Tundan Sabah’s wonderfully pungent comment echoes some, but not all of my thoughts, regarding these ‘revelations’. His deliciously contemptuous polemic helped me to clarify my own thoughts, the measure of writing at it’s best.   The raw data collected by MI5 is enough to convict the man in 2015, yet not enough to be arrested and put on trial for treason at the time? We now have the proof? That raw data is just that, no more no less. But what a perfect opportunity to air the perpetual grievances that the Financial Times holds for any political manifestation of the ‘Left’. That ‘Left’ is prima facie guilty of subversion/treason, of the deeply held beliefs of the defenders of the predations of Capital and it’s actors.Rational analysis gives way to the usual politically calculated hysterics.

For those who are interested John Banville in his novel The Untouchable has taken as his starting point Anthony Blunt and the whole circle around him. The Cambridge Five and even that Establishment stalwart Graham Greene appears, in the most unappealing literary guise. Banville’s novel provides the insights that I wrote about earlier in my comment.

The question remains, what about the double life of the closeted homosexual have to do with the double life of the spy? Was that double life just a habit of being, that dovetailed so well with the life of the spy? As a kind of nihilist/romantic delusion? And did the animus for the heterosexual establishment play a part in the emotional makeup of these spies? Cedric Belfrage wasn’t gay, but the essay offers an opportunity to reflect, even in a small way, on the larger picture of Britain in the thirties, and almost to the present moment of The New Cold War.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c3c3bf66-4751-11e5-af2f-4d6e0e5eda22.html#axzz3jRy9p98r