Sunning myself in Devon
I was suddenly landed with 

the hottest book of the year

By ALAN FRAME

In the summer of 1987 i was doing what I did every summer, settling in for the annual family holiday in the beautiful time-warp village of Beer on Devon’s Jurassic Coast. A week or two of messing about in boats, fishing for mackerel and bass, rock-pooling with my girls and swimming in the surprisingly warm sea. Bliss.

 

As I was about to leave our rented cottage for the beach there was a knock on the door. It was a local stringer with an urgent message to ring Nick Lloyd. Such was the form in those pre-mobile days. The next day a package arrived by office car and I was handed a copy of Spycatcher, Peter Wright’s account of his time as MI5 assistant director and his belief that his boss, the Service’s director-general Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet  mole.

 

By accepting the package I was probably committing a criminal offence because the Thatcher government had managed to ban its publication in the UK and newspapers and the rest of the media were not allowed to comment on its contents, let alone reveal them. But for some bizarre reason, though the ban applied to all of the UK, a book shop in Glasgow had got hold of 100 copies and the Express had one of them which was then in my hands.

 

It was my job to sit in a deckchair in glorious weather on Beer beach, fortified by crab sandwiches from my friend Jim Chapple’s little food emporium, to decide whether the Express should publish extracts if and when the ban was lifted by the High Court. That year Mr Justice Scott did just that only for the Law Lords to reverse his decision.

 

I mention this because this weekend it has been revealed that though Margaret Thatcher seemed so obsessed with proscribing Spycatcher, six years earlier she had given the nod to similar revelations by the great Chapman Pincher, former defence corr of the Express, in his book Their Trade is Treachery. Why? Because she thought of  Pincher as ‘one of us’ and coming from him the allegations would be dealt with more sympathetically than by those pesky ‘lefties’ on the Observer and Guardian, also pursuing the story.

 

Yet when that theory was put to her Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong, who had been sent by her to Australia to fight the case for banning Spycatcher there, he dismissed it as far fetched. ‘Ingenious but totally untrue.’ He lied because it is now shown that the Saintly Margaret had written him a memo, just released under the 40-year rule, saying ‘Please see Lord Rawlinson on a PC (privy counsellor) basis. Rawlinson was Pincher’s prime source for the revelations.  

 

All of which proves that once you start down the road of banning or censoring the written word you rarely arrive at a good place. If we get it wrong, a libel trial will follow and that prospect should be all the caution you need. Governments should stay clear of injunctions of that type and concentrate on real problems.

 

I told Nick that we should publish once the injunction was lifted and all the signs were that the government was running out of steam in its stupid battle.

 

Incidentally, at this distance most security analysts agree that both Peter Wright and Pincher were probably wrong about Hollis though we may never know. But if so, it would be a rare mistake by Pincher, personally hired by Beaverbrook and given a rent-free flat in St James and a limitless expense account which he used to wine and dine contacts at the late-lamented l’Ecu de France in Jermyn Street. He produced scoop after scoop, so much so that Edward Heath, when prime minister, had asked in exasperation: ‘Is there nothing we can do about Pincher?’

 

The answer was No and Chapman Pincher  was still writing up to his death aged 100 in 2014.

 

As for my efforts reading Spycatcher on Beer beach I needn’t have bothered. Unbeknown to us Andrew Neil had flown to the US and picked up a copy where it had just been published (and where even Thatcher was unable to ban it) and the moment  the government’s injunction was finally overturned he serialised it in the Sunday Times.  

 

We were beaten to it by Andrew Neil though he could have saved Rupert Murdoch a business class return ticket to New York if he, one of Scotland’s finest, had known about that book shop in Glasgow.

 

But at least my then wife got a vast bouquet from the Express for ‘spoiling her holiday’.

19 August 2024