Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain
by Richard Davenport-Hines  
(William Collins, £25)

AN AIR of affronted entitlement pervades Richard Davenport-Hines's book on Cambridge University's communist spies.

Suffused with resentment that the British people in voting for Brexit rejected the advice of their betters, he rails against the “populist delusion that one person’s opinion is as good as any other and pretending that it is improper to value trained minds and rational expertise higher than instincts, inklings, hunches and overemotional fudge.”

The subterranean connection in this bizarre coupling is the author's conviction that the Soviet successes in subverting the security apparatus of the British State has been unfairly blamed on the failures of the “narrow, tightly enmeshed relationships” which characterised the structure of the British ruling class.

Davenport-Hines sets about the difficult task of rehabilitating the professional reputation of Britain's spooks and ends up regretting that: “Government by the knowledgable — epistocracy — has been superseded in most of the English-speaking world by a version of democracy that elevates opinion above knowledge.”

The bare facts that underpin this book are that faced with the solid intent of the British bourgeoisie and its French allies to reach an accommodation with fascism and its repeated refusal to join with the Soviet Union in checkmating Hitler, a talented cadre of Cambridge communists collaborated with the clandestine apparatus of the Communist International and Soviet intelligence.

This common purpose carried through into the period of war-time alliance with the USSR and, for the most resolute and courageous among them, into the cold war.

The book has several strengths. Its detail and periodisation is useful in marshalling many of the known facts and in dispelling the most egregious of falsehoods and fantasies. It is insightful with the atmosphere of male camaraderie and the culture of trust which was both a strength and weakness of the British intelligence apparatus.

And the author has some pertinent things to say about the negative effects of misogyny on operational efficiency.

Although he dismisses the cod psychology that explains Kim Philby's decades-long commitment as the product of an unhappy childhood, he is perhaps too intimately interested in the sexual activities and psychological states of the actors in this drama.

Davenport-Hines has little time for his rivals in the literary spy circus but he reserves his real animus for the “foul-minded, mercenary and pernicious,” mole-hunters of the 1980s in Parliament, the media and the state apparatus. “Their besmirching of individuals and institutions changed the political culture and electoral moods of Britain far beyond any achievement of Moscow agents or agencies,” he contends.

So intent is he on defending the institutional integrity and policy preferences of the Establishment – and what we might best call its “incompetent” organs of surveillance, security and spying – that he verges on suggesting that the Soviets prioritised the erosion of public trust in the British ruling elite as much as the accumulation of intelligence.

The casualty of such absurd self-contemplation is any sense of history, coupled with a wilful blindness to its ironies. He recounts an incident when the ex-communist Phillip Toynbee met in Moscow with his exiled old friend Donald Maclean and the still-loyal communist defended the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian counter-revolution.

Maclean reportedly argued that without the Soviet intervention Hungary would be “ruled in effect by capitalists, the Church and landlords, with some sort of fascist front and permanent witch hunts to keep down the enemies of such people — in short a sort of Franco Spain.”

The situation in today's fascist-infused Hungary demonstrates just how insightful a Foreign Office official Maclean had been.

In the murky world of espionage and counter espionage much published material is suspect and this book, no less than others, has an ideological axe to grind.

But it does demonstrate that despite the enormous personal price — broken relationships, alcoholism, exile and stress — paid by the men and women who signed up for clandestine combat against fascism and its ruling class appeasers it was their politics which, in the main, sustained them.

They betrayed not the British people but, rather, it's ruling class.