Peter Wright’s 1987 Spycatcher is an eminently putdownable book. When Mr Justice Powell compared its style to that of “the Boy’s Own Paper or The Biggles Flying Omnibus”, he was overselling its literary qualities. But I could never tire of reading about the Government’s hilariously hapless attempts to ban it. As the veteran investigative journalist Tim Tate puts it in his new account of the debacle, the Spycatcher affair was a “uniquely English farce”. And since we taxpayers paid for its staging – to the tune of at least £3 million (£8 million today) – we would be foolish not to wring all the enjoyment we can from it.
The central character, a figure too preposterous for a novel by Mick Herron let alone le Carré, is Peter Wright, MI5’s zealous senior counter-espionage officer. The first half of the book gallops through the highlights of Wright’s rackety career: falling through a ceiling while installing microphones in a house next to the Polish embassy; trying to organise a coup to oust prime minister Harold Wilson, whom he suspected of being a Soviet mole.
In 1976, Wright retired to run a stud farm in Tasmania; in what proved to be a monumental act of false economy, the government denied him a large chunk of his pension entitlement. Incensed, he decided to reveal to the public the extent to which MI5 bugged, burgled and plotted with impunity. Moreover, he was convinced that the service had long been riddled with Russian moles, among them its former director-general Sir Roger Hollis. He laid out his theories in a memoir, Spycatcher, ghostwritten by the journalist and future Hollywood director Paul Greengrass. Its publication was proscribed in England, and in 1986 the Thatcher government took legal action to prevent its being published in Australia, too.
As in so many espionage sagas, a key turning point occurred in a gentlemen’s lavatory. Sir Michael Havers, Mrs Thatcher’s attorney-general, found himself using the facilities alongside Paul Hamlyn, Spycatcher’s would-be publisher, at the Garrick Club one evening, and murmured that it was pointless to fight the case because the Australian government was prepared to intervene in Thatcher’s favour. Hamlyn immediately told his Australian lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, to communicate to those in the corridors of power that siding with Mrs Thatcher was likely to end in humiliation. Turnbull – later to become Australian prime minister himself – successfully convinced the Australian government to keep itself at arm’s length.
The most entertaining part of Tate’s book is the best-known: the descriptions of Turnbull’s cross-examination of Sir Robert Armstrong, Thatcher’s cabinet secretary. Having started his purgatorial trip to the Supreme Court of New South Wales by assaulting a photographer at Heathrow airport, Armstrong wilted under Turnbull’s questioning as he struggled to turn the government’s ill-thought-out case into a coherent argument, destroying for ever the popular image of civil servants as omnicompetent Sir Humphreys.
Justice Powell decreed that Spycatcher should see the light of day, while chiding the Thatcher government for its attempts to delay or sway proceedings – what he called its “serpentine weavings”. Spycatcher sold in its millions around the world, and yet in Britain newspapers were forbidden from discussing its contents into the 1990s. Rules about buying and selling the book reached Covid bubble-level complexity. Edward Heath told the House of Commons that he had been advised he could be prosecuted if he read it, but would not be at risk of legal action if his housekeeper read it out to him.
Tate, who has had access to much fresh material, including extracts from those parts of the trial transcripts that were originally redacted for security reasons, tells his tale with a humour more savage than subtle. There is little doubt whose side he is on. Although he does not ignore Wright’s chippiness and volatility, he does not label him with the hostile adjectives he showers on people he disapproves of, especially Armstrong, who is “vain”, “oily” and “duplicitous”.
The book pulsates with loathing for Armstrong, “Thatcher’s… Machiavellian chief consigliere”. In 2015, on the Radio 4 series The Reunion, Paul Greengrass said in Armstrong’s presence: “I felt bad for Robert… I felt that he had been debagged in public, and after a life of glorious public service that wasn’t what he deserved.” But if you went by Tate’s book, you would be unaware that Greengrass had said this, or, indeed, that it would be possible for anybody to conceive such a sympathetic view of Armstrong.
Tate ends with a characteristically peppery list of “dis-acknowledgements”, chiding those, such as the current Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, whom he blames for helping to keep the Government’s Spycatcher files under wraps. They should have been released to the National Archives in 2019, but weren’t. “I should think there’s some bad-dish stuff on Armstrong and Thatcher in them,” posits Jonathan Aitken, one of Tate’s interviewees. I suspect our only hope of ever seeing them rests on their being leaked by a mole: that would at least allow the sorry saga to end with a pleasing le Carré-ish symmetry.
To Catch a Spy is published by Icon at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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