Owen Matthews Owen Matthews

Betrayal was a routine business for George Blake

When questioned by Simon Kuper, the double agent dismissed the many men he sent to their deaths as casualties of war in a great ideological cause

A model of self-righteousness: George Blake always claimed to have acted according to his conscience. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 06 February 2021

Kim Philby once remarked to the journalist Murray Sayle that ‘to betray, you must first belong. I never belonged’. Kim, as usual, was lying. Westminster and Cambridge, the Foreign Office and SIS: for all his attempts to pose as an outsider, Philby was a thorough-paced member of the British Establishment. George Blake — who is quoted using exactly the same phrase about himself in Simon Kuper’s wise, engaging biography The Happy Traitor — was telling the truth. Blake never belonged to a country, and communism was probably the closest thing he ever found to a spiritual home — even if he was deeply disillusioned by the reality of the workers’ paradise when his espionage career ended in exile in Moscow.

He was born George Behar in Rotterdam to a Jewish father and a strictly Protestant Dutch mother. His father, Albert, originally from Constantinople, had acquired a British passport after service with the British Army on the Western Front and named his only son after the King.

Get Britain's best politics newsletters

Register to get The Spectator's insight and opinion straight to your inbox. You can then read two free articles each week.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in