Richard Davenport-Hines - Enemies Within

The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naïveté of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and bathing beach, his blond ‘private secretary’, his wife’s mausoleum and swans and sarsen stones, all mere toys to satisfy his varying moods … and then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.

After Phipps’s transfer to the Paris embassy, he was cautioned by Vansittart against candour about French politicians in telegrams that had a wide circulation among members of the government. 40

Embassies and legations, like the Office in London, were cooperative, hierarchical organizations in which mutual trust was indispensable. This was not a matter of class loyalty or old-school-tie fidelity, but an obvious point about raising the efficiency of its staff. Sir Owen O’Malley estimated that about one-third of his ambassadorial energy went into making his embassy work well. ‘It begins to lose power whenever one man gets discouraged or another too cocky or a third jealous … when wives quarrel it is hell.’ It was indispensable for an ambassador to be trusted by the government to which he was accredited. ‘One of the many illusions about diplomacy is that it consists in diddling the other fellow. Nothing could be further from the truth. It consists more than anything else in precision, honesty, and persuasion, which three things should hang together.’ 41

‘Democracy is not only a theory of government, but also a scale of moral values,’ the economic historian Sir Michael Postan insisted in a 1934 essay on Marx. As someone born in Bessarabia under tsarist despotism, who had escaped from the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1919, Postan valued parliamentary democracy as a flower of the European tradition of humanitarian individualism. ‘It accepts human personality and individual man as an end in themselves, the sole purpose and the only justification of a social system. It judges political actions by the good or evil they do to individuals, rather than by their effects on the collective super-individual entities of race, state, church and society.’ Postan countered the modish communists in his university who excused collective authoritarianism: ‘majority rule, representative institutions, government by consent and respect for opinions are merely broad applications of humanitarian ethics to problems of state government’. Social networks were central in Postan’s model society, where transactions were characterized by trust, reciprocity and the absence of avarice – but never led by the popular will. Maynard Keynes, Cambridge economist and Treasury official, thought on similar lines to Postan. ‘Civilisation’, he said during the looming European catastrophe of 1938, ‘was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved.’ 42

After the transformative crisis of 1914–18, and despite the widespread earlier qualms about Victorian imperialism, most of the administrative leaders who helped to govern inter-war Britain believed that they represented a civilizing force in the world: ‘all my life and all my strength’, as Eric Holt-Wilson declared with staunch sincerity of his work for MI5, ‘were given to the finest cause on this earth – the ennoblement of all mankind by the example of the British race’. There were self-seekers and time-servers, of course, but also efficient, modest men, who took pride in doing the best possible job that they could. Sir Alan Brooke, the most effective Chief of the Imperial General Staff in history and afterwards Lord Alanbrooke, wrote on New Year’s Day of 1944: ‘Heard on the 8 am wireless that I had been promoted to Field Marshal! It gave me a curious peaceful feeling that I had at last, and unexpectedly, succeeded in reaching the top rung of the ladder!! I certainly never set out to reach this position, nor did I ever hope to do so, even in my wildest moments. When I look back over my life no one could be more surprised than I am to find where I have got to!!’ 43

Such men as Holt-Wilson and Brooke were convinced upholders of values which required the practice in their working lives of such personal virtues as pride in service, individual self-respect and group responsibility. Cynicism was thought a sign of mediocrity. It is easy to scoff that these beliefs covered hypocrisy, selfishness, bullying, prejudice and inefficiency; but many public servants upheld these beliefs, which were at the core of their self-identification and a vital motive in their work. They were rich in the social capital of group loyalty, and therefore rich in trust. Although the British Empire rested on force, and its diplomats exerted coercion, it was the pride of Whitehall that it worked by influence rather than power.

‘Power’, to quote Lord Beveridge, ‘means ability to give to other men orders enforced by sanctions, by punishment or by control of rewards; a man has power when he can mould events by an exercise of will; if power is to be used for the good, it must be guided by reason and accompanied by respect for other men.’ Beside the power of money, exerted by giving or withholding rewards, stood governmental power: ‘making of laws and enforcing them by sanctions, using the instrument of fear’. In contrast, Beveridge continued, ‘influence … means changing the actions of others by persuasion, means appeal to reason or to emotions other than fear or greed; the instruments of influence are words, spoken or written; if the influence is to be for good, it must rest on knowledge’. It was believed that the official integrity and impartiality of men of good influence would not be warped by personal preferences. When Burgess and Maclean disappeared from the Foreign Office in 1951, the former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the Commons that all ministers trusted the neutrality of their officials, and felt sure ‘that the civil service has no part in political views’. His apparent implication was that it was irrelevant if the two missing diplomats – or any of their colleagues – were secret communists, because their partisanship outside the Office could not have tinged decision-making within the Office. 44

In 1940 the Home Defence (Security) Executive, newly constituted by Churchill’s War Cabinet to oversee the defence of the nation from fifth columnists and best known as the Security Executive (SE), recommended that a regulation be implemented making it an offence to subvert government authority. This was opposed by Sir Alexander Maxwell, the PUS at the Home Office, as ‘inconsistent with the historic notions of English liberty. Our tradition is that while orders issued by the duly constituted authority must be obeyed, every civilian is at liberty to show, if he can, that such orders are silly or mischievous and that the duly constituted authorities are composed of fools or rogues.’ Maxwell had a first-class degree in politics and ancient philosophy from Oxford, and was married to a Quaker physician: together they gave an annual party for the Home Office charwomen with their sons acting as waiters. He was humorous, gentle, unruffled and a model of upright neutrality who always remembered that Home Office decisions affected, not an undifferentiated mass of citizens, but individual lives, each of which had peculiar problems and potentialities. Maxwell respected, as few officials in his department have done since 1997, ‘historic notions of English liberty’. Activities which showed the authorities as contemptible were not necessarily subversive in Maxwell’s judgement. ‘They are only subversive if they are calculated to incite persons to disobey the law, or to change the government by unconstitutional means. This doctrine gives, of course, great and indeed dangerous liberty to persons who desire revolution … but the readiness to take this risk is the cardinal distinction between democracy and totalitarianism.’ 45