Anthony Blunt

So In the background of all this, you've got very real spy stories, very real spy scandals, most famously the Cambridge Spies, which, again, is a difficult one to think back on and realise it's actually drip-fed, so it's almost like three separate kind of scandals.

You've got the first wave, then you've got the Anthony Blunt one, which doesn't emerge until much later, then you've got the final revelation of Cairncross, which comes even later after that.

But we now bundle them together as these five Cambridge academics that were... communist sympathisers in the 1930s, not a particularly unusual thing in well-to-do middle-class culture at the time, but they stay and go much further, right, and they end up actually spying and being in pretty significant positions in the British establishment.

Obviously, a great book, Stalin's Apostles, came out earlier this year.

I want to move on here because we're getting really – let's cut a break here.

I want to go to another chapter that I think we have time here to discuss, the one about homosexual as subversive, the double life of Sir Anthony Blunt.

And you also had a pretty long one about Maynard Keynes, the economist.

which is also my neck of the woods since I teach economics.

And I've read his biography, and I was fascinated to see what you have to say about that.

Can you walk us through that? I mean, either Anthony Blunt or what is it, Bloomsbury Group? What was that all about? And how is homosexuality linked to sedition, if at all?

That's a good question, isn't it? So what are we talking about? We're talking about, let's say, start with Leslie Stevens, who was the father of Virginia Woolf.

So he said to study Darwin, he said, I lost my faith, but I'll always be a gentleman.

And I said, yes, but I can't take an exam.

So she rang up Anthony Blunt and said, will you take Nell? She's interested in pictures.

And he said, yes.

Oh, how amazing.

What was the codename of this audacious deception operation? Question 2.

In the mid-20th century, a notorious ring of British double agents, including Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, secretly passed information to the Soviet Union.

By what collective nickname are they known? Question 3.

Cold War agents often relied on an encryption method that, when used correctly with truly random keys that are never reused, is mathematically unbreakable.

5.2.

In April 1964, in a flat above the Courtauld Institute in London, an MI5 officer named Arthur Martin sat down with the art historian Anthony Blunt.

The British National Archives tells the story.

Blunt asked for five minutes, in his words, while he wrestled with his conscience.

Then he began to talk and confessed that he had spied for the Soviet Union.

Blunt was one of a group often called the Cambridge Five, men recruited in the 1930s: Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross.

The National Archives says Blunt was recruited by Soviet intelligence in early 1937, although the exact date is unclear, and that MI5 recruited him in 1940.

The archives records that Blunt was given immunity from prosecution in return for confessing, and that he kept his post as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures until 1972.

but you, you deal with it in three pages.

Anthony Blunt was-

Oh

...

The illegitimate son of George V.

Just tell us, tell us the story.

So, so Anthony Blunt, who was the what? The fourth man, would he be, or the fifth? The fifth-

He was the fourth man.

... he's under a lot of stress, and it's interesting 'cause he's cracking up at this point.

There is a question which is, does he know how close they are getting to him? There's interesting because It does look like Anthony Blunt visits Beirut around this time, late 62, looking for some kind of orchid or something weird and goes to the, you know, is in touch with people from the embassy.

People from the embassy remember this.

And again, you know, people are like, well, did he meet Philby? You know, Blunt is this mystery man.

yeah.

the best one there was like so Christopher's 30 I was in my 40s Frankie's in his 50s and we were talking about the wealth of the royal family one day right and Frankie went oh who was it I can't remember who it was it was somebody from the Labour government in the 70s tried to put a price on the royal family's wealth and couldn't because they had Rembrandts and all that right and he went on I went oh Rembrandts hmm procured by Sir Anthony Blunt one of the Cambridge spies and Christopher went awa awa I went, one of the Cambridge spies, and he was like, what's that? And we were like, there was a spy ring at Cambridge University that was pro-communism in the 1950s, and he went,

no.

As if somehow me and Frankie just made this up in the spot.

So he feels a little bit abandoned, I think, although, you know, he's often, you know, later in life he won't kind of admit that.

Eventually, he gets word through Anthony Blunt, another of the Cambridge spies, you know, that he's hard up, and through Blunt, they will get him 5,000 pounds for Philby to kind of-

Hmm

... help him out, but it's a sign of how, how desperate they are.