The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
plot?
Ramsay MacDonald1
We were completely misled on that subject
Stanley Baldwin2
The interwar years were a time of international subterfuge; of clandestine struggles between intelligence agencies only recently created. As Britain and Bolshevik Russia faced off in a global war of subversion and counter-subversion, a fear of communism swept the Whitehall establishment. A smear plot allegedly sought to topple a Labour prime minister, while another prime minister publicly misused intelligence for political expediency. Remarkably, these things happened twice in the space of a decade. The history of secret intelligence and Downing Street has an intriguing habit of repeating itself, and many of the issues that emerged in the interwar years would resurface to confront later prime ministers.
Two prime ministers dominated the 1920s and 1930s: Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald. Both entered office as inexperienced and unsophisticated consumers of intelligence. Both faced a steep learning curve. Stanley Baldwin was a hands-off prime minister. A master of delegation, he allowed his ministers maximum freedom – to the extent that he drew charges of complacency and laziness. Baldwin expended most of his energies developing personal relations with MPs, and so spent a great deal of time sitting in Parliament: sometimes on the green benches of the Commons resting his eyes through some dreary debate, at other times slouched in an armchair somewhere soaking up the political atmosphere; but always in conversation. It was a working style that did not please everybody. One exasperated colleague complained, ‘What can you do with a leader who sits in the smoking room reading Strand magazine?’3
Beneath the surface, Baldwin was a highly-strung individual. He exhibited a range of nervous habits, from a subtle eye-twitch to compulsively smelling any object that fell into his hands. He was particularly keen on putting books to his nostrils and enjoying a long, loud sniff.4 Yet he worked well in a crisis. These are intriguing, almost contradictory, characteristics which bear directly upon a prime minister’s use of intelligence. His proclivity for delegation hints at a lack of interest in detailed intelligence material, while his nervous demeanour suggests an unsuitable constitution for dealing with the periodic crises of the secret world. In fact, Baldwin did draw steadily on intelligence throughout his time in office, although he did so in a blundering and unsophisticated manner which frustrated the intelligence community. He compromised GC&CS’s best intelligence source on the Soviets, publicly accused Air Ministry intelligence reports of misleading him, almost cost an MI6 analyst his job, and fell out with MI5 over surveillance of King Edward VIII.
In theory at least, Baldwin should have had an easier ride than Ramsay MacDonald. The illegitimate son of a farm labourer and a housemaid, MacDonald was an outsider. As the first ever Labour prime minister, he was also the first prime minister to hail from a working-class background. He was not part of the establishment; not one of the old boys. MacDonald had never even held a ministerial position before entering Downing Street. There can have been very few prime ministers as inexperienced in the workings of the secret world – or indeed of Whitehall in general – as he.
Despite his energy, good looks and personal magnetism, MacDonald was prickly, guarded and introverted. Unlike Baldwin, he had an impressive capacity for hard work. His working day began at seven, and would drag on until the early hours of the following morning. Poor at delegating, he served as his own foreign secretary in his first government throughout 1924. Returning as prime minister for a second time in 1929, MacDonald only appointed someone else, Arthur Henderson, as foreign secretary for political reasons, and sought to keep as much control over foreign policy himself as possible.5 One might expect that this would have increased his access to intelligence, and made him a particularly active consumer compared to other prime ministers. But in reality, he generally kept the intelligence community at a distance, and had little intention of ever meeting an MI5 or MI6 officer. At one point, in order to remain detached from the intrigues of the secret world, he even forced a senior MI6 man to stand in an adjoining room, and would only speak to him using the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office as an intermediary.6
Yet MacDonald was a Labour hero, the party’s man of destiny. He served as prime minister in 1924, and again between 1929 and 1931. In politics, as in much of British public life, however, heroes exist only to fall. Things inevitably soured for MacDonald in 1931 when he agreed to serve as head of a national coalition government designed to see Britain through the international economic crisis. Deemed a traitor by his erstwhile supporters, he was unceremoniously sacked from the Labour Party which he had done so much to turn into a credible force in British politics. Although he remained prime minister until 1935, the Conservatives, including Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, increasingly dominated the government. Ravaged by insomnia and ill-health, the ageing prime minister ‘slowly faded away’.7 A sea voyage was recommended to restore his health, but he died on board an ocean liner in November 1937. By then, many of the European crises that would trouble his successors were already visible.
The election of the first ever Labour government raised a whole host of questions about the relationship between Number 10 and the intelligence establishment. King George V wondered what his ‘dear Grandmama’, Queen Victoria, would have made of a Labour government, and the same can be said for the intelligence services. MacDonald had long been on MI5’s radar: the service had actually recommended prosecuting him for delivering seditious speeches during the First World War. Elements within the intelligence elite continued to view MacDonald and his first government with ‘suspicion, alarm and in some cases contempt’. The mistrust was mutual, and Vernon Kell, the long-serving director-general of MI5, knew full well of Labour suspicions towards his service.8
The Foreign Office deliberately waited several months before showing any signals intelligence to the new prime minister. When he was finally inducted, MacDonald was probably the only member of his cabinet informed of the activities of GC&CS. The diplomats feared that Labour ministers would be horrified at the idea of intercepts and espionage, and, in Churchill’s words, kept MacDonald ‘in ignorance’. Even once he had gained experience, intelligence officers still kept him ill-informed. In the early 1930s, important reforms meant that MI6 confined itself to operations on foreign territory, while MI5 took over responsibility for countering communist subversion from Scotland Yard. Seeking to ease coordination and reduce overlap, these reforms shaped both organisations for decades to come. Yet it seems that MacDonald was not even told about them.9 Similarly, Arthur Ponsonby, his parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office, was refused all access to signals intelligence and MI6 reports, despite directing the government’s Russia policy. Whenever Ponsonby mentioned intelligence, his officials became rigid. Not that Ponsonby particularly minded; he thought intelligence was a ‘dirty’ business.10
Few Labour ministers were intelligence enthusiasts. In 1929 Robert Vansittart, the senior official at the Foreign Office, had to defend the Secret Service Vote, from whence came funding for clandestine activity, against the new foreign secretary, Henderson. Britain’s most senior diplomat, Vansittart was an extraordinary polymath and aesthete – during his time as a young diplomatic trainee in Paris he had written a play in French, entitled Les Parias, which was a great success at the Théâtre Molière. He went on to produce several volumes of poems fêted by figures such as T.E. Lawrence. A romantic soul, full of passionate loves and hatreds, he adored intelligence.11 ‘Van’, as he was known, bemoaned how Henderson, a tee-totaller, ‘rated Secret Service like hard liquor, because he knew, and wanted to know, nothing of it’. Although this is perhaps unfair, given that even senior Labour ministers were given limited access to it, Vansittart felt frustrated because the government indulged in intelligence ‘all too little’.12