Enemies Within. Richard Davenport-Hines
whip in the Commons in 1925 and elected to the party’s national executive in 1926, he became a reliable, sapless party hack. As the government’s third most senior whip after Labour’s victory at the general election of 1929, his duties included the compilation of a daily summary for King George V of Commons debates. The Tory MP Sir Henry Betterton, afterwards Lord Rushcliffe, had a story of seeing two Labour whips on a visit to Palestine. ‘Jack Hayes (the Liverpool policeman), now Treasurer of the Household, was very drunk and staggering about on the platform. As a train drew in, his pal urged him to pull himself together and said, “the Treasurer of Palestine is on this train.” Hayes clicked his heels and stood at attention with his hand at the salute and said “Treasurer be b—d. I am His Majesty’s Treasurer”, and added fervently, “Gawd bless ’im”.’39
The general election of May 1929 was approached with heavy apprehension by many Conservatives because it was the first contest with the enlarged franchise of the so-called Flapper Vote. ‘Votes for women at 21 is alarming people up here and there is no doubt that we are taking a big leap in the dark,’ judged Cuthbert Headlam, a Tory whose constituency lay in a northern mining county. He expected ‘a big increase in the Socialist vote. In our pit villages the women are far wilder than the men – they are hopeless to argue with – they listen to the sob stuff with open ears.’40
The involvement of a popular Labour whip in a spying scandal during election year would have aroused suspicions that the arrests were a pre-election stunt by intelligence mavericks similar to those behind the Pravda and Zinoviev forgeries. The government was to prove chary in 1934 when the CPGB member Edgar Lansbury, late of the Anglo-Russian Three Ply and Veneer Company, was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act: as the Solicitor General, Somervell, noted, ‘The Cabinet are very apt to be afraid that a quasi-political prosecution will lead to a row.’ Similar squeamishness was one reason for the decision not to prosecute Ginhoven and Jane who, after hearings by a disciplinary board, were dismissed from the police on 2 May (the general election was to be held on 30 May). Another good reason for disciplinary proceedings rather than a criminal trial was to avoid discomfiting public revelations in court. It would have harmed future MI5 investigations if the extent to which Allen had been turned by MI5 and had informed on his former employers, both English and Russian, had been publicized. MI5’s improving tradecraft was saved from public exposure. The agency was enabled to continue watching and learning from its adversaries.41
Ginhoven and Jane expected demotion to the ranks of sergeant and constable, and were indignant at their dismissal from Special Branch. Harker was disquieted to find that ‘both inside the Special Branch and outside, there is a good deal of sympathy with the two men, who – by the majority ignorant of all … the true facts – are considered to have been punished with unjustifiable severity’. This reaction resulted from ‘the Scotland Yard policy of concealing all the true facts as far as possible. One begins to wonder how far the very clumsy investigation may not have been inspired by a desire to produce such a state of mind with the Disciplinary Board itself!’ Another puzzle is the fate of Sidney Russell Cooke. In July 1930 he was found in the dining-room of his chambers in the Temple dead of an oddly angled gunshot wound to the abdomen. It was unlikely that the wound was accidental; hard to believe that ‘Cookie’ had killed himself; but the possibility that he died as the result of his association with Harker has never been aired.42
Labour’s electoral victory encouraged Ewer, who in the weeks afterwards seemed to the incoming junior FO minister Hugh Dalton to be ‘a tiresome busybody’, lobbying for the restoration of diplomatic relations with Moscow, which had been severed after the ARCOS raid. Disillusion with Marxist orthodoxy came soon. In August Ewer took a reflective holiday in Warsaw and the Carpathian resort of Zakopane. After returning in September, he wrote an article for the communist Labour Monthly in which he argued that Anglo-Russian tensions were not simply an ideological clash of capitalism and communism, but also derived from their nineteenth-century rivalry as Asiatic powers. The piece was denounced as counter-revolutionary and Ewer was expelled from party membership. In a letter to Rajani Palme Dutt, the Stalinist doctrinaire in the CPGB, possibly written in the knowledge that his words would be intercepted and read by MI5, Ewer declared his apostasy. Communists ‘have come to talk only in an idiom, which, once a powerful instrument of thought, has become so worn and so debased that – like the analogous idiom of the Christian Churches – it no longer serves for thinking, but only as a substitute for thinking’. In all disputes ‘they rely upon the repetition of phrases which have come to be as mechanical – and yet, to them, as magically authoritative – as the formulae of the Athanasian creed’. He rejected the authoritarianism which enforces doctrinal conformity, ‘condemns all “deviation” as a moral offence’ and imposes obedience by the ‘apparatus … of confession, of absolution, of excommunication’.43
Slocombe’s success in conducting ‘secret work unmolested for such a long period is proof of the high standard of his efficiency as an espionage agent’, MI5 concluded in 1930. ‘His high standard and reputation as a journalist give to him, as to EWER, most excellent cover for his treasonable activities and unrivalled opportunities for the collection of valuable confidential information.’ In August that year Harker cautioned Sir Arthur Willert (the Foreign Office’s press officer) about Ewer: ‘I considered him by far the most dangerous individual from a S.S. point of view that the Russians had in this country, and that Sir Arthur Willert might rest assured that anything he told Ewer, would go straight to the Soviet Embassy.’ Willert responded by asking unprompted if Harker knew Slocombe. Harker replied that Slocombe was Ewer’s deputy, and ‘very nearly as dangerous’. Willert thought the pair were ‘the ablest and most entertaining journalists he had ever met’, and offered to introduce Harker to them. ‘Though nothing would please me more personally, I did not think it wise at this juncture,’ Harker said.44
Around this time Lord Southwood’s profit-driven printing combine Odhams Press bought control of the Daily Herald. Ewer continued as the paper’s foreign editor, in an editorial office in which communist affiliations were less acceptable and commercial considerations had higher ranking. Slocombe, however, left the Daily Herald: he was later foreign editor at the Sunday Express and a Daily Mail special correspondent. Ewer was summoned to a disciplinary meeting with Pollitt and Willie Gallacher in the Lyons tea-shop next to Leicester Square tube station in September 1931. ‘They parted on very bad terms,’ MI5 understood. ‘Ewer stated that from now on he was going to be bitterly anti-Communist.’ Pollitt subsequently described Ewer as ‘a posturing renegade who never loses a single opportunity of getting his poison over’, while the Daily Worker was to denounce him as ‘pro-Nazi’.45
During the purges of 1937 Rose Cohen, the former lover of both Ewer and Pollitt, was arrested – apparently to stop her from meeting Pollitt in Moscow and reporting that her husband Max Petrovsky had been arrested as a Trotskyite ‘wrecker’ and was awaiting execution. The Daily Herald made a weasel defence of Soviet maltreatment of her. British officials were disinclined to help this ‘“Bloomsbury Bolshevik” or “parlour pink”’, as they called her: one of them asked, as a marginal joke in her file, ‘I wonder whether Miss Cohen is now solid or liquid?’ Ewer convinced himself that she had been sent to a Siberian camp (in reality she was shot after months of abysmal terror), and felt haunting distress about her fate. He did not know that Pollitt had made strenuous private appeals on her behalf, and therefore found it unforgivable that CPGB leaders knew how hard she had worked for ‘the Cause’ but, as he told MI5, never intervened on her behalf.46
In the late 1940s Ewer worked with the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department in countering communist propaganda and apologetics. He broadcast for the BBC and wrote commentaries expressing the bitterness of a betrayed and disillusioned idealist. Younger diplomatic correspondents, who consulted their amiable doyen ‘Trilby’ for interpretations of official opacities, never guessed that this urbane man had once been an inflammatory communist zealot. It was suggested in September 1949 by Ann Glass and Jane Archer that given the leakages attributed by Soviet defectors to highly placed government circles, Ewer and Slocombe should be questioned in the hope of establishing whether some of their sources in 1919–29 had since reached senior positions. The task was allotted