A tale of treachery

When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s editorship, we knew how to throw a party, from the great sesquicentennial ball in 1978 to the summer garden parties to the Thursday lunches. Among other happy moments in that dining room perched giddily at the top of the building I remember a ludicrous exchange on biblical topography between Enoch Powell and Auberon Waugh; or Richard Cobb, the great historian of France, waking from a post-prandial nap with the words that he must get the 3.25 back to Oxford, to be told that it was nearly six; or Barry Humphries leaving briefly and reappearing as Dame Edna, to the consternation of Spiro Agnew (who had seen a thing or two in his time). And then there was the Thursday when another famous American was brought to lunch by a London journalist.

This was the only occasion I ever met Alger Hiss. Thirty years before he had been at the centre of a cause more célèbre than any other of its time, which held America and much of the world spellbound for 18 months in 1948-50. Hiss was then a most illustrious figure, a personification of the American liberal establishment. He had served as secretary to the venerable Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court, he had joined the Agriculture Adjustment Administration (AAA) when it was set up as part of the New Deal, he had moved to the State Department and ascended a series of posts which, among other things, took him to the Yalta conference in 1945 as an aide to President Roosevelt, and he had then become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was ‘the great and the good’ in distilled form.