by John Pearson
Norman Lucas was one of the last of the old-school crime reporters and he was something of a Fleet Street institution. Like many of his kind he was a former policeman. But Norman had a sentimental streak: over many years a considerable part of his generous expense account had gone on keeping in contact with his old friends at New Scotland Yard. All he asked for in return was to be kept informed if anything interesting cropped up in their line of duty. Over the years these contacts proved to be a useful source of information, but everything depended on trust between them. Norman’s Scotland Yard friends trusted him to be totally discreet, and Norman trusted them to be absolutely accurate. A slip-up either way could have been embarrassing. But Norman’s friends didn’t make mistakes; nor did Norman, and it was thanks to this that he was regarded as one of the best-informed crime writers in London. By 1964 he had become chief crime reporter of the Sunday Mirror, a newspaper with a weekly circulation of five million.
During that first week of July 1964, one of Norman’s contacts at the Yard informed him that the major investigation of the Krays and their followers was complete and arrests would shortly follow. Apart from details of the Twins’ involvement in organised crime throughout London, including their contacts with the American Mafia, C11 had turned up sensitive information about a number of public figures and politicians involved with one of the Twins in a homosexual vice ring. The most sensational of these characters was a member of the House of Lords ‘who is a household name’. When Lucas asked his informant to be more specific, Boothby’s name was mentioned, together with those of several other politicians and celebrities.
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As it happened, C11 and Norman Lucas weren’t the only people suddenly aware of what Boothby and Tom Driberg had been doing. What Lucas couldn’t know – because it would be thirty years before the papers of Sir Timothy Bligh, private secretary to the then prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home would be placed in the Public Records Office – was that serious concern about the antics of these two important politicians was coming from another quarter, quite independently from C11. And because of this a still more high-powered investigation was just about to start. On the orders of the prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home himself, two of his top ministers were making urgent inquiries into the behaviour of Lord Boothby and Tom Driberg.
What had happened was that just before Norman Lucas got his tip-off from his friend at Scotland Yard, Martin Redmayne, Conservative Chief Whip in the House of Commons, had been approached by a pair of worried Conservative backbenchers, Brigadier Terence Clarke, and Barnaby Drayson. Some of their constituents had been complaining about the behaviour of two politicians, accompanied by obvious criminals, whom they’d witnessed soliciting rent boys at White City dog track. The two MPs had duly visited White City to check out the story for themselves and had actually seen Boothby and Driberg behaving as their constituents described.
In fact the behaviour of Boothby and Driberg wasn’t quite as far-fetched as it sounds. Gambling, particularly on greyhound racing, was fairly common practice by criminals needing to account for their illicit earnings. One of those who did so was Driberg’s current lover, the burglar Teddy Smith, who not only was a keen greyhound fancier but might well have needed an explanation for the proceeds from the burglaries that Driberg had put him up to.
When the two MPs reported back to Martin Redmayne with the news he was so disturbed that he instantly informed the prime minister, who was even more alarmed. Since Driberg was a Labour MP his behaviour was strictly not Sir Alec’s business but the possibility of a criminal and homosexual scandal involving a Conservative politician as famous as Lord Boothby emphatically was. It was less than a year since one of Lord Home’s own parliamentary colleagues, John Profumo, the then Minister for Defence, had been forced to resign from the government after lying in parliament over an affair with the call girl Christine Keeler. The ensuing uproar ended with the resignation of Harold Macmillan, the then prime minister, who was succeeded by Alec Douglas-Home.
Sir Alec didn’t panic easily but the scars from the Profumo business had still to heal and he was so alarmed at the prospect of a rerun of that terrible disaster that he actually called in his home secretary Henry Brooke to question Boothby personally. It is an indication of how seriously the prime minister treated it that he also summoned the secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Timothy Bligh, to record his actions, along with the home secretary’s reply. He’d spoken to Boothby who totally denied any suggestion of involvement with the Krays. More reassuring still, the home secretary said that he’d had a word with the Commissioner for Police, Sir Joseph Simpson. A great careerist who was every inch a politician’s policeman, bland Sir Joseph had a knack of saying what senior politicians wished to hear. He did so now, assuring worried Henry Brooke that not only was there ‘no ongoing investigation of any organised criminals’ by Scotland Yard but that ‘organised crime is actually decreasing now in London’.
When the home secretary reported these glad tidings back to the prime minister and the members of his committee the members appear to have been reassured, with the exception of the down-to-earth Solicitor General, Peter Rawlinson, who remarked that it all sounded, ‘pretty unconvincing’.
As for Norman Lucas’s story, which by now had reached the newsroom of the Sunday Mirror, it would normally have gone straight to the Mirror Group’s editorial director Hugh Cudlipp, widely known as one of the great crusading journalists of the day. But ebullient Hugh was off on holiday and at that very moment all his energies were going on repainting his yacht in Honfleur harbour. Had Cudlipp been a little less concerned about his boat and been in London to deal with Norman’s story, things would have turned out differently.
For quite some time Hugh Cudlipp had been cultivating close personal relations with Harold Wilson and the Labour Party’s high command, and he would certainly have checked with them before running such a dangerous story in the paper, just as Harold Wilson and his advisers would certainly have urged caution before running such a story with a general election looming that autumn. But during Cudlipp’s absence editorial control of the Mirror newspapers was left in the nervous hands of the chairman of the Mirror’s proprietors, the International Press Corporation, Cecil Harmsworth King, who was a very different character from that crusading journalist Hugh Cudlipp.
That July, Cecil Harmsworth King had two particularly busy bees buzzing in his bonnet. The first, as befitted the great-nephew of Lord Northcliffe, the intolerable father of modern popular journalism, was that he absolutely must assert himself against the dangerously ambitious Cudlipp and make himself the undisputed boss of IPC. The second, which was closely linked with this, was to use his position of chairman of Mirror Newspapers to take his place among London’s movers and shakers. Cecil King was longing to assert himself and make things happen.
Sensing, correctly, that Sir Alec Douglas-Home had almost had his day, Cecil King had recently decided to offer Harold Wilson and the Labour Party the support of Mirror newspapers in the forthcoming election and was driving round London in his big Rolls-Royce with a red flag flying from its radiator. And now Norman Lucas had given him just the story he needed to show his loyalty to Labour and to demonstrate the power of the Mirror newspapers. The Profumo case had brought down one prime minister already and had sold an awful lot of papers in the process. Imagine the effect of the revelation that the most popular right-wing politician of the day had been involved in a homosexual scandal with the most dangerous gangster in London.
According to Norman Lucas ‘Cecil King was cock-a-hoop’ when he read his story. Understandably. Single-handed, he and he alone was about to shaft the rickety Conservative government, and help to send Harold Wilson to Downing Street as prime minister in the forthcoming general election. In the process he could also show crusading journalist Hugh Cudlipp how to edit a newspaper. At one smart stroke Cecil King would have made himself master in his own house and put himself in line for that longed for peerage that would place him on a par w
ith his fearsome great-uncle, the legendary Lord Northcliffe.
The year before, at the start of the Profumo scandal, Cecil King had actually asked Prime Minister Macmillan if there was any truth in rumours he was hearing of a ‘relationship’ between Jack Profumo and the call girl Christine Keeler. ‘Not a shred. You have my word upon it,’ said Macmillan. Two days later, when the Sunday Mirror’s deadly rival, the News of the World openly accused Profumo of lying to the House of Commons, Profumo admitted it and resigned immediately. Shortly afterwards, Macmillan followed. Once fooled, Cecil King had no intention of being caught out like this again over Robert Boothby.
There was, however, just one tiny problem. King hadn’t checked with Transport House as to whether Labour’s high command actually wanted his story. Not that this made any difference once the presses had begun to roll, and five million copies of the Sunday Mirror fell on five million doormats that Sunday morning.
‘PEER AND A GANGSTER. YARD INQUIRY’ proclaimed their headlines, and according to the accompanying article ‘the Police Commissioner, Sir Joseph Simpson, has ordered a top-level investigation into the alleged homosexual relationship between a peer who is a household name and a leading thug in the London underworld, involved in West End protection rackets.’1
12
Cover-up:
August–September 1964
AFTER THOSE UNEXPLAINED reports from the two Conservative MPs concerning the behaviour of Lord Boothby and Tom Driberg at the dog track, one place in Britain where the Sunday Mirror story must have caused some consternation was at Chequers, the official country residence of the prime minister, where on that memorable Sunday morning, Sir Alec Douglas-Home was enjoying his breakfast with the Sunday papers – except that he can’t have enjoyed anything very much when he saw the front page of the Sunday Mirror. This was what Sir Alec had been fearing all along. How typical of bloody Bob. Disaster loomed.
Faced with this suddenly appalling crisis, Douglas-Home was powerless. There was nothing he could do except send once more for the home secretary, who couldn’t do a great deal either. But politics can be an odd old business, and few things were odder than what happened next and how help and consolation were to reach Sir Alec in his hour of need by courtesy of his arch-enemy Harold Wilson, the leader of the opposition. To understand how this happened we must return to the central character in this imminent disaster, Lord Boothby.
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France was a popular destination for top people that July, and while Hugh Cudlipp was putting that final coat of varnish to his yacht in Honfleur harbour, Boothby, oblivious to what Cecil King was up to, not to mention the discoveries of his own party’s parliamentary chief whip, had spent a more relaxed few days taking the waters at the spa town of Vittel with his old friend, Colin Coote, editor of the London Daily Telegraph. That Sunday morning as they returned to London one of them picked up a copy of the Sunday Mirror at the airport.
‘We were both completely baffled by its front-page story and spent the flight back to London trying to work out who on earth the famous peer could be,’ Lord Boothby told me later. (Interestingly, another member of the House of Lords who felt genuine alarm was Lord Montgomery of Alamein who thought that since he was one of the few members of the Lords who could claim to be ‘a household name’ the press had discovered some fearful indiscretion from his past.)
Boothby, on the other hand, insisted that in contrast with the Field Marshal his conscience was crystal-clear, and that he had never imagined for a moment that the as yet unnamed peer in the Sunday Mirror might just conceivably be him. He also claimed that after he was safely back in Eaton Place he rang his old friend Driberg out of simple curiosity to find out who it was. ‘As one of the best-informed journalists in London, Tom was sure to know the peer’s identity.’
All this, of course, like most of what Lord Boothby uttered in the days ahead, was sheerest nonsense. What in fact had happened was that no sooner had he read the front page of the Sunday Mirror than he panicked, and his hurried call to Driberg was not to inquire who the fuss was all about but to beg him to do anything he could to help him. Here he was clutching at the flimsiest of straws but he had no one else to turn to. Besides, Driberg, as we now know, was not uninvolved himself and having wriggled out of so many sexual scrapes in his own distinctly lurid past there was just a chance that he might help them both to wriggle out of this one.
But, clearly, clever Tom didn’t sound too hopeful. And when, shortly afterwards, the doorbell rang and the home secretary and the Conservative chief whip were standing on the doorstep with orders from the prime minister to ask what Lord Boothby now intended doing about the Mirror’s accusations there was not a great deal he could say, apart from using that deep brown TV voice of his to deny everything and send them on their way. His visitors had made it fairly clear, to say the least, that they were not impressed. Once they’d gone, despair and desperation descended on Number One Eaton Place.
Several years later, when I was trying to make sense of what had happened, I was put in touch with one of the minor characters involved, a rich Lithuanian timber merchant called Harold Kissin, who was said to have helped Boothby at the time. When I met him he struck me as an extremely amiable rich middle-aged businessman; apparently by chance he too had arrived at Eaton Place soon after the two top Tory politicians had left.
But did he really come by chance? It was only later that I discovered that Kissin was a close and trusted friend of Harold Wilson and a member of his so-called ‘Hampstead Circle’. In the past Wilson had even done unofficial business for him during trips to Russia. Now was the time for Wilson to request a favour in return. For Kissin apparently knew Boothby quite well and was just the sort of tactful understanding character one would turn to in an awkward situation. At the time he told me that he found Boothby ‘in a dreadful state, poor fellow. He’d been drinking heavily, and was threatening to kill himself.’
Kissin also told me how he did his best to calm Boothby down and told him not to panic. He had good friends who would help him and he was sure that everything could be arranged. Before he left he gave him what would prove to be extremely sound advice. Get in touch at once with Arnold Goodman.
I was always puzzled over why the Labour Party’s most influential lawyer, Arnold Goodman, came to represent a Conservative peer as notorious as Robert Boothby. What made it particularly strange was that not only was Goodman very much a Labour lawyer but he was also one of Harold Wilson’s most trusted and dedicated advisers. So why should he, of all men, have helped to get the Tory Lord Boothby off the hook in his hour of greatest need?
I actually interviewed Boothby at the end of 1969 and in all innocence asked him the same question. Who was responsible for Goodman’s intervention in his defence, which on the face of it seemed most unlikely? Had it really been down to the influence of kindly Harold Kissin? Boothby shook his head. ‘Certainly not’, he said. ‘It was the little man.’
‘Little man. What little man?’ I asked.
‘Who d’you think I mean? The little man. Harold Wilson.’
The mystery deepened. But when I tried to probe, Lord Boothby clearly felt he’d said enough and changed the subject.
Even so, I found it hard to believe that Harold Wilson would have acted so decisively to save an old scoundrel like Boothby – and a Conservative scoundrel at that – out of the sheer kindness of his heart. There had to be some other reason. Not until 1995, when the Cabinet papers were finally released under the thirty-year rule, did I find out what it was. What I couldn’t know in 1964, because the evidence would be suppressed for another thirty years, was that when the Boothby scandal burst that summer Harold Wilson had a desperate need to destroy all traces of what was actually a far more dangerous scandal than I realised. For it was not until 1995 that I learned that Tom Driberg, who was one of Wilson’s oldest and most trusted friends in politics, the man he would finally ennoble and make Chairman of the Labour Party, had also been so perilously involved with Booth
by.
This was plainly crucial to any understanding of this whole extraordinary affair. For it meant that both government and opposition shared a common interest – to make absolutely sure that Cecil King’s story went no further. It also explained why bulky Arnold Goodman was so hurriedly wheeled in to succour Boothby in his hour of need. With a general election in the offing, all that really mattered now to Harold Wilson was not to bail out the unfortunate Boothby but to save the skin of one of his most influential political advisers. Should this scandal ever have spread to Driberg, the Little Man might soon have been saying sad farewells to any hopes he had of becoming prime minister in the election set for eight weeks’ time.1
So this, and not the milk of human kindness, was why Arnold Goodman was so hurriedly brought in to save the skin of Robert Boothby.
Not for nothing was the man whose appetite and girth had earned him the nickname of ‘Two Dinners Goodman’ also known as Harold Wilson’s ‘Mr Fixit’. After the Sunday Mirror revelations he was probably the only man alive who could have put the lid back firmly on this highly toxic can of worms – and made absolutely sure it stayed there.
Whatever one may think of the late Arnold Goodman’s lawyerly integrity, one must admire his cool in such a very awkward situation. The problem was that, then as now, the village of Westminster kept afloat on gossip and everyone in politics who was not born yesterday knew at least something of Bob Boothby’s reputation – and probably even more about Tom Driberg’s. Frankly, it would have been hard to find a dodgier duo in public life to have landed in a mess like this. And the longer it was permitted to drag on, the more the rumour and the gossip would increase and the more difficult it would be to save the pair.
