Only the foolish failed to come in from the cold

On HIS gap year, 1985, between Eton and Oxford, David Cameron visited the Soviet Union. Nothing sinister in that, of course, even to dedicated John le Carré fans. A lot of people visited the old USSR. Indeed, I did so myself, along with Liz Lochhead and Trevor Royle, as a guest of the Soviet Writers’ Union. A memorable trip, one highlight of which was an evening spent with the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and his English girlfriend (Cheltenham Ladies’ College) at his dacha, in the course of which, speaking of Hugh MacDiarmid, he declared: “He’s a great poet but politically he’s crazy” – so much for the author of the Hymn to Lenin, the great Scottish Nationalist who rejoined the Communist Party after the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.

All this is by the way; back to Cameron. Down at Yalta on the Black Sea, he was picked up by two Russians, both speaking excellent English. They gave him lunch and dinner and quizzed him about England and British politics. When, some months later, he told his tutor at Oxford about the conversation, he was asked: “Do you think it was an interview?” Or , to put it more bluntly, were the two amiable Russians KGB men sounding out a possible recruit?

Cameron, recounting the incident this week in a speech to students at Moscow State University, added: “If it was an interview I didn’t get the job.” The reaction of old-KGB man, now prime minister, Vladmir Putin to the disclosure is not recorded, but president Dmitry Medvedev joked: “I am sure David would have made a very good KGB agent, but in that case he would never have become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.”

Really? In the week of the release of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the new film of le Carré’s classic novel about Soviet infiltration of the British establishment, one is tempted to ask, “why on earth not?” The Soviets, as we le Carré addicts know well, loved to play a long game, planting moles as sleeping agents – if you will excuse the mixed metaphor - long before they could be of use. A young Etonian with political ambitions would have been the juiciest of targets. Cameron reported the Yalta incident to MI5 when he was being cleared to work as special adviser to Norman Lamont at the Treasury in 1990. Well, of course he would, wouldn’t he? Bluff and double-bluff were meat and drink to the old KGB.

Fears of Soviet infiltration have been the stuff of rumour and fiction at least since Burgess and Maclean decamped in 1951. Long before Peter Wright, the somewhat fanciful MI5 officer, published Spycatcher, despite the best – suspicious? – efforts of the Thatcher government to ban it, stories about Harold Wilson’s Soviet connections circulated. My father was convinced Wilson was a Russian agent. In his years in opposition Wilson made several visits to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, ostensibly as a consultant for a timber firm owned by one Montague Meyer. Fishy, very fishy, my father said. Moreover, two decidedly dubious businessmen, Joe Kagan, who made the Gannex raincoats Wilson wore, and Rudy Sternberg, who contributed to a fund set up to finance Wilson’s private office, were suspected of having KGB connections, and Kagan was known to be on friendly terms with the KGB station head in London. Wilson made both of them peers. Fishier still – and indeed MI5 was sufficiently suspicious for Wright and other disaffected officers to run an unauthorised bugging of Number 10.

Of course, it was all nonsense. I used to tease my father by saying Anthony Eden seemed a far more likely Soviet agent. Hadn’t British foreign policy during the war so often served Soviet interests, and who was foreign secretary then but Eden? Or what about Harold Macmillan and his role in the repatriation in the summer of 1945 of the Cossacks who had fought for Germany against the Red Army? My father would have none of it: if Wilson wasn’t a Soviet agent, he couldn’t have done more harm if he had been.

In truth, anyone in the West who chose to serve the Soviet Union, at least after Khruschev’s speech to the 20th Party Conference in 1956 – in which he revealed the extent of Stalin’s criminality – was, as Yevtushenko said of MacDiarmid, “politically crazy”. It was different in the days of the Cambridge spies. It was possible then to believe in communism, to believe that by serving the Soviet Union, you were associating yourself with the march of history, and even the interests of Britain. Donald Maclean, the most ideologically driven of them, was anti-American and convinced from the Thirties that we should align ourselves with the Soviet Union.

How long ago it seems, now that political ideology is dead and communism, far from being the wave of the future, has been consigned to the dustbin of history. Yet the perplexities of the mid-20th century continue to exert their fascination, and doubtless the new film of le Carré’s masterpiece will not only be a great success, but will also invite us to indulge in nostalgia for a time when ideology mattered and loyalties might be divided.

Back in the Thirties a young Etonian about to go up to Oxford might indeed have succumbed to the seduction of the KGB (or its predecessor, the NKVD). By the time Cameron went to Yalta, the Soviet system was moribund and its attractions all but extinct. If the two Russians who lunched and dined him were indeed KGB men, only a complete fool could have responded to their blandishments. Indeed, the boot was already on the other foot, and free market capitalism seemed to be the wave of the future – another mistaken assumption, we may say.

To add a footnote: a recent spy novel, The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming, has a KGB officer, name of Platov, who bears an unmistakable resemblance to Putin, making contact with the British security services and seeking to defect in the last years of the Soviet Union, before emerging as the strong man of the new post-Soviet Russia. Wildly fanciful, of course. But just suppose…