Queen Elizabeth and the Spy in the Household/Channel 4

This was a typical Channel 4 documentary- long on revelation, short on evidence for it.

The programme made two significant such revelations, namely that the Queen was complicit in the cover up of Anthony Blunt and his immunity from prosecution and, secondly, the spy delivered a hot dossier on the Royals to his Russian masters.

There is no doubt that the Establishment was more tolerant of Blunt as he was Surveyor (no such normal title as ‘Curator’) of the Royal pictures whereas working class blokes and homosexual spies like John Vassall went inside.

I have little doubt that  Blunt was blackmailed by the KGB.

He also seems a dreadful snob and casuist, supposedly struggling with his conscience whilst betraying his country and no doubt exposing actual agents to real risk.

However a bevy of amateur historians failed to make the obvious point that the reason that the Landed Gentry were pro-Hitler was not out of any genuine admiration but rather that the alternative of Bolshevism and sequestration of their land was very much worse.

Add to this, which the historians on view did not, the loss of a generation no more than twenty years previously in the Great War and an active peace movement.

Maybe one day archives will reveal that the members of the Royal Family were more complicit with Nazism then they have ever shown but, in the absence of such primary evidence, more rigorous historians will probably steer clear of the unfounded accusations made in this programme.