Richard Davenport-Hines - Enemies Within - Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain

The months after the Armistice were a time of political instability, strange alliances and imponderable risk. Exterior perceptions might mislead. In the east London slum district of Limehouse, during the last months of the war, Irish nationalists combined with socialists to organize a militant constituency cohort led by a pharmacist called Oscar Tobin. One day in January 1919 a newly demobilized soldier, carrying a nondescript suitcase like the terrorist in Conrad’s Secret Agent , visited Tobin’s shop, went up the backstairs with him and laid plans for socialists to take control of Stepney Borough Council. Tobin was a Jewish Romanian who was to be refused naturalization as a British subject in 1924. To a watcher the confabulation above his shop might have seemed the inception of a revolutionary cell; but the demobbed soldier was Clement Attlee, and this was the first step in a political career that always upheld constitutionalism and culminated in his leadership of his country during the Cold War. History is full of misleading appearances. The balance between trust and treason, as Queen Elizabeth said, is seldom easy to get right. 26

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