Alex Grant hit the headlines a decade ago as a Greenwich councillor — but he has a new tale to tell of scandal and intrigue in public life. The Greenwich Wire’s special correspondent MERCURY MAN found out more.
Of all the political scandals of the 1960s, Tory MP John Profumo misbehaving himself with Christine Keeler springs to mind quicker than the spying of junior Admiralty clerk John Vassall – and earlier traitors like Burgess, Maclean and Philby are positively Premier League compared to Vassall in the Conference.
But a new book by former Greenwich Labour councillor Alex Grant tells how the blackmailed Vassall actually did more political damage to the country than Profumo, and how the scandal exposed the deep-rooted hypocrisy and homophobia of the time.
Sex, Spies and Scandal – the John Vassall Affair is published this week by Biteback and your special correspondent, who knew Alex himself as a brave and committed representative of the people, will put down his latest Nero Wolfe for this one.
“After several years of ghostwriting other people’s books, I wanted to write one about Dolphin Square, the apartment block in Pimlico where John Vassall lived for three-and-a-half years, from early 1959 until his arrest in September 1962,” Alex said.
“Dolphin Square was home to a fascinating collection of people in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Sid James, Christine Keeler, Angus Wilson – arguably Britain’s first openly gay novelist – and many MPs and military men, as well as Vassall.”
Alex didn’t write that book but eventually homed in on Vassall, who worked in quiet obscurity as a junior clerical officer at the Admiralty until he was exposed as a Soviet spy, prosecuted and imprisoned in 1962.
“It turned out that Vassall had been photographed in compromising positions while working at the British embassy in Moscow in 1954,” Alex said. “For more than seven years he had been blackmailed into handing British defence secrets over to his Soviet handlers, both in Moscow and in London.”
The scandal led to the resignation of a well-regarded government minister amid rumours that Vassall was part of a secret homosexual cabal in Westminster and Whitehall.
“The Vassall case is barely remembered today,” Alex said. “The Profumo scandal which followed seems to have erased memories of the Vassall case, even though it was just as big a deal at the time. And remarkably, apart from a homophobic account of Vassall’s espionage which was published in 1964, no book has ever been written about it – until now.”
Vassall’s arrest and trial, and a subsequent judicial enquiry by Lord Cyril Radcliffe, dominated the front pages of newspapers for several months. The salacious reporting was full of homophobic innuendo and half-truths; arguably Britain’s first tabloid witch-hunt.
“As a gay man being prosecuted for spying, several years before decriminalisation, Vassall was given no quarter,” Alex said. “The newspapers, and the judge at his trial, overlooked the ugly truth: that Vassall had not been seduced in Moscow, but had been drugged and gang-raped.
“That is not to say that Vassall was blameless. He was a vain and snobbish man, prone to Walter Mitty fantasies about his social status. He had courted trouble by fraternising with Russian men in Moscow, and most of them were probably covert KGB agents.
“But he was caught between a rock and a hard place, whether he told the embassy what had happened or gave into the Russians’ demands to give them defence secrets. He would eventually be disgraced and prosecuted, either way.”
Vassall died in 1996 but Alex managed to track down several people who knew him, including two women who worked with him in an archive after his release from prison in the 1970s, when he used the alias John Phillips to avoid his past.
His defence barrister Jeremy Hutchinson, who died in 2017, had a lengthy correspondence with him, both during his imprisonment and afterwards, which has only recently been put in an archive. It gives poignant insights into how Vassall struggled to rebuild his life after his conviction.
Alex said: “More importantly, in the autumn of 2022, the National Archives released thousands of documents on MI5’s surveillance of Vassall, and their breathtakingly intrusive investigations of everyone he knew socially.
“MI5’s files confirm for the first time that Vassall had relationships with two Conservative MPs – neither of whom seemed to know anything about his spying – before his arrest.”
Alex, who was a Labour councillor for 16 years, is no stranger to political scandals. In 2013 he made local headlines after a resignation statement, sent to Labour party members to explain why he was standing down, was leaked to the media. In the statement, Alex made clear that, like others, he’d had enough of a culture of bullying at the council.
He later revealed that after raising concerns – confidentially – about the Labour council’s approach to property disposals, he was shouted at and threatened.
The council chief whip at the time, Ray Walker, even served him with a warning to stop “issuing publications critical of the party”. The warning was later found to be unlawful. (Walker died last year and was posthumously made an alderman last October.)
Alex’s complaints about bullying were the tip of an iceberg, as the media – including an early incarnation of The Greenwich Wire – began reporting abusive messages left on a colleague’s voicemail by the council leader, Chris Roberts, and even allegations that Roberts had once thrown a bunch of keys at a town hall cleaner, which the leader denied.
Roberts stepped down in 2014, but those who had tried to blow the whistle on what was going on in Greenwich were never thanked, or apologised to.
“I am still fascinated by political scandals, and what they tell us about organisational failures and the spirit of the age,” Alex said.
“The scandals in Greenwich were local and relatively simple: a problem with bullying, and further bullying of whistle-blowers. By contrast the John Vassall affair was a multi-layered scandal in which lives, liberty and sexual freedom were at stake.”
John Vassall also had an intriguing connection with Greenwich.
After his arrest, MI5 found a sheet of paper inside the back cover of an “authentic atlas” of London, kept inside his desk at the Admiralty, carrying directions to reach the National Maritime Museum, in Vassall’s distinctive handwriting. It contained a list of streets, from Lambeth Road to Romney Road, with what seems to be atlas page numbers after each street, and then directions to find the museum’s car park:
“Sharp right at the end of Museum Grounds. CAR PARK. Right again, skirt building, TRUSTEES ENTRANCE, West Wing. Mr Kerr, Director, away for the day. Sends apologies. Cdr May. Deputy Director.”
The reference to “Mr Kerr” is probably a misspelling of Frank Carr, who was the museum’s director from 1947 to 1966.
When Vassall worked in the private office of an Admiralty minister, Tam Galbraith, in the late 1950s he often arranged Galbraith’s ministerial visits. The document could have been directions for Galbraith’s chauffeur, telling him how to reach Greenwich. If so, why was Vassall keeping the document in his London atlas more than three years later? Did Vassall himself visit Greenwich during those years?
Captain Adrian Northey, who had been Vassall’s boss in Moscow in 1955-56, was the director of the Royal Naval College in the early 1960s. Vassall had got along well with Northey, and it is possible that Vassall went to visit him, though there is no evidence that Northey was aware of, or an accomplice in, his spying.
Vassall’s connections to Greenwich are a loose end in the story, and it would be good to know whether Vassall visited Greenwich, and if so why.
His known rendezvous points with his Soviet handlers between 1956 and 1962 were mostly in north and west London, not south-east, but maybe he sometimes met the KGB in Greenwich as well?
Sex, Spies and Scandal – the John Vassall Affair is published by Biteback. Alex Grant was a Labour councillor for Blackheath Westcombe ward, previously Vanbrugh ward, from 1998 to 2014. He tweets @AlexGrant24 and blogs at www.alexgrant.me.
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