filmmakers throughout the 1980s in ways that make them central, I believe, to British culture of the late Cold War. Treachery was surely, as Blake Morrison recalled, the theme-song of the times,¹¹ as the Cambridge spies and their likenesses appeared in a remarkable number of plays, films, television dramas and novels. Even when they do not appear directly, works that involve spying, treason and the opaqueness of British officialdom, such as in Tom Stoppard's radio play, The Dog It Was That Died (1982) or Hugh Whitemore's Pack of Lies (1983), were responding to the Blunt Affair. Since the Burgess–Maclean defection in 1951 and Philby's exposure in 1963, the Cambridge spies, or characters based on them, have appeared in numerous novels, plays, feature films and television programmes.¹² As Simon Wilmetts and Christopher Moran have cited, Few Cold War stories have captivated the British public's imagination with such frenzied intensity and lengthy duration as the saga of the Cambridge Five. Indeed, it is difficult to think of another Cold War narrative that has been told and retold with such recurring frequency on British cinema and television.¹³

This ongoing fascination with the Cambridge spies was especially evident in the decade following Anthony Blunt's exposure. The list of works from the decade related to the Cambridge spies is extensive and impressive, drawing interest from some of the most acclaimed writers of the time. First up was Dennis Potter's television drama, Blade on the Feather (1980), which features a protagonist responsible for recruiting Burgess, Blunt and Philby. Julian Mitchell began work on Another Country (1981), his Olivier prize-winning play based on Guy Burgess's Eton schooldays, less than two months after the Blunt Affair. A major film based on Mitchell's play went into production in 1983, the same year that Alan Bennett's play about Burgess's post-defection life, An Englishman Abroad, aired on BBC television, later to be revived in 1988 along with a companion play, A Question of Attribution, about Anthony Blunt's duplicitous life as an art historian and MI5 informant. The latter play was turned into a feature film by the BBC in 1989.

The events leading up to Burgess's and Maclean's defection, and Blunt's role in their escape, was staged at the Greenwich Theatre in Robin Chapman's One of Us (1986). The script was modified and expanded the following year in the BBC production, Blunt: The Fourth Man, with Ian Richardson as Blunt and Anthony Hopkins as Burgess. The Cambridge spies, as one would expect, also figure prominently in some of the major spy fiction of the decade. Kim Philby appears in Frederick Forsyth's The Fourth Protocol (1984), playing a central role in a KGB plot to set off a nuclear bomb in Suffolk, and in A Perfect Spy (1986), John le Carré's protagonist, Magnus Pym, is a composite of Kim Philby and le Carré himself. These novels were turned into feature films and TV serials respectively in 1987. The Blunt Affair also prompted a reconsideration of cases directly related to Russia and spying, such as the Enigma project and the Profumo Affair. Ian McEwan's effort, The Imitation Game, which aired on Play for Today in 1980, was originally intended to portray Alan Turing and his work on the Enigma code. However, when McEwan discovered that the women working on intelligence at Bletchley Park were, by government order, shifted to domestic work such as cleaning and making tea, the play changed direction. Hugh Whitemore successfully took on the subject that McEwan passed over in Breaking the Code (1986), which stages the life and work of Turing, the brilliant mathematician who deciphered the Nazi Enigma code, only to be prosecuted by his own countrymen for indecent acts.

Clearly, if the Cambridge spies were gay men who betrayed their country, then Turing represented the reverse. Whitemore had also written a play about MI5's intrusive methods of surveillance in Pack of Lies (1983) and similar impositions on privacy and civil rights by the House Un-American Activities Committee in Concealed Enemies, which aired on American Public Television in 1984. Interest in John Profumo's affair with burlesque dancer, Christine Keeler—which took place around the time of Kim Philby's defection in 1963—was also revived in the 1980s. A. N. Wilson's novel, Scandal (1983), which features a Labour MP with a compromising sexual fetish who is entrapped by Soviet agents and discloses government secrets in order to keep his affair secret, is reminiscent of the Profumo Affair. In 1985, Australian screenwriter, Michael Thomas, and producer Joe Boyd approached the BBC with a plan to film a three-part series about the Profumo Affair, which was turned down on supposedly moral grounds. With financial backing from Palace Pictures and Miramax Films, the film, Scandal, was finally released in early 1989. In addition to offering a steamy dramatization of Secretary of War, John Profumo's affair with Keeler, the film exposes the Tory government's and the Special Branch's conspiracy to scapegoat Stephen Ward, the London osteopath and bon vivant responsible for bringing Profumo and Keeler together. By the end of the 1980s, as the Cold War came to a symbolic end with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, this fascination with the Cambridge spies, with official secrecy and treason went into decline.¹⁴

Although many of these authors and works have received critical attention, the body of literature, film and television devoted to the Cambridge spies and related themes collectively warrants more extensive consideration, and these texts’ significant contribution to the literary and filmic culture of the 1980s remains underappreciated. This book seeks to correct that oversight, by building on and amplifying scholarly work recently done on Cambridge spy narratives in British television and film. Simon Wilmetts and Christopher Moran, in Filming Treachery: British Cinema and Television's Fascination with the Cambridge spies (2013), offer a perceptive examination of several feature and television films since the late 1950s, arguing convincingly that the Cambridge Five cannot be understood merely as an historical event, but should instead be regarded as a story that resonated with core themes of British identity in the context of the Cold War and Britain's imperial decline.¹⁵ Another key scholarly voice on the Cambridge spies in television and film, Joseph Oldham, in his book, Paranoid Visions: Spies, Conspiracies, and State Secrets in British Television Drama (2017), and his articles on le Carré's and Dennis Potter's representations of the Cambridge spies, has identified the manner in which the Cambridge Five served as a loose prompt for invented allegorical scenarios that address the cultural and political imperatives of the day."¹⁶ This study seeks to expand upon this critical work, taking into account the known biographical facts about the Cambridge spies, much of which has come to light in recent years, in order to examine how these real historical figures are represented and reimagined in the context of Britain during the 1980s. To lay the groundwork for this study, this introduction provides a brief background on the Cambridge spies, how they were generally perceived by the public, particularly at the time of the Blunt Affair, and identifies some key historical issues of the decade that suggest why the Cambridge spies were especially relevant to the political and social discourse of the era.

In Dennis Potter's teleplay, Blade on the Feather, the protagonist, Jason Cavendish, dismisses the Cambridge spies as a bunch of drunks, queers, and lefties,¹⁷ a general impression of the spy ring that had been prevalent in Britain for decades. The very mention of the Cambridge spies, John Banville notes, conjures a world of louche living, sexual shenanigans, and covert betrayal.¹⁸ Their individual reputations were often construed in a reductive fashion that brings to mind the attributes Jean Brodie assigns her girls in Muriel Spark's novel: Burgess was famous for his flamboyance, Philby for his treachery, Blunt for his impassivity, Maclean for his dipsomania. They all came from privileged upper-middle-class backgrounds, attended elite public schools and, of course, went to Cambridge, and because they held these advantages their treason became, in the public mind, all the more astonishing and contemptible. Many wondered, as Peter Quennell put it, were they helpless victims, high-minded, muddle-headed conspirators, or determined but incompetent traitors?¹⁹ One crucial consequence of the body of literature and film devoted to them was not only to provide answers to these questions but also to humanize the Cambridge spies, to portray them as interesting and singular characters, to investigate and disclose the nuances of their beliefs and motives, and to complicate and challenge public perceptions about treason, which in the 1980s was still subject to capital punishment. One obvious factor behind their persistent appearance in the literature and film of the 1980s was that they were fascinating characters and, for many, their actions were inscrutable. As Fred Inglis observed, spies bewitch their audience with the spell of the double life, and they are so satisfyingly contradictory [that they become] the only political heroes in a culture in which all politicians become villains.²⁰

Among the Cambridge spies, Guy Burgess was probably the most intriguing, and he certainly possessed the greatest potential for adaptation in literature and film. He had also been dead since 1963 and his character could not be libeled, so writers could use his name and identity freely. Burgess was, according to those who knew him at public school and university, a man of exceptional gifts. He distinguished himself in sport and academics at the Dartmouth Naval College, won the Gladstone Fellowship at Eton, and took a first in History at Cambridge, where he was also offered a postgraduate fellowship. Burgess's friend, Goronwy Rees, recalled that Guy had a reputation for being the most brilliant undergraduate at Cambridge,²¹ and Andrew Boyle wrote that Burgess's effervescent and sometimes dazzling conversational gifts made him a welcome guest²² at dinner among fellows and dons. Such was his reputation for wit and charm that the actress Coral Browne, who was invited to lunch with Burgess in Moscow shortly before his death in 1963, anticipated meeting a latter-day Oscar Wilde. He was an accomplished pianist and skilled in drawing, delighting school friends with ingenious caricatures of masters and prefects. In addition, Burgess was known for his good looks, a cherubic beauty (later spoiled by excessive drinking and narcotics) that made him especially suitable for portrayal on stage and screen. He would be played by some of the most distinguished actors of the decade, including Alan Bates, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Ogilvy, Simon Callow, Rupert Everett and Daniel Day-Lewis. But there was a less appealing side to Burgess. He was self-destructive and volatile. He drank heavily, was unfaithful to his lovers, and his wit, often turned viciously against his closest friends, could be cutting and cruel. Cyril Connolly remembered Burgess as an affectionate bully capable of great acts of generosity like a magnate of the Dark Ages.²³ He was also notoriously unkempt, with shabby, unwashed clothes and dirty fingernails. He chewed garlic to maintain good health and exuded the smell—a detail that a number of writers pick up on. As his biographer, Andrew Lownie, observes, diametrically opposed views of Burgess were to be a pattern that repeated itself throughout his double life,²⁴ and that holds true of representations of him in film and literature in the 1980s. Through his many appearances over the decade, Burgess became a kind of mythical and protean figure, capable of being molded into whatever vision of him the author desired; he is alternately harmless and devious, innocent and dissolute, idealistic and cynical, a genius and a buffoon, a faithful friend and a confidence man. But, despite these mutations, he is always recognizably Guy Burgess.

Harold Kim Philby shared much of Burgess's literary and filmic appeal but for different reasons. Writers were drawn to him for his reputation as the most ruthless and elusive of the Cambridge spies, and for the widespread belief that he did the most damage to British national security. He was, as the title of Philip Knightley's biography has it, the Master Spy,²⁵ a man with deceptive charm and supreme cunning. Another of his biographers, Ben Macintyre, noted that his manners were exceptional: he was always the first to offer you a drink, to ask after your sick mother, and remember your children's names.²⁶ When under suspicion, he could talk himself out of the most compromising situations. Even while Philby was working full time for Soviet intelligence, his superiors at SIS were impressed by his diligence and high level of competence, hence he managed to rise in the ranks of British intelligence, handling nuclear secrets at Bletchley Park and passing them on to his KGB controllers. He eventually became MI6 liaison to the CIA in Washington, where he had access to American military secrets, including sensitive details about US military technology and manoeuvers. Philby left MI6 headquarters most Fridays with a briefcase full of classified documents, some of which unmasked British spies working behind the Iron Curtain, and because of his duplicity valuable Rusian defectors such as Walter Krivitsky and Konstantin Volkov were assassinated. John le Carré recalls that The scale of Philby's betrayal is barely imaginable … In Eastern Europe alone, dozens and perhaps hundreds of British agents were imprisoned, tortured, and shot.²⁷

And yet, despite his reputation for treachery, Philby was admired by those who knew him. He was quiet and not extroverted like Burgess, but many found him to be affable. He had stammered since the age of four and, though certainly clever, he had to work hard for his academic success. John le Carré said that, of the Cambridge spies, he detested Philby the most because he saw that he had so many of [his] attributes, such as the inverted snobbery of my class and generation and, at times while working as an undercover agent for MI5, le Carré sensed that he, too, was capable of going over to the other side.²⁸ But it is misleading to see Philby as a loyal subject led astray by KGB enticements; he was an earnest dissident committed to what he called the inner fortress of the world movement towards Soviet collectivism and the redistribution of wealth.²⁹ As Philby's first biographers, Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, contend, Philby's concern for politics was genuine. With great seriousness he travelled from the anti-fascism of the thirties through the struggle against Hitler to the global tensions of the Cold War.³⁰ He joined the Communist Party in 1933, the same year he graduated from Cambridge, using the proceeds from his second-class honors prize in economics to buy the complete works of Karl Marx. He took part in the Austrian Labor Movement, rescuing scores of anti-fascists from prison and execution by the Nazis. He married a Jewish and Communist Austrian woman, Litzi Friedmann, and helped her escape to England in 1934. He then went on to Spain, not to fight on the Republican side, as most of his leftist compatriots had done, but to work as a journalist reporting favorably on the Falangists and Franco, a cover that gave him access to intelligence that he passed on to his KGB controllers.

Philby's idealism and the humane, egalitarian acts to which it led in his early postgraduate years often goes unrecognized, even by writers sympathetic to him. Graham Greene, who worked with Philby in SIS during the war, admired his idealism, how he took great risks for a cause he believed in, and likened him to Catholics who sided with Philip of Spain and plotted against Queen Elizabeth in the early seventeenth century.³¹ Philby is also often remembered for his legendary, post-defection homesickness for England. His fondness for cricket, The Times crossword and the English landscape are central to Alan Bennett's portrayal of the homesick defector, Hilary, in The Old Country. More often, however, one is more likely to encounter hostile representations of Philby that focus on his alcoholism and womanizing (Philby married three times and left his wife behind when he defected to Russia), which Frederick Forsyth referred to as his desultory whoring and drinking³² and what le Carré identified as his execration for the bigotry and prejudices of the British ruling classes.³³

Although the exposure of Anthony Blunt served to revive the British public's fascination with the Cambridge spies, his character and career seemed to hold slight literary and theatrical potential. Admired by his students and colleagues at the Courtauld Institute, and widely respected for what George Steiner called the veracity and scrupulous integrity of his work, he was nevertheless found by most who knew him to be prickly and aloof.³⁴ His reputation for sangfroid was fostered in large part by his BBC interview in 1979, where he projected arrogance, impassivity and duplicitousness. Alan Bennett, the only author to make Blunt the central protagonist in his work, modeled him after certain academic types he had known whose expertise isolates them socially and intellectually, leading to a personality trait best described, according to Bennett, as does-not-suffer-fools-gladly.³⁵ The prevalence with which this impression of Blunt was disseminated is unfortunate. His genius, his homosexuality, his passion for obscure art, and of course the ostracism he faced when he was unmasked, led to a life of profound isolation.³⁶ When writing Blunt's biography in the 1980s, Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman discovered that Blunt's life was unexpectedly fascinating, particularly in relation to his friendship with Burgess.³⁷ The two shared a flat in Soho during the war, hosting guests and squatters that included many of London's brightest young intellectuals and artists, and he and Burgess were central to London's gay/leftist underground culture at the time. Sadly, his relationship with Burgess, which held great dramatic potential, was passed over at a time when narratives about relationships between gay men were simply not viable. One could imagine the script going something like this: as Cambridge undergraduates, Blunt, a reserved, slightly prudish postgraduate meets a dazzling, libertine underclassman. He falls desperately in love with him, joins the Communist Party, modifies his own critical practice to fit the theoretical Marxism of his lover. His devotion to this man, however, goes unrequited as his lover's amorous impulses defy Blunt's expectations of fidelity. Still Blunt would do anything for him, and, years later, when it appears that Burgess is going to be exposed as a Communist spy, Blunt risks his own esteemed reputation and professional standing to assist Burgess's escape. Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew both Burgess and Blunt well, was convinced that Blunt was only a Communist because of Guy. The thing he really cared about was art, says Muggeridge. My opinion is that the real motive is that he was madly, crazily in love with Burgess.³⁸ The relationship between Blunt and Burgess is a compelling story worthy of stage and screen, and in it there existed a degree of affection that public perceptions of him tended to efface. Still, only playwright Robin Chapman went near such subject matter, offering brief glimpses into their companionship in One of Us and Blunt: The Fourth Man, but the considerable merits of these works, which I take up in Chapter 4, offer only a cursory glimpse of the intricacies of the Blunt-Burgess relationship.

Of the Cambridge spies, Donald Maclean has probably received the least attention by dramatists and writers, possibly because his post-defection life did not fit in with what Maclean's biographer, Roland Phillips, calls the twilight brigade community of defectors, down-at-heel, and wondering how he got there.³⁹ Less dazzling than Burgess, lacking the charm of Philby or the intellectual prestige of Blunt, Maclean was often mentioned but rarely seen in the literature and film of the 1980s. His defection made him infamous, but only because he escaped with the more dazzling figure of Burgess, and he seems destined to be remembered as a kind of sidekick or supporting player. Andrew Boyle painted him as shy and clumsy,⁴⁰ while John le Carré dismisses him as a chubby drunk with a sneer.⁴¹ Goronwy Rees recalled an embarrassing encounter with Maclean at the Gargoyle Club in London, shortly before his defection, in which a besotted Maclean shouted abuse at him, accused him of being a rat, only to stumble away before Rees could retaliate.⁴² Boyle casts Maclean as a discontented idealist aggrieved by the failures of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government, in which his father served as a Cabinet member.⁴³ Boyle also emphasizes Maclean's Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, tracing his Marxist idealism to a Calvinist guilt over his own class privilege, a kind of ethical purity that Roland Phillips, in his recent biography, A Spy