The Lownie Report Podcast: The Early Days of Guy Burgess and the Cambridge Spy Ring

Join Andrew Lownie on Substack here - https://substack.com/@andrewlownie Get your copy of Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess here https://amzn.to/44lpP4n Seventy-five years ago Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean slipped out of England and surfaced in Moscow. Even today we are still learning new things about this infamous chapter in British history. In today’s Lownie Report podcast I go back to the man I spent thirty years researching, the subject of my 2015 book Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess, which won the Intelligence Book of the Year prize and remains the only full biography of the most colourful and, I would argue, most interesting of the Cambridge Five. My fascination began as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where even in the 80s the spies were the talk of every dinner table after Margaret Thatcher outed Anthony Blunt in 1979. There remained many dons who had known the key players, and I spent my final year helping John Costello research his book on Anthony Blunt and travelled the world talking to sources and digging through archives. It was a formative experience because I discovered early on how readily the British Establishment would obscure history in order that it be written as it intended it to be, rather than as it was. To misquote Churchill, history would be kind to the state because it intended, as best it could, to control what was written about it. This would be a theme in all of my books that followed about Edward VIII, Mountbatten and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. In this first part we look at the evolution of a young Burgess. A childhood dominated by women and an absent naval father, who died young, only to be replaced by a stepfather to whom Burgess wasn’t close. We look at how a highly traumatic episode involving Guy’s parents would, by his own telling, have a profound effect on him. The roots of his controversial life were there from the start, and evident early on was the combination of intellectual precocity, supreme confidence and a Marmite character that repelled as many as it entranced. We discuss the febrile politics of 1930s Cambridge, the secretive and exclusive Apostles club of which Guy was a member, and why so many of the brightest young men of his generation gave themselves so willingly to Communism and the Soviet Union. It was a time when Britain was considered by some to be in terminal decline, the main political parties were seen to have failed and the world was recovering from enormous economic turmoil, which precipitated the rise of extremism on both sides as desperate people looked for alternatives. Not a terribly different situation to the world today, almost 100 years on. The episode also covers the motivations of Guy’s contemporaries Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, and how Victor Rothschild, another of Burgess’s Cambridge friends, may have been subject to blackmail over the death of a young man he accidentally killed in a car crash.