If you just live long enough then gradually some hidden truths seep under the door sill. Thus, today we have a report in The Telegraph based on revelations from Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB Resident in London in the early ‘80s who had actually been working for MI6 all the time – well done, ‘Smiley’, old chap, you turned him!
We Brits do have a tendency to think fondly of our more eccentric leaders and they didn’t come much more eccentric than Tony Wedgewood Benn, a man whose eyeballs swiveled faster than a fan at Wimbledon watching an exchange between Federer and Djokovic! Such a toff – he was born into the aristocracy but revoked his titles in order to stand as an MP – and such a gentlemen people said of him, er, but not me. I thought then as I do now that he should have been dragged up the Old Baily on treason charges and then hanged by the neck whilst we, the populace, pelted him with rotten veg. As so often, mine was a minority opinion.
But reading Gordievsky’s revelations confirms that I was right and the rest of you were wrong – again, er, but modesty forbids and all that sort of thing! To be fair, I think the majority of the populace, apart from the walking brain-dead on the Left, agreed that he was as thick as a plank – a view shared by the Russians:
A two-and-a-half hour lunch in late 1983 at the Soviet embassy with Benn led Viktor Popov, the ambassador, to declare him unreliable.
At a meeting that December, Popov ordered agents from the KGB, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the military intelligence directorate to remove any information gleaned from Benn from dispatches to Moscow.
“He was not intelligence material,” Gordievsky said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
“Popov said, when going through your reports about meetings with different politicians to be sent to Moscow, be careful. Some of them are not truthful. I said, who are you talking about? He said Tony Benn.”
“He was an unnecessary simpleton, who told left-wing fairytales and falsified stories,” Gordievsky concluded.
Alas, my proposition that we dig the old Bolshevik bastard up and drive a stake through what remains of his heart cannot be realised because he was cremated – typical slippery move by a double-crossing traitor.
Should you detect a tone of severe fury in this post you are entirely right. Many brave men and women died trying to free themselves from a Russian regime that makes our pathetic attempts at 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' look like playtime at school. The likes of the Right dis-Honourable Anthony Wedgewood Benn chose to stick their tongues as far up the Russian arse as they could manage. So what about you, Hillary Benn MP, proud of your Dad, are you?