Treason: '70s style

Anatoly Chernyaev’s diaries show the bullet that Britain dodged.

These diaries indicate that, by the 1970s, an alternative government was in place, handpicked by Moscow to take over the apparatus of the British state once the Cold War was lost. There would be a Soviet-style power split: real power would rest in the chairmanship and the bureaucracy, with the politicians simply the front men. Some of the Labour men the Soviets were grooming were paid agents, others fellow travellers. Yet even front-rank politicians were pathetically anxious to reach some kind of understanding with the Soviet regime.

And Mr Gordon Brown recently praised to the rafters the late Jack Jones, a paid up KGB agent who spied on Britain for 45 years.

Ah, well. At least Brown didn't slap a knighthood on Arthur Scargill, a lifelong Stalinist and proud of it, so we can thank Heavens for small favours.