HIS exposure as a Soviet agent was one of the greatest shocks of the
cold war. Now
it has emerged that Sir Anthony Blunt, the pillar of the Establishment
who
turned out to be the fourth man in the Cambridge spy ring, admitted his
treachery to the art critic Brian Sewell years before he was publicly
named.
Sewell, who studied under Blunt at the Courtauld Institute of Art in
London,
reveals in a new memoir that he found out about his mentor’s spying not
long
after MI5 had extracted his confession in 1964.
Blunt, who worked for the security services during the second world war,
had
denied being recruited by the Soviets throughout his 11 previous
interrogations.
His treachery remained unknown to all but a select few until Margaret
Thatcher
named him on the floor of the Commons in 1979. The shock was increased
by
Blunt’s status as a close adviser to the monarch — he was surveyor of
the
Queen’s pictures from 1945-72.
The two men became friends in the mid-1950s when Sewell was a student at
the
Courtauld, where Blunt was director from 1947 until his retirement in
1974.
“Anthony told me in the mid-1960s that he’d been a spy,” said Sewell,
whose
latest memoir, Outsider II, is published on November 1. “It simply came
up
in a conversation we were having one day. I didn’t see any reason to
discuss
it with him much more.”
He also says the Queen knew of Blunt’s spying, but still kept him in his
royal
post for nearly a decade after finding out. “The Queen had been told he
was
a spy after his confession,” Sewell said...
The Sunday Times.
Eh?
Saying nobody knew Blunt was a spy is like saying nobody knew Sir Jimmy Savile had a thing for underage girls.
What next?
Stevie Wonder's blind?
Sunday, 14 October 2012
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