There is not much that’s new, I think, in the release of the MI5 files on PG Wodehouse and his wartime broadcasts from Germany. The Guardian headline reads I was not a Nazi collaborator, PG Wodehouse told MI5 and, of course, Wodehouse told MI5 he wasn’t a Nazi collaborator because he was not, in fact, a Nazi collaborator.
Naive? Perhaps. Foolish? Certainly. But a collaborator? Don’t be ridiculous. And yet, one way or another this stuff keeps resurfacing even though you’d have thought Plum’s knighthood – delayed by the whiff of There’s Something Not Quite Right About Those Radio Programmes – might have settled the matter. If that weren’t enough then Robert McCrum’s masterly biography should have ended all doubts.
And yet perhaps there is one fresh wrinkle. I cannot recall if McCrum uncovered this dispiriting factlet:
[A] memo of a 1946 meeting between an M15 officer and the then director of public prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, reveals that [Wodehouse’s] case was re-evaluated after the war.
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