The British Diplomatic Service — Facts and Fantasies
| Date | 01 October 1982 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9256.1982.tb00066.x |
| Author | Geoffrey K Fry |
| Published date | 01 October 1982 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
THE BRITISH DIPLOMATIC SERVICE
-
FACTS AND FANTASIES
GEOFFREY
K
FRY
Lmages
of
the
D-&Zonrat.lc
Sewice
That the celebrations
for
the Foriegn Office's bicentenary havecoincided with
a political disaster in the Falklands should have surprised few students of British
government, certainly not those who remember that the centenary of the Northcote-
Trevel an Report on the Permanent Civil Service coincided with the Crichel Down
spectrum of views.
from
the spying activities
of
Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two diplomats who
defected
to
the Soviet Union in
1951,
an affair which the subsequent defection of
'Kim'
Philby and the more recent unmasking of Anthony Blunt have kept in the limelight.
Books such as Andrew Boyle's Climate for Treason have revealed an extraordinary
background to such incidents. In the vital summer of 1940, for instance, an
apparently sober Burgess nearly convinced a high level meeting that the way to end
the war was to wait for a westerly wind and then send off large numbers of balloons
in the direction
of
Central Europe, hoping that incendiary bombs attached to them
would set the cornfields of the Hungarian Puszta on fire and starve the Germans out
(p.204). Drunken and dissolute behaviour by both Burgess and Maclean was ignored
by the Foreign Office, along with obvious clues to their political allegiances. Even
thei
r
excesses were matchad in
1946
when, on transferring as Ambassador
from
the
British Embassy in Moscow to that in Washington,
Sir
Archibald Clark Kerr (Lord
Inverchapel) brought his Russian valet with him, as a parting gift from Stalin.
valet was given a free run of the Washington Embassy, before eventually leaving to
run a fish and chip shop in Scotland (pp.323-24). The Foreign Office's involvement
at the end of the War with the enforced repatriation to the Soviet Union
-
and,
hence, to their deaths
-
of
thousands of people who were not even that country's
citizens has been another source
of
scandal, even though the political responsibility
of
Sir
Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan seems clear.
Calls from right wing journals like The Spectator for
KGB
spies to be flushed
out of the Foreign Office,
if
necessary by the offer of a once-and-for-all amnesty,
contrast with the more familiar left wing suggestions that the Office is a nest of
Conservative sympathizers. Like many such beliefs about British government this one
seems
to
originate with Harold Laski.
It
appears
to
rest on
a
simple correlation
between diplomats having socially privileged backgrounds and Oxbridge educations
which are said to lead them inevitably
to
have a class interest inimical to that of
the Labour Party.
It
does seem strange how social critics and Labour leaders avoid
behaving similarly, given that their origins are often much the same unlike the
impeccable working class credentials
of,
say, Ramsay Macdonald.
A
further irony
is
that Burgess and Maclean were the very class archetypes at whom Laski directed his
fire, yet both certainly did their utmost
for
what they defined as socialism, as did
Philby. Laski seemed
to
find sinister the well known rapport that existed between
the proletarian Ernest Bevin and the Foreign Office. The 'Laski view' tends
to
be
expressed in a sufficiently generalized
form
to be incapable of substantiation
-
or refutation.
Affair
r
.
The Foreign Office has always attracted political suspicion from a wide
For the right wing the reputation of the Foreign Office has never really recovered
The
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