Brian Sewell: Soviet double agent Anthony Blunt did no harm to Britain

Art critic helped double agent get to safe house as spy scandal broke
22 October 2012

Art critic Brian Sewell today stood by Soviet double agent Anthony Blunt despite his role in the greatest spy scandal of the last century.

Mr Sewell’s memoirs reveal how he protected Blunt — his tutor at the Courtauld Institute — when his role as the “fourth man” in the Cambridge spy ring was exposed and he was “besieged” by the media. Today, Mr Sewell, the Evening Standard’s art critic, said Blunt was a “close friend and somebody I greatly admired” and an “honourable man” for handing back his knighthood before the scandal broke in 1979.

Blunt was recruited by the NKVD — the predecessor to the KGB — in the Thirties while he was a Cambridge don and passed wartime secrets to the Soviet Union during his time as an MI5 agent at Bletchley Park.

The spy scandal broke in 1951 when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union, followed in 1963 by Kim Philby. Blunt was unmasked in 1964 but, in return for co-operating with the authorities, details of his involvement were kept secret and he was able to remain Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures.

Sewell recalled helping Blunt to flee to a safe house in Chiswick after then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confirmed his role as a Soviet agent in a statement to the Commons in 1979.

“No sooner was the speech done by Mrs Thatcher that newspapers began to drag up other people they accused of spying. It became something of a witch-hunt.”

In his book Outsider II, Mr Sewell says he learned of Blunt’s involvement in 1970 after he was sent to Cambridge on the pretext of selling a drawing to another don, Andrew Gow, who Mr Sewell suspects was the “fifth man” and Blunt’s “puppet master”.

He said Blunt had wanted him to know of his past but had been unable to tell him himself. “I clearly remember the conversation beginning with, ‘Anthony wishes you to know…’,” Mr Sewell said.

“It was Andrew Gow who Anthony Blunt asked to tell me everything about his episode as a spy. If Andrew Gow knew it all in such detail, then I find it very difficult to explain to myself as him being anything other than a mentor.” Mr Sewell said there was no evidence that Blunt’s work for the Soviets harmed Britain’s national security. “I think his activities were so minor and futile they had no effect on anybody,” he said.

“I’m now convinced that had he not been a first cousin twice removed to the Queen and not been Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures no one would have paid much attention at all to this. The press had incredible difficulty in pinning anything at all on him.”

Asked whether the revelations lowered his estimation of Blunt, Mr Sewell said: “No, not at all.”

He said: “I was just about old enough to know that there was, during the Thirties, a kind of division among young intellectuals — that people were either going to the Right and being lost to the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini and General Franco, or they were going to the Left as the only possible way to prevent Europe from becoming swamped with fascism.

“Lots of perfectly honourable people went out to convince people it was the right thing to do, which meant going to communism.”

He said it had been difficult to write about Blunt: “He was a close friend and somebody I greatly admired.”

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