politician, less confident in the loyalty of officials or more apprehensive that his doings should be known outside his own personal entourage, often employed in confidential or shady transactions a small group of adherents who could be as dangerous to themselves as to him.’ Such shenanigans impaired the trust between ministers and officials, caused delays, confusion and duplicated labour, and devalued the objective advice of those excluded from the inner ring. (The circulating file is a grievous loss in the age of emails and ‘Reply all’ circulation lists.)48
Condescension and chauvinism were ubiquitous. When the British Minister in Prague was asked if he had many friends among the Czechs, he was incredulous. ‘Friends!’ he exclaimed. ‘They eat in their kitchens!’ Sir Alexander Cadogan, lunching at the Ritz Hotel in 1940, was irritated by the proximity of ‘Dagos and Coons’. Assumptions of racial superiority were treated as a national virtue. ‘It looks as if the peak of white supremacy has been reached and that recession is now inevitable,’ lamented Sir Victor Wellesley, Deputy Under Secretary at the FO until 1936. ‘Of all the calamities which that gigantic struggle [in 1914–18] inflicted upon Europe, none in the end may prove to have been greater than the loss of prestige which the white race has suffered in the eyes of the coloured world.’ Even communist informants thought that the exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom was part of the natural order. ‘Nature has put Great Britain at the cross-roads of civilization,’ declared a Labour MP Wilfrid Vernon in 1948 (eleven years after he had been caught leaking aviation secrets to the Soviets). Duff Cooper, Ambassador in Paris during 1944–7, ‘has a tremendous feeling about the superiority of the British race and about our system of government’, Guy Liddell noted. ‘He thinks the old school tie is one of the finest institutions we have got, and that widespread education is a mistake.’49
Racism was a majority pleasure. In 1940 the Duke of St Albans, after a day on guard at Admiralty Arch, went in battledress to dine at Brooks’s club. ‘I hate all Europeans, except Scandinavians,’ he growled to a fellow diner; ‘of course I loathe all dagoes.’ Dining at the Blue Train Grill, one Fleet Street editor endured ‘a cabaret which consisted of two niggers at a piano – one a full-blooded fellow and the other a chocolate-coloured coon. It was odd how my old Tory blood revolted at these self-satisfied niggers ogling our women, and at our women mooning over them.’ Foreigners were called Fuzzy-Wuzzies, Levantines, kaffirs, chinks and worse. They were identified with failure, contraceptives, trickery, idleness, perversion, cowardice, absenteeism and disease: Balkanization, Dutch caps, French letters, Greek gifts, Greek ease, Hunnish practices, Dutch courage, French leave, Spanish influenza, German measles, the French disease. ‘Egyptian PT’ (physical training) was afternoon sleep, and a ‘Portuguese parliament’ was where everyone talked but no one listened. Orientals were wily, Hindus were lazy, Hungarians were reckless, and Slavs were dreamy and lethargic. Treachery was sincerely thought to be unEnglish: it was the trait of subject breeds. ‘Don’t trust the natives: they’re treacherous,’ the war correspondent Philip Jordan was told when he visited Ceylon in the 1930s. ‘It’s only when you’ve been out here as long as I have’, said expatriates who thought themselves kind and good, ‘that you will realise how little you know about “our coloured brethren” as we must call them now.’50
London was the capital of ‘the greatest democracy in the world’, the Cabinet minister Sir Samuel Hoare averred in 1936. ‘If British liberty and democracy collapse in a catastrophe, liberty and democracy will be exterminated in the world.’ Few people in England thought such Anglocentrism was absurdly overblown, or that Hoare was insular and foolish. After all, Germany and Italy were already autocracies, Austria and Spain were being overwhelmed by anti-democratic forces, and the Second Republic in Portugal and the Regency in Hungary were authoritarian regimes. King Alexander I had imposed personal dictatorship on Yugoslavia in 1929. There had been a military seizure of power in Bulgaria in 1934, although by 1936 King Boris III had engineered a semi-democratic counter-coup which prevailed until 1939. A fortnight after Hoare’s speech a military junta in Greece proclaimed the dawn of the Third Hellenic Civilization, which meant the abolition of the constitution, the dissolution of parliament and the suppression of political parties. King Carol II was preparing to suppress all democratic pretences in Romania. Britain, with its new constitutional settlement of 1927–9, was indeed one of the leading survivors among the diminishing number of free European democracies. It was to prevent resurgence of the dictatorial nationalism of the 1930s that the European nations coalesced economically, judicially and politically in the late twentieth century.51
There was justified pride in the intelligence, neutrality and inviolability from corruption of Whitehall. ‘The Greeks, like many other races, lack a competent civil service with established traditions of hard work and integrity,’ wrote Sir Daniel Lascelles from the Athens embassy in 1945. After years of Turkish domination, their political tradition was ‘to evade and thwart governmental authority’. It was said in their favour, continued Lascelles, that Greeks had ‘plenty of guts. So, I believe, have the Irish.’ There were a few exceptions to this patriotic unity: Goronwy Rees, who spied for Moscow in 1938–9, disparaged the land mass of England, Scotland and Wales as ‘Bird’s Custard Island’ because it was thick, tasteless and sickly. Millions of his compatriots however believed that British was best. Sometimes for sound reasons, but often with the benefit of self-assured inexperience, they presumed that the English language was the richest in the world, and that the nation’s policemen, beer, pageantry, countryside, sense of fair play, engineering, handshakes, comedians and parliament were unmatched. Nationalist pride permeated every social group: ‘the lags were as uncritically patriotic as book-makers or actors’, said Wilfred Macartney of his fellow inmates in Parkhurst prison, where he was detained in 1927–35 after trying to obtain RAF secrets for Moscow. ‘Everything English was best, from a Rolls-Royce to a cigarette.’52
Such unreal assumptions vitiated national influence throughout the Cold War period. ‘The British have a great liability: so many of us still believe in the “effortless superiority” … of all British men and some women,’ wrote the sociologist Michael Young in 1960. ‘This terrifying attitude is not confined to Bournemouth. Many solid working-class people have it too, Labour voters as well as Tory.’ When, during the Suez crisis of 1956, Young conducted an opinion survey in the inner London suburb of Hornsey, he was ‘dismayed by the number of manual workers who backed Eden wholeheartedly, talked of Wogs, Dagoes and Gyppies as vituperatively as they did when they were “seeing the world” in the Army’.53
Pretensions of English singularity, coupled with the delusion that public institutions could be made inviolate from continental influences, beset the cruder politicians, virulent editorial journalists and the more ignorant voters. Officers in Special Branch may have been hoodwinked by such ideas, but they made less headway in MI5, where most officials were well-travelled linguists rather than the blockheads imagined by the agency’s detractors. Diplomatists from Crowe, Vansittart and Cadogan downwards, though they were patriotic, saw the best hopes of peace lay in supra-nationalism, not nationalism. ‘The only sure guarantee against a renewal of fratricidal strife lies in the realisation, not only of the economic, but of the social solidarity of Europe,’ Don Gregory (the former Foreign Office expert on Soviet Russia) wrote in 1929. He warned against the special danger of Britain being lulled into complacency because ‘we are almost the only Europeans who have no traditional hatreds, who have no land frontiers to bother about, who need never be dragged into a war unless we wish to be’. European ideas and power had mastery over British destiny.54
