Back to the fabulous Fifties

Charlotte Bingham has had an extraordinary writing career. She wrote her first book, Coronet Among the Weeds (newly republished by Bloomsbury), when she was just 19. It was a memoir of her life as a 1950s debutante — the ‘weeds’ were the chinless wonders she met at debs’ dances — and it became an instant hit in 1963. She then wrote another 33 bestselling novels and co-wrote, with her husband Terence Brady, various TV series, including Upstairs Downstairs. But when he was dying of cancer two years ago, she suddenly skipped back to the 1950s and picked up the story of Coronet Among the Weeds where it left off. The result was a very surprising memoir called MI5 and Me, published last year, to which Spies and Stars is the follow-up.

She mentioned in Coronet Among the Weeds that her father was a Lord — the 7th Baron Clanmorris. What she didn’t tell us was that, as John Bingham, he was a section head of MI5 and the model for John le Carré’s George Smiley. After she had completed her debutante season, he recruited her to work as a secretary at MI5, which she wrote about in MI5 and Me.

Now, in Spies and Stars, she is still working at MI5 but has fallen in love with an actor, Harry, and starts writing scripts with him. Her father encourages her because he thinks it is important to infiltrate what he sees as ‘the communist hotbed of British theatre’. (Remember this is the 1950s when there were reds under every bed.) He also recruits Harry to act as an undercover agent at Communist party HQ and sell the Daily Worker. But Harry still wants to be an actor and ‘starve for art’, so Charlotte’s father pulls strings to get him a film role.

Charlotte — or Lottie as she calls herself — is thrilled to meet a film producer and his wife because they were so obviously, ostentatiously rich: ‘Their clothes, their wrist- watches, jewellery and footwear, seemed to be staring out at the rest of us with pity.’