WE aim to be entertaining. And if others besides Graham Martin find entertainment in detecting a cloak-and-dagger thriller, of démarche and coup and counter-coup, going on between the three of us editors, they are very welcome. We shall try to provide further pregnant hints that below the overt text of our Editorials there is another sub-text, lightly coded, in which the Mancunian and the Somersetshire and the Tennessean editors can be discerned manoeuvring and out-manoeuvring and jockeying for position.

Clearly the Tennessean editor is suspect in any case. If it is perhaps rash to think he has been got at by that originally Tennessean institution, the Ku Klux Klan, it is in any case clear that he is 'out of touch'. Professor J. R. Vincent for instance, writing in the happily reborn TLS, has remarked that 'One of the perks of being an academic, perhaps, is that living in ivory towers one gets to know so much'-this by way of explaining that the identity of 'the Fourth Man' was known to him and such as Hugh Trevor-Roper all of seventeen years ago. (Whence, naturally, some annoyance that it was left to Andrew Boyle to get kudos and money out of blowing the gaff.) But plainly the ivory towers that Professor Vincent had in mind were not those that look down on the hills of Northern California or of mid-Tennessee: and so it is no surprise that your hapless Tennessean editor, so far from being 'in the know', was struck all of a heap by the identification of Blunt as 'the Fourth Man', and subsequently of Cairncross as conceivably 'the Fifth'. His guileless innocence caused him, as may be supposed, no little embarrassment when he was slyly invited at Tennessean cocktail-parties to proffer an explanation or at least an opinion. And it did not help that his interlocutors knew him as a product of Cambridge, that university where, as now appeared, the whole web of impudent treachery was spun. He could see himself being run on a rail out of Nashville, as 'unsound' there, though in an opposite sense, as he is held to be apparently in the columns of Stand. Thus cornered and more than a little mortified, your humble servant and unofficial ambassador found himself fulminating like any Labour back-bencher at how the British ruling-class covers up for its children, and looks after its own. (This went down well; for Americans are ready to believe that our governing class is corrupt, where they go wrong is in supposing that it is, for all its corruption, astute and efficient.) Professor Vincent's implication that every one who needed to know about Blunt knew it in 1963, did nothing to remove your servant's suspicion that in Britain there is a minority that is entitled to know, and a vast majority that isn't; and he wasn't mollified by the uncertainty whether the Sovereign was among the knowledgeable few, or one of us, the duped and deluded many.

The Prime Minister of course isn't of 'the governing class'. At least, that isn't where she originated. And among the hopes that some of us have none too confidently pinned on her, was the hope that she retained from her origins political instincts not shared by her Old Etonian colleagues. That hope has not been borne out by the way her Government has handled the Blunt affair: no heads have rolled, no one has been brought to book, and the impudent traitor himself is apparently at liberty to profit further (if not financially, then in other ways) from his treachery by writing memoirs that will be bought by a national newspaper. (His hapless underlings meanwhile-cypher-clerks and such-have spent six or eight years in Pentonville.)

J. R. Vincent says:

The mood of 1979 might be defined in terms of the change in the status of E. M. Forster. Once a slightly prissy cultural symbol, an edifying text for schoolchildren, he has become a political dirty word, even in The Times editorial columns.

If one exclaims, 'Not before time!' it is not out of vindictiveness, still less self-satisfaction. We should not have needed any special information about Forster's associates, nor the dreary posthumous revelations about his sex-life, to take his measure long ago. That we didn't (though C. H. Sisson did) shows how the rot is not in 'society', nor in 'the governing class', but in ourselves. Nothing that we have subsequently learned about Burgess or Philby, Blunt or Maclean, has illuminated what we should have recognized for ourselves in the terrifyingly childish declaration: 'If I had to choose between betraying my friend and betraying my country, I hope I should have the courage to betray my country.' Quite plainly, that is the principle on which Blunt's friends operated through at least three decades, and the principle on which they will continue to operate since, by choosing not to unmask them, the Government has by clear implication condoned them.

To get Forster off the hook, it has been contended- quite intemperately indeed-that Blunt betrayed both his country and (necessarily, therefore) his friends. But this is only a debating point. For all the evidence is that in the circles that Blunt and Forster moved in, alike in Cambridge and in London, 'my friend', whether in homosexual or heterosexual mouths, had a far more special and restricted sense than it had in normal usage then, or has now. 'Friend' was not, for Forster and his associates, what it is in normal parlance: something that shades imperceptibly into or out of 'neighbour', or 'colleague', or 'acquaintance', or 'comrade-in-arms'. 'Friend', for them, meant something altogether more intense and restrictive. And so, though one understands well enough why Lord Annan should be most vehement in denouncing Philby and the other traitors, at the same time as he impenitently advances 'Bloomsbury' as a school of manners for us all, I think he shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. His vengefulness on the one score is meant to safeguard and validate his leniency on the other. But Bloomsbury, alike at its Cambridge and its London end, explicitly fostered the in-group intellectual arrogance without which Philby's career, and Burgess's, and Blunt's, are inexplicable. For good measure it provided a moral code by which sexual and political faithlessness were equally and interchangeably evidence of Enlightenment. As an apparently inexhaustible fountain, not to say sump, of self-regard, Bloomsbury deserves all the attention it has received, and the so much more that we can anticipate its receiving to the last syllable of recorded time. But it deserves that attention, surely, as the grotesquely well-documented case of a governing class in the last stages of demoralisation and frivolity. Is that the spirit in which it is studied? On the contrary Lord Annan and others have the temerity still to offer us Lytton Strachey and Vanessa Bell as models of civilized behaviour to which we and our children ought to be aspiring!

If we wonder that no heads have rolled, 'Witch-hunt!' comes the cry from the well-drilled liberal ranks. There is no better example of how catch-phrases serve us instead of thought. For the point about witches is that we once thought they existed, but now know they don't; whereas, as regards traitors, we thought they didn't exist, but now know they do. It is the same with the even more vacuous gibe: 'Reds under the beds!'- which depends for its effect on the assumption that 'Reds' don't exist, whereas we know they do; and in beds, if not sometimes under them, is where they seem to do a lot of their business-if we can believe for instance the account of Burgess in the late Goronwy Rees's Chapter of Accidents. In a somewhat but not significantly different context, 'Money on the table' is the latest catch-phrase to be meaninglessly mouthed in the same echo-chamber where 'Witch-hunt' and 'Reds under the beds' have volleyed hollowly back and forth for decades.

Michael Hamburger has warned you that the Tennessean editor is 'not as closely in touch with present realities in Britain as he thinks he is.' And, observing such a present reality as Lord Annan, what can the editor do, except agree?
DONALD DAVIE