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Degenerate Art on Donald Trump's concentration camps and what can be done to resist their building: "When you consider the number – again, in the tens of millions—that the administration is promising to detain or deport, and when you look at the network of planned facilities that we already know about, what we’re witnessing is the express repetition of a project on the scale of the larger concentration camp systems in history – the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labour camps in the People’s Republic of China."

"Westminster’s moral compass went haywire a long time ago, and no party knows how to navigate its way out of the swamp. The political graveyard is full of those who blithely – and fatally – assumed that their troops were cleaner than their opponents." Sam Bright wonders what happened to Keir Starmer's concern about sleaze.

"OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, acknowledged in its own research that large language models will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering." Gyana Swain reports.

Charles Taylor that Holywood's Oscar-winning pictures are not where we should look for art that speaks to the danger of this moment: "In American cinema, it’s always been easier to find real meat in B movies and Westerns and noirs and war movies and melodramas than in their high budget counterparts. Those movies, often made on the cheap for a quick profit, couldn’t avail themselves of the production values that, when it came to thorny topics, too often shellacked the life out of their subjects."

"Mother was given the book to read, but I don’t think she read it, which was probably for the best." Bridget Osborne talks to Simon Surtees, one of the boys who appeared in Peter Brook's 1963 film of Lord of the Flies.

Scandalous History introduces us to three bandit queens of the Wild West: Belle Starr, Pearl Hart and Laura Bullion.

Chancellor announces £1.5m fund for Britain's elite chess players

Rishi Sunak established a £500,000 fund to support Britain's elite chess players when he was prime minister. The new Labour government scrapped it.

But now Rachel Reeves – a former  British under-14 girls champion herself – has announced that a larger sum is earmarked for the same purpose.

Leonard Barden, in his Guardian column, quotes her as saying:

“We are allocating £1.5m to help identify, support and elevate top tier players who have the potential to compete at a global level.”

And he explains:

The new support, announced along with a £500m grant for youth service projects, is more precisely targeted to the best talents, and will act as a spur to players like England’s youngest grandmaster, Shreyas Royal, 16, and England’s youngest Olympiad player, Bodhana Sivanandan, 10, both of whom met the chancellor a few weeks ago at 11 Downing Street. 

Currently the best prospect relative to age is Supratit Banerjee, 11, who played on top board for the Surrey team which retained the inter-counties championship this month and made a creditable draw with England’s No 2, David Howell, in a clock simultaneous match last week. The Scot, Frederick Gordon, 15, has also impressed. 

Barden goes on to cite similar schemes that proved successful in England, the US and the old Soviet Union.

One feature of Rishi Sunak's package for chess isn't being revived: the money he gave for chess tables in parks.

It was always hard to see why this was a matter for central government, but the plan – like the teaching of Latin in state schools – was attacked out of both snobbery and inverse snobbery.

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"Part of this is down to the increasing centralisation of politics. The prime minister’s role has expanded dramatically over the decades, and cabinet government has been a fiction for a long time (Nigel Lawson claimed that cabinet meetings were the only time during the week that he got a rest). Even minor departmental decisions now have to be signed off by the centre and slotted into a communications grid." Sam Freedman on the rise and rise of political advisers.

Luke McGee suspects Putin is up against his biggest opponent yet - Trump's ego: "Trump clearly wants something that looks like a peace deal so he can show off what a great negator he is. If Trump now sees Putin as the block to a deal, that is a problem for Putin, as he has to make a choice between looking weak domestically or losing whatever goodwill he had with Trump’s White House."

"Yes, Pecksniff and Trump are bullshit artists of the highest order and neither ever experiences the least bit of remorse." Robin Bates argues that Charles Dickens, with Mr Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, anticipated Donald Trump.

Ray Newman watches Some People, which was made in Bristol in 1962 with a young cast including Ray Brooks and David Hemmings: "The church opened in 1956 and was typical of the space age houses of worship built on overspill estates all over the country in the post-war period. Unfortunately, though it looked astonishing, it was plagued with structural problems and was demolished in 1994, which only adds to the value Some People holds as a record of a time and place."

Benjamin Poore says that Shostakovich spoke truth to power - both Nazi and Communist - through his Babi Yar Symphony.

"Without any particular training, the animals - like human babies - appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do." Christa Lesté-Lasserre discusses a study that supports my view that cats are much cleverer than they choose to show us.

Forget Chess Masters: Watch a classic Boris Spassky game

If Chess Masters: The Endgame was designed to encourage people to play the game, then it worked with me. I watched two minutes of it before going online and playing chess myself.

I will give it a longer look, but it's clearly nothing like The Master Game, which players of my generation remember with gratitude'.

So here instead is the British grandmaster Daniel King analysing a win by the great Boris Spassky, who died last month.

Spassky is White here, and his opponent is the American grandmaster Larry Evans. Their game comes from the USSR v USA match at the Varna Olympiad (the world chess team championship) in 1962.

This game is a good example of what I wrote about him the day after he died:

He was brave and fluent player, who made you feel that you could play attacking chess like that too.

If you play chess at all, I think you will enjoy this video.

Lech Wałęsa likens White House treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy to a Soviet-era interrogation

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The former Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Wałęsa has written to Donald Trump, condemning the US president’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine.

His letter, reports Notes from Poland, was co-signed by 38 other former political prisoners of Poland’s communist regime:

"We watched your conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with horror and distaste," wrote the group, referring to Trump’s meeting with Zelensky in the White House on Friday, at which the pair were expected to sign an agreement but which instead turned into an angry confrontation.

"We were also horrified by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of the one we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service [SB, the communist secret police] and from courtrooms in communist courts," they added.

"Prosecutors and judges, commissioned by the all-powerful communist political police, also explained to us that they held all the cards and we had none," wrote the signatories. "They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people were suffering because of us."

Wałęsa is something of a controversial figure - he has made illiberal statements on refugees and gay parliamentarians - but, unlike Donald Trump, he knows the cost of political courage.

Boris Spassky died yesterday at the age of 88

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Boris Spassky, former world chess champion, died yesterday. His match against Bobby Fischer in 1972 put the game on the front pages of the world's newspapers.

He was brave and fluent player, who made you feel that you could play attacking chess like that too. He was equally at home playing king's pawn and queen's pawn openings as White - a novelty in those days, but now something expected of every grandmaster. I'm reminded of the way W.G. Grace revolutionised batting in cricket by being able to play off the front and back foot.

There's a good obituary in chess.com, which gives full details of his career and some examples of his brilliant play.

In one of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, I quoted David Edmonds and John Eidinow's Bobby Fischer Goes to War:

In the summer of 1946, Spassky passed his days watching the players in a chess pavilion "with a black knight on top" on an island in Leningrad's river Neva. "Long queen moves fascinated me," he recalls. "I fell in love with the white queen. I dreamed about caressing her in my pocket, but I did not dare to steal her. Chess is pure for me." 

Spassky had learnt how the pieces move by watching older children play when he was sent to an orphanage during the Siege of Leningrad. When he was back home, his first trainer used to feed him as well as teach chess. He remembered those summer days in the chess pavilion:

He had thirteen kopeks for his fare and a glass of water with syrup to see him through until the last streetcar carried him home. His feet were bare. "Soldiers' boots were my worst enemy."

As I added in that column, chess can be a great escape.

Cockburn's TV commercial with Robin Bailey and Richard Marner

This cracked us up in the late 1970s.

Though he often played Germans, notably Colonel von Strohm in 'Allo 'Allo!, Richard Marner was born in the Soviet Union.

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

******

When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

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Janan Ganesh argues that the Tories' greatest disservice to the UK has been to misunderstand the US: "A bilateral trade deal with Washington was meant to offset the loss of unfettered access to the EU market. That no such deal emerged was bad enough (though as predictable as sunrise). But then Donald Trump and later Joe Biden embraced a wider protectionism. World trade is fragmenting as a result. So for Britain, double jeopardy: no agreement with the US, but also less and less prospect of agreements with third countries."

"This week’s official government report into the atrocities of Alderney suggests more than 1000 might have perished as a result of over-work, starvation, disease, beatings and being executed. The story of the brutal sadism of the Nazis on Alderney is not just a Jewish story. The clear majority of those who died were from the Soviet Union." Antony Barnett and Martin Bright on Lord Pickles's Alderney Expert Review.

Elisabeth Braw says countries mulling wider national service plans should learn from the Norwegian model. It's voluntary, selective and places on the scheme are highly prized.

 Steve Bowbrick finds Disney's Song of the South deserves its problematic reputation: "The movie’s full of inexplicably dark, even distressing references and cues. In an animated sequence Br’er Fox sets a trap and it’s a literal noose strung from a tree. The tar-baby sequence is inexplicably awful. Some superficial effort was made to place the film after emancipation but it makes no difference - Disney’s movie is an inescapably antebellum artefact."

"Of the webpages that existed in 2013, for instance, 38 per cent are now lost. Even newer pages are disappearing: 8 per cent of pages that existed in 2023 are no longer available." Peter Black explains why he quotes at length on his blog, rather than relying on links.

When I first joined the Liberator editorial collective, we held our paste ups - Cow Gum and Letrset, isn't it? Marvelous. - in an office at Gray's Inn. A London Inheritance looks at how its South Square was reconstructed after wartime bombing.

Chess, Freud and paranoia: Another column for the JCPCP

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Another of my Sighcology columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. There are three more posted on this blog, covering private schools, Davids and mental hospitals.

More about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Publishing site. 

Reuben Fine could have been a contender. When Alexander Alekhine, the reigning world chess champion, died in 1946, the game’s authorities announced a tournament involving the world’s strongest players to find the new champion. And Fine, along with three Soviets, a fellow American and a Dutchman, was among the six players invited.

Fine, however, declined to take part, arguing that the conditions favoured the Soviet players. He soon dropped out of elite chess altogether, preferring to concentrate on his career as a psychotherapist.

As an orthodox Freudian, Fine took a particular view of chess. Bill Harston, writing Fine’s obituary for the Independent in 1993, explained:

Drawing heavily on the earlier writings of Freud's biographer Ernest Jones, Fine supported the view that chess is an embodiment of the Oedipus Complex, with the father-figure King ('indispensable, all-important, irreplaceable, yet weak and requiring protection') and powerful mother-figure Queen providing the elements for the player to enact his parricidal fantasies. The pieces, according to Fine, are mostly phallic symbols.

His writings have been widely quoted to explain the dearth of strong women chess-players and the absence of homosexuals at the highest levels of the game.

******

In 1972 an American player broke the hegemony that the Soviet Union had established after Alekhine’s and won the world chess championship. That was Bobby Fischer, whose match with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik acted as a symbol of the Cold War and put game on the world’s front pages.

Fine wrote a book about Fischer and his achievement. In it he revealed that for many years ‘chess players approached me with the request to try to help Bobby out of his personal problems. In spite of his genius, he was socially awkward, provocative, argumentative and unhappy’.

In fact, or so Fine wrote, he had already tried to help Fischer. Bobby’s mother had consulted him soon after her son had won the US Junior Championship at the age of 13:

He came to see me about half a dozen times. Each time we played chess for an hour or two. In order to maintain a relationship with him, I had to win, which I did. ... My family remembers how furious he was after each encounter, muttering that I was “lucky”.

Hopeful that I might help him to develop in other directions, I started a conversation at one point about what he was doing in school. As soon as school was mentioned, he became furious, screamed, “You have tricked me,” and promptly walked out. For years afterward, whenever I met him in clubs or tournaments he gave me angry looks, as though I had done him some immeasurable harm by trying to get a little closer to him.

******

Dr Fine might have got on better with Fischer’s opponent in the match that won him the world title, because Boris Spassky’s reminiscences of first encountering chess are pregnant with Freudian meaning – as the psychiatrist said of Basil after staying at Fawlty Towers, “There’s enough material here for an entire conference.”

David Edmonds and John Eidinow wrote in Bobby Fischer Goes to War:

In the summer of 1946, Spassky passed his days watching the players in a chess pavilion "with a black knight on top" on an island in Leningrad's river Neva. "Long queen moves fascinated me," he recalls. "I fell in love with the white queen. I dreamed about caressing her in my pocket, but I did not dare to steal her. Chess is pure for me." 

Spassky had learnt how the pieces move by watching older children play when he was sent to an orphanage during the Siege of Leningrad. When he was back home, his first trainer used to feed him as well as teach chess. He remembered those summer days in the chess pavilion:

He had thirteen kopeks for his fare and a glass of water with syrup to see him through until the last streetcar carried him home. His feet were bare. "Soldiers' boots were my worst enemy."

Chess can be a great escape.

******

Bobby Fischer never defended his world title. The conditions he insisted upon proved unacceptable to the game’s authorities as they would have given him an unfair advantage over his challenger. So Fischer walked away from chess.

His only return to the game came in 1992, when he and Spassky played another match. Fischer won again, but neither player was the force he had been 20 years before. Over those two decades there had been worrying reports about Fischer’s mental health, and this second match caused him further problems. It was held in the short-lived Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was under United Nations sports sanctions, and the United States issued a warrant for Fischer’s arrest. He was never to return there.

This did nothing for his state of mind and his raging paranoia was exposed to the world by his reaction to the terrorist outrage of 9/11: 

"[I hope] the country will be taken over by the military – they'll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders."

It was Iceland, the scene of his greatest triumph, that stepped in to offer Fischer asylum, in both senses of the word. He died there in 2008.

******

I could conclude with the words of Bill Hartston, who was briefly Britain’s best chess player at the start of the Seventies and later became a journalist and then a star of Gogglebox: “Chess doesn't drive people mad: it keeps mad people sane.” But maybe chess isn’t a good occupation if you have a tendency to paranoia, as you spend your life encountering ingenious people who are plotting your downfall.

And paranoia about professional chess was never confined to Bobby Fischer nor obviously unjustified. There were those in 1946 who wondered whether the Soviets had murdered Alekhine to hasten the crowning of their first world champion, while Reuben Fine’s doubts about the ensuing tournament appeared justified when one Soviet player contrived to lose all four of his games against another.

Bertie Wooster goes to Russia: How Britain tried to reverse the Russian Revolution

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews Anna Reid's A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution in the new London Review of Books:

"A really nasty, dirty little war ... Waste of time, money and everything else" was the way Christopher Bilney, who served as a seaplane pilot in the Caucasus in 1919, remembered it in old age. 

He was one of many British veterans whose memories of Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20 were "uneasy, with guilt and a sense of failure lurking beneath surface jollity". The American veterans - who had less reason for guilt, given that their nation’s participation was relatively benign - sometimes retrospectively compared it to Vietnam. 

In the diplomatic world, a Western consensus developed that the intervention was something best forgotten. Indeed, both Richard Nixon in 1972 and Margaret Thatcher twelve years later succeeded so well in this that they were able to assure Soviet interlocutors that their countries had never been at war with each other.

Fitzpatrick makes the book sound a good read:

The novelty of Reid’s approach comes largely from her generous use of participants’ diaries, letters and memoirs, mainly British, which makes her story unusually entertaining and takes us back into a world of British upper-class twits familiar from Evelyn Waugh, Osbert Lancaster and P. G. Wodehouse – at times, it reads almost like 'Bertie Wooster goes to Russia.' 

But its story is a dark one. The White (i.e. anti-Bolshevik) Russians on whose behalf we had intervened had antisemitism as a central plank of their propaganda, and there were pogroms against the Jewish population of Ukraine while British troops were stationed there.

Mention of Ukraine suggests a worrying parallel, and Fitzpatrick concludes:

Perhaps the real takeaway from Reid’s history isn’t so much a lesson as a premonition: that not too far down the track, we could be witnessing a shamefaced withdrawal of Western support that leaves the Ukrainians - like the Russian Whites a century earlier - to sort out the mess with Moscow on their own.

GUEST POST Sex, spies and scandal: The John Vassall Affair

Historian Alex Grant explains why an often-overlooked spy scandal of the early 1960s matters – and  how it changed British journalism, and security vetting, for ever.

"He had 'minor public school' printed all over him," an old friend told me during my research into the life of the clerk turned spy, John Vassall. "Because he was not in the same social class as the ambassador and other senior diplomats, he hadn’t the nerve to go to them when he got himself in a spot of bother."

Who was John Vassall, what was this "spot of bother" and why is it important? With typical British understatement, the term a "spot of bother" was a euphemism for some of the worst possible predicaments - rape, entrapment and blackmail. And Vassall was entrapped by his delicate position in Britain's class structure, as well as by his sexuality.

Vassall, the son of a Church of England vicar, was born in 1924. After being forced to leave his minor public school - Monmouth - in 1941 (his impecunious parents could no longer afford its fees) he served briefly in the RAF and then found work as a junior clerical officer at the Admiralty, where he beavered away quietly until he was sensationally exposed as a Soviet spy, prosecuted and imprisoned in 1962. 

Only then was it discovered that Vassall had been photographed in compromising positions while working at the British embassy in Moscow in 1954. Over the next seven years he had been blackmailed into handing hundreds, if not thousands, of British defence secrets over to his Soviet handlers, both in Moscow and in London. 

Vassall’s arrest and trial, and a subsequent judicial enquiry by Lord Cyril Radcliffe, dominated the front pages of newspapers for several months. The press’s salacious reporting was full of homophobic innuendo and half-truths. 

As a gay man being prosecuted for spying, several years before decriminalisation, Vassall was given no quarter. Newspapers, and the judge at his trial, overlooked the ugly truth: that Vassall had not been seduced in Moscow, but had been drugged and gang-raped.

The scandal led to the resignation of a well-regarded government minister - Tam Galbraith, whose private office Vassall had worked at in 1957-9  - amid what was arguably Britain’s first modern tabloid witch-hunt. There were hysterical rumours that Vassall was not a lone operator, but part of a large, and secret, homosexual cabal in Westminster and Whitehall. Macmillan's government almost fell.  

Two reporters were sent to jail for refusing to reveal their sources, which caused lasting fury on Fleet Street, and helped to fan the flames of the Profumo scandal a few months later. A crackdown after Vassall’s conviction led to a tightening of woefully lax security procedure at the Admiralty - and the modern system of 'positive vetting' for certain civil service posts, which still persists today.

Yet the Vassall scandal is barely remembered now. The Profumo one, which followed fast on its coat-tails, seems to have erased memories of Vassall, even though it was just as a big a story at the time. And remarkably, apart from a homophobic account of Vassall’s espionage, published in 1964, no book has ever been written about it – until now.

Another reason why Vassall was treated so unsympathetically was that he was on the cusp of two social classes Curiously, he was both a snob and a victim of snobbery. Although he was presentable, well-spoken and a vicar’s son, he had never risen higher than clerical officer. His social pretensions irritated his colleagues just as much as his campness did. 

There is evidence that being cold-shouldered by more senior diplomats at the British embassy in Moscow may have driven him into the arms of Russian men. Naively, Vassall never suspected that most of them were covert KGB agents.

Although Vassall died in 1996, I managed to track down several people who knew him,  including two women who worked with him in an archive after his release from prison in the 1970s, when he used the alias John Phillips to avoid his past. More importantly, in the autumn of 2022, the National Archives released thousands of documents on MI5’s surveillance of Vassall, and their breathtakingly intrusive investigations of everyone he knew socially. 

MI5’s files confirm for the first time that Vassall had relationships with two Conservative MPs -  Fergus Montgomery and Sir Harmar Nicholls - before his arrest. By a neat coincidence I live in Oundle, in what used to be Nicholl’s Peterborough constituency, where Nicholls is still fondly remembered as a diligent MP, about whom no whisper of a connection to Vassall was ever heard).

While neither MP seems to have known anything about his spying, they managed to keep their names out of the papers and their careers continued until the 1980s and 1990s. Two other MPs – Tam Galbraith and Denzil Freeth – were not so lucky. Galbraith spent the last 18 years if his life on the backbenches, while Freeth was forced to leave parliament entirely in 1964, merely because of rumours he had once attended a party with Vassall. 

Once Vassall was released, he found that many of his old friends and lovers had been persecuted or dismissed from the civil service in Britain, America and Australia.

Then, just as now, Westminster and Whitehall were brutal places, where careers were either brutally cut short, or gilded, depending on luck, and what friends in high places you had. Despite Vassall’s constant name-dropping, he really stood no chance against a British state that wanted to make an example of him, and which ignored the role that its own homophobia had played in his downfall. 

Some aspects of the Vassall scandal – Minox cameras, undeveloped films in cardboard boxes sealed with Scotch tape, Vassall taking ministerial boxes up to Galbraith in Scotland on the night train from Euston – seem very old hat nowadays. But others are all too familiar. 

One would hope that Vassall would be treated more leniently by the courts today, as a victim of sexual violence rather than an ideological traitor. But would the press, and social media? report the story more sensitively than they did in the early 1960s? I am not so sure.   

Alex Grant’s book on the Vassall scandal - Sex, Spies and Scandal - can be ordered from Biteback Publishing. www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/sex-spies-and-scandal. You can read his blog Alex Grant and follow him on Twitter.

Neal Ascherson and fables of the reconstruction of Germany

This blog's hero Neal Ascherson writes on the former East Germany in the current London Review of Books:

Travelling around Mecklenburg in 1991, in what had been the GDR six months before, was a disorienting experience. Again and again, I was reminded of Reconstruction in America, the traumatic aftermath of the Civil War. Here again was a sullen, defeated society. 

There had been no gunfire, but West Germany felt as victorious as the American North must have done in 1865. Here once more came the carpetbaggers, smart operators from Frankfurt or Düsseldorf pouring into East Germany to loot its collapsing industrial and service economy. While silent locals stood with their bicycles in the rain, gleaming black BMWs swept past carrying Treuhand officials on their way to privatise or close more state factories. 

As in the old South, a whole ideology justifying the power structure had been switched off, and its guardians – in this case, the SED, the National People’s Army and the immense web of the Stasi and its informers – found themselves out on the street.

Since then the gap between living standards in the former East and West, though still 26 per cent in 2020, has narrowed. And yet, just as sophisticated Manhattanites despair at the South’s refusal to forget a past that would be better forgotten, West German ‘Wessis’ are unnerved to find how many ‘Ossis’ insist on remembering a disconcertingly ‘other’ life in that phantom Germany.

Ascherson writes beautifully and is endlessly interesting. Another point he brings up is that the East German Communists saw themselves as the true heirs and interpreters of Karl Marx's thought, and thus morally and intellectually superior to the ruling party in the Soviet Union.