Monthly Archives: June 2021

The Spy Who Loved, by Clare Mulley

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Summary: An exceptionally fine biography of Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville) and her incredible exploits as a resistant to totalitarianism during World War 2

The Spy Who Loved is Clare Mulley’s exceptionally fine biography of Krystyna Skarbek or Christine Granville as she later styled herself. Like all great biographies it does two things: it not only gives the reader a strong sense of what their subject was like, but it also provides an powerful introduction to their times. Neither of these are trivial matters, but the former is immensely complicated by the fact that Skarbek lived so much of her life clandestinely at one point taking the opportunity to shave 7 years off her age when obtaining an official identification.

Determined to resist the tyrannies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia which consumed her own country, Poland, Skarbek led a remarkably dramatic life, first as a British liaison to the Polish resistance, and later as a Special Operations Executive agent in France. There she was a witness to the desperate French insurrection on the Vercors, and she played a central role in the Resistance preparations for the Allied landings in southern France. Her exploits included securing the defection of an entire German garrison on a strategic pass in the Alps, and, armed with little more than her courage and quick wits, saving a group of her colleagues from almost certain death following their capture by collaborationist police.

The title of the book, The Spy who Loved, is a deliberate reference to James Bond and the, unfortunately unlikely, story that Skarbek was the model for Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. It also is a reference to the fact that Skarbek’s expansive sexual history was also Bondesque.

Judith Matloff, in her very fine account of the Angolan Civil War, notes how booze and promiscuity are common reactions to the experience of trauma. But, at moments, Skarbek’s choices put me in mind not of Bond, but of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s extraordinary creation “Fleabag”, a character deeply damaged by grief and guilt, and seeking fleeting respite from the pain through sex.

Nevertheless, Skarbek’s lovers, for the most part, were lucky in her choice of them. Several had her to thank for their lives. They remained devoted to her memory and some even tried, abortively, to write her biography together.

Skarbek had a difficult time readjusting after the war. She was almost certainly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But, because she was Polish and a woman, she got little support from officialdom. Unable to settle she got a job as a steward on an ocean liner where she was subject to bullying and petty harassment by others in the crew who disliked her being “foreign”, One of the few who befriended her on the liner was a man called Dennis Muldowney, who became obsessed with her and, eventually, murdered her.

It was an appallingly sad end to such a spectacular life. Clare Mulley has done Skarbek some measure of justice with this superb biography.

“Embracing Brexit”, and other nonsense from UK Labour’s leadership

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Summary: The UK Labour Party should look to the moral courage of Hume and Mallon to effectively oppose Johnson’s debased government

At the start of the play King Lear, the villainous Edmund contemplates how he plans to ruin the life of his decent brother Edgar. It won’t be too hard, he reckons, because Edgar is a “brother noble, whose nature is so far from doing harms that he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty my practices ride easy.” In other words, Edgar is so innocent he will never be able to believe that someone could be so shameless with the shenanigans that Edmund plans to unleash in his bid for power.  

This line struck me again after seeing a report of Ed Miliband of all people, following in the footsteps of Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, advising the British people to “embrace Brexit.” This wholesale purchase of Boris Johnson’s shameless Big Lie by the British Labour leadership must have Johnson rubbing his hands in glee. Just as the disaster of Brexit in terms of reduced revenues and collapsing businesses begins to become apparent, Labour, without Johnson even having to ask, has surrendered to him the most favourable political terrain upon which the next election could be fought. And just like that, like innocents, they blunder into his trap.

Few con-men in history can have been so gifted with luck as Johnson. His practices run easy on Labour’s foolish honesty. Starmer and his team may wish to be statesmen and stateswomen endeavouring to do what is best for their country. But what is needed from them first is that they be an opposition, because Johnson has no such patriotic inclination. Johnson remains only interested in Johnson. So Labour must bide their dreams of good government until they actually win an election over the exposed lies of Johnson’s cabal. But that is a possibility that is forever diminished by their acquiescence in Johnson’s most fundamental grift.

I did not grow up politically in the British Labour party. I grew up during the Troubles in the North of Ireland. I learned politics from John Hume and Seamus Mallon. They were men who had their disagreements and differences in approach. But there were more important things that united them and made them such a formidable political partnership.

One of these things was that they repudiated the Big Lie. They did not accept that a polity gerrymandered through the use of the first-past-the-post electoral system was worthy to be considered a democracy. They did not accept that violence could ever heal a divided society. They accepted neither the mealy-mouthed justifications of the British state nor of the Irish paramilitaries for the carnage they wrought. Over 30 brutal years they helped turn their commitments to those truths into a workable peace process, in the face of odds which to many seemed insurmountable. Too many English politicians now seem to take this peace so easily for granted that they dismiss the importance of its roots in Ireland’s and the UK’s common membership of the European Union.

People often made jokes about Hume’s “single transferrable speech”: the one he delivered year in, year out from Derry to Dublin to London to Washington and Brussels. In it he unfailingly demanded peace, power-sharing and respect for each other’s traditions and identities.

But whatever the jokers thought, Hume knew something important that he learned as a teacher. Repetition works. Eventually the basic facts – of French grammar, or Irish history, or the fundamental elements of a peace process – could with patience be drummed into even the most obdurate of brains.

Mallon spoke a similar truth. Sometimes observers would be amazed to see him telling constituents to keep their potential votes rather than pander to their prejudices, and be dishonest about his most deeply held principles.

Mallon showed a class of moral courage which is rare in general. It is even rarer in the current British Labour party which ties itself in knots in its efforts to pander to the perceived prejudices of the Tory voters in its former “Red Wall” seats. Unfortunately it seems they have come to believe that this demands they give Johnson a free pass on his most outrageous lie: that there are benefits to Brexit.

Labour’s leadership may be decent people, but their nature is such that they do not properly conceive of the harms that Johnson so casually wreaks upon them. History is happening to them, and they lack the steel of a Hume or a Mallon to bend its arc back towards justice.