Anthony Blunt: A Question Of Retribution?

ANTHONY BLUNT: A QUESTION OF RETRIBUTION? (320kbs-m4a/129mb/57mins)
BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast: 20th November 2024

In November 1979, Margaret Thatcher exposed the British art historian Sir Anthony Blunt as a Soviet spy. She revealed that Blunt - openly gay and a former intelligence officer for MI5 - was a member of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring who had traded secrets with Soviet Russia during the Second World War.

As one of the country's leading academics and a former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures (a role for which he received his knighthood), Blunt's influence reached to the top of the establishment. In a Britain polarised by the Cold War, Blunt's exposure provoked an unprecedented media storm and turned him into a national hate figure.

Blunt had shared 1,771 top secret documents with Russia during the war and played a key role in the escape of Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, fellow members of the Cambridge Five. Ironically, Stalin's regime was so distrustful of everything they received that it is questionable how much impact the information that Blunt shared actually had.

David Cannadine, the current President of the British Academy, reassesses Blunt's career before his exposure as well as the fallout afterwards. He uncovers the controversy which erupted over Blunt's academic position after he was revealed as a spy, and how the academic community came to terms with the revelation of a traitor in its midst.

Eventually stripped of his knighthood and expelled from academic life, Blunt's rapid downfall was driven as much by a hostile disdain for his position as a privileged left-wing intellectual, and by a rampant homophobia in the press that labelled him a 'treacherous Communist poof'.

Can artistic reputations survive political actions or personal disgrace, and what issues does Blunt's story raise for institutional loyalty and professional identity?

David Cannadine speaks to many of Blunt's former students and those directly involved in the raw and personal clash of ideals over Blunt's position, some of whom remained sympathetic to him as a great intellectual and great teacher, and saw themselves as defenders of intellectual liberty against a political witch-hunt.

With Dawn Ades, Christopher Andrew, Miranda Carter, Richard Davenport-Hines, Neil MacGregor, Charles Moore, Charles Saumarez Smith, Deborah Swallow, Sarah Whitfield and Richard Verdi.

Historical research: Martin Spychal

Producer: Melissa FitzGerald

A Blakeway production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in June 2020.