An Affair of State - Phillip Knightley & Caroline Kennedy

 Phillip Knightley was a doyen of investigative reporters, a key member of the Sunday Times Insight team which broke the thalidomide scandal.   Knightley's other preoccupation was espionage.   This, issued towards the end of his active career, is his account of the Profumo Affair of 1963, the year he arrived in Britain from his native Australia.   By 1987 many of the principals were long dead and Jack Profumo had redeemed himself by charitable work.   Knightley's take on what by then had been exhaustively worked over is twofold: the weaselly behaviour of the servile British Press, and Scotland Yard working hand-in-glove with their governmental masters to frame Stephen Ward.

This gives Knightley and co-writer Kennedy a couple of major problems.   Firstly, they are unable to give us any meaningful insight into the character of Ward, who of course committed the suicide on the eve of being found guilty of a relatively minor sex offence - living on the immoral earnings of the prostitutes Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies.   Why would Ward, a successful society osteopath and artist need to take money from a couple of fairly low-rent tarts?   What esactly were his personal predilections?  Knightley and Kennedy have done their journalistic duty and interviewed loads of people who knew him, but none seem able to offer much.   Most are honest enough to admit they liked him but what appealed to them about him does not emerge.   And (something I had not fully realised) Ward was 50 years old when he died.   How can someone live, often in the public eye, for half a century and leave no perceptible trace?   The only answer, which is not addressed in An Affair of State, is that traces have been officially erased.

The second problem is also skirted.   The scandal itself was about Profumo lying to Parliament when. in a personal statement, he denied having sex with Keeler.   Powerful men (Profumo was Minister for War) have always been prone to the lure of a bit of rough.   It gets headlines when it comes out but the scandal here was the blatant lie.   Why then would the Establishment think that prosecuting Ward for running prostitutes and using his posh flat as a brothel would somehow restore the Macmillan government's credibility.   It should be noted, by the way, that the frame-up was so unsuccessful, the jury cleeared Ward of most of the charges and all the serious ones, leaving only the lesser count - a convition which any barrister capable of working his mouth would be confident of overturning on appeal.   The two young women obviously lived off him, not the other way round.)

I do not dispute for a second that Ward was framed.   The evidence Knightley and Kennedy set down is overwhelming.   It was hot news in 1987 and would have been incredible in 1987.   Nowadays, however, we all know that the only reason for the Met's existence (rather than individual local police forces) is to do the goverment's bidding.   The government has to rely on the Met because it cannot trust MI5, whose role in this affair is truly murky.   In 1963, of course, the secret services were reeling from the defection of Burgess and Maclean.   Philby too had gone but his defection wasn't confirmed until the week after Ward's suicide.   The Cambridge Five were MI6.   MI5 is supposedly the home secret service.   In 1963 it was headed by Roger Hollis, who Peter Wright, the actual hunter of moles at the time, later accused of being one.   There is no doubt whatsoever that Stephen Ward warned them about Profumo's dalliance with Keeler long before the scandal broke.   Clearly MI5 did not inform senior ministers, or they would never have let Profumo make his personal statement.   What happened there, then?   It's not like they weren't relevant issues.   Profumo was Minister for War and President Kennedy in 1963 whether to share US atomic capabilities with Britain.   Ward told MI5 that Keeler was also involved with Soviet Naval Attache Eugene Ivanov.   No problem there?   Apparently not.

It's a fascinating read, that raises many questions.   Perhaps the best of its kind.

Battle on Venus - William F Temple

 Intrigued by his Four-Sided Triangle, I decided to explore more of William F Temple's work and found several of his lesser output in an online bookshop in Liverpool.   This one is actually a double bonus - an Ace Double from 1963 - two Temple short novellas or long short stories for the price of one.

Like many in the second rank of Fifties sci fi writers Temple began in traditional book format and was reduced to pulp publications to keep going.   Battle on Venus is typical.   The first Earth mission crashlands  on Venus to find the air breathable and the planet at war with itself.   Tanks and aircraft and torpedos and giant cutting wheels battle around them.   While the crew try to repair the spaceship explorer George Starkey sets off to find whoever is in charge of the machines.   But first he finds a Venusian girl with a gift for thieving.  She leads him to the immortal being who has created the war to allieviate the boredom of immortality and who has thus wiped out 99% of the planet's population by remote control.

As ever it is the ideas which intrigue - the window they open on the scienctific consensus of the time.   In 1963 we knew that Venus is shrouded by poisonous clouds but had no idea at all what lay beneath.   Actually, nowadays many scientists wonder if Venus was Earth's twin, a lost paradise, which leads some to wonder if life began there and migrated here.   In 1963 I suspect that idea was confined to outliers like C S Lewis and William F Temple.   Automated warfare is another idea which has come to fruition.   I liked the concept of Teleos, caps with electronics which enable Starkey and the Venusians to communicate by thought.

Battle on Venus is fun and interesting.   By this time Temple had developed more of a gift for character than in Four-Sided Triangle.   The 'Jonah', Captain Freiberg, is amusing, as is the petulant immortal Senilde.   Mara, the thief girl, is more interesting than our hero.

The Unfortunate Englishman - John Lawton

John Lawton seems to derive great enjoyment from playing with the internet. There are loads of hits when you Goggle him, about half of which are for this John Lawton, the writer not the musician. But none of them manage to tell you any more than you already know. He is the author of eight Troy novels (the Metropolitan Police detective, not the ancient city) and two Wilderness novels, of which this is the second. Wilderness is actually Holderness, but let's not get bogged down. He, Lawton, seems to have worked in TV on both sides of the Atlantic, though we are not told in what capacity or the titles of any programmes. He now, apparently, lives in Derbyshire.


This playfulness, this layering of truth, is carried forward into The Unfortunate Englishman and presumably the Troy series. Characters all have two or three identities on the go and none are what they seem to be. All the books are set in the Cold War era, with a particular focus on the years 1960 to 1963, about which Lawton has written a non-fiction history.


The Unfortunate Englishman starts in 1963 but zips happily back and forth, from the end of WW2 to 1965 across 171 very short, snappy chapters. Essentially it is about a bumbling part-time spy, Geoffrey Masefield, who is caught photographing top secret sites during a trip to Moscow. Joe Wilderness, an East End criminal turned agent, is sent back to Berlin by his boss and father-in-law Alec Burne-Jones to arrange the exchange of Masefield for Bernard Alleyn (formerly Leonid Liubimov of the KGB) currently resident in Wormwood Scrubs.


Wilderness does not want to return to Berlin station, mainly because of what happened in Chapter One. But he owes Burne-Jones too many favours to refuse. Eventually the main players all assemble at a checkpoint between East and West to do the deal - then comes  the brilliant twist.


Along the tangled way Wilderness becomes the father of twin girls and Masefield gets to have sex with two Russian twin sisters. Joe encounters so many old friends and old enemies that I have to wonder what went on in the first Wilderness novel Then We Take Berlin (2013). He also arranges a potentially lucrative sideline in a vast trove of high quality wine he has acquired from a Nazi.


The Unfortunate Englishman is a tremendous read. Lawton writes like a dream. His characters are infinitely complex yet all absolutely credible. I am going to read everything he has ever written,. I recommend you should do the same. Then let's compare notes.