Mi5

Thursday

Alan Judd

Hasty exit strategy

For years after the rug was pulled from under it, the British Empire — with a quarter of the globe, the largest the world has known — seemed an unfashionable subject for historians. Did they fear political incorrectness, or was it simply that they had to wait for sufficient archival material to emerge? Whichever, there is now some very welcome sprouting in this part of the historical garden, already well-watered by the Cambridge historian Ronald Hyam, and few shoots could be more welcome than Calder Walton’s important contribution. Walton draws on recently released MI5 files to reveal the role of intelligence in the transitions from colony to independent state. Decolonisation

Friday

Alex Massie

Plum Imprisoned

There is not much that’s new, I think, in the release of the MI5 files on PG Wodehouse and his wartime broadcasts from Germany. The Guardian headline reads I was not a Nazi collaborator, PG Wodehouse told MI5 and, of course, Wodehouse told MI5 he wasn’t a Nazi collaborator because he was not, in fact, a Nazi collaborator. Naive? Perhaps. Foolish? Certainly. But a collaborator? Don’t be ridiculous. And yet, one way or another this stuff keeps resurfacing even though you’d have thought Plum’s knighthood – delayed by the whiff of There’s Something Not Quite Right About Those Radio Programmes – might have settled the matter. If that weren’t enough

Friday

Martin Bright

The Saddest Thing I Have Seen in a Long Time

The moral of the story is: don’t mess with the British state. I woke up this morning to a message from my old Observer colleague Antony Barnett, who now works for Channel 4’s Dispatches, urging me to look at page 31 of the Daily Mail. There in all her glory was a transvestite called Delores Kane, who bore a distinct resemblance to the former MI5 officer David Shayler. It’s not so long ago that David announced he was the messiah and now he has decided Jesus was a transvestite and that he, Shayler, must take the form of Delores. I was one of many journalists who worked with David when he left the