Countdown’s Richard Whiteley was an MI5 spy says Royle Family star

RICHARD Whiteley’s codebreaking skills never extended beyond setting the nineletter conundrum, at the end of Countdown, at least as far as most people knew.

And while he had the nickname ‘twice nightly Whiteley’ and was known as something of a charmer with the ladies, the bumbling quizmaster with a love of appalling puns, loud ties and stripy blazers, which often clashed, hardly cut the figure of a James Bond.

But according to an astonishing claim made by the actor Ricky Tomlinson, the late Mr Whiteley was . . . a spy.

Tomlinson, 77, best known for playing the couch potato Jim Royle in the sitcom The Royle Family and whose catchphrase was ‘my a**e’, made the jaw- dropping remark in an interview with a local newspaper at the opening of the Wetherspoon pub the Bull and Stirrup in Chester. Celebrity friends, former colleagues and Whiteley’s girlfriend at the time of his death yesterday reacted with incredulity at Tomlinson’s claim.

So how was it that the seemingly disparate worlds of cosy, afternoon TV inhabited by the former Countdown host — who died aged 61 in 2005 following heart surgery — and the murky activities of the security services which Tomlinson alleged Whiteley was involved in, collided?

The answer, according to former plasterer Tomlinson’s remarks in the Chester Chronicle, dates back more than 40 years to when he and his friend steel fixer Des Warren helped to organise the first national building workers’ strike in an upstairs room at the very same pub being relaunched.

Tomlinson was then a trades union rabblerouser. He was a 33-year-old site safety officer and member of the action committee for 300 flying pickets during the violent 1972 national builders’ strike. It was claimed that the pickets stormed building sites which employed non-unionised workers and, according to witnesses, chanted: ‘Kill, kill, kill.’

He and Warren were arrested — with 22 other men — and charged with conspiracy to incite violence. The pair were sentenced to two and three years in prison respectively during the notorious ‘Shrewsbury 24’ trial in 1973. Tomlinson spent much of the time in solitary confinement after refusing to wear prison uniform and also went on a 22-day hunger strike.

It was considered by many on the Left to be one of the most controversial prosecutions of trade unionists in British history.

Tomlinson claims that a documentary called Red Under The Bed, for Yorkshire Television, aired during the trial and presented by Whiteley with the late Labour MP turned Thatcherite Woodrow Wyatt as producer, influenced the decision to convict.

He claims the security services under Edward Heath’s government commissioned the documentary for this purpose.

Tomlinson told the Chester Chronicle: ‘I’ve got documents at home, which are printed “confidential”, “strictly confidential”, “not to be seen”, but it involves the likes of Ted Heath and Woodrow Wyatt.

‘We have just discovered that they made a film which went out on television the night the jury were out considering the verdict, called Red Under The Bed, and it was so anti-trade union that two of the jury changed their minds and brought in a majority verdict of 10-2 guilty.

‘We found out this week that the film was designed, written, made and paid for by the security services.

‘Woodrow Wyatt was a member of the security services and, unbelievably, so was Richard Whiteley who hosted the show. Richard Whiteley from Countdown was a member of the intelligence services.’

THE Chester Chronicle reported that Tomlinson insisted he had the evidence but was not prepared to pass it to them.

Yesterday Whiteley’s girlfriend when he died, Kathryn Apanowicz, 56, a former EastEnders actress and now a presenter with BBC Radio York, said: ‘It is absolute bloody nonsense, there is no truth in it whatsoever.

‘If Richard was a member of the secret service then maybe Ken Dodd was in charge of MI5.

‘He couldn’t keep a secret to save his life and he certainly wasn’t a spy; in the Seventies he was driving around in a Ford Escort.

‘I think Ricky was chasing publicity, but my advice for him would be to take more water with it. It is so laughable that it’s not even insulting.

‘My friends have been ringing to ask whether I’m going for a part in the next series of Spooks!’

Speaking at Whiteley’s former holiday home in Wensleydale which she was bequeathed in his £4million will, she added: ‘I think Richard will be up there with Terry Wogan having a good laugh at the idea of him being a spy — he didn’t even know how to work the VCR.’ She said that she would have to mention it on her radio show on Saturday morning and play Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better, the theme to 1977 Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, starring Roger Moore.

Carol Vorderman, 56, who was Mr Whiteley’s Countdown co- host throughout his years on the show from its inception on Channel 4 in November 1982 until his death, said: ‘Whiters was a mystery and he was amazing and charming and very bright — which he managed to hide well a lot of the time on Countdown. I would be fascinated to see Ricky’s evidence.’

Mr Whiteley was a student at Cambridge University between 1962 and 1965, graduating with a thirdclass degree in English from Christ’s College.

The university is known to be a recruiting ground for the secret services and was attended by the notorious double agents Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt.

SIR John Jones, a former director- general of MI5, who died in 1998 aged 75, was a graduate of Christ’s College, where he read history, before Mr Whiteley.

But Gyles Brandreth, who was a regular on Countdown’s Dictionary Corner during the years Mr Whiteley hosted the show, said of the claims about his friend: ‘Well, he was at Cambridge . . . but if he was a spy, then he was the best in the business.

‘I knew him for 40 years and talked to him for hours — often late into the night and when he was in his cups — and he gave no hint of any kind that he had ever been approached by, or was involved with, the secret services.

‘He certainly had Bond-like qualities: he was intelligent, charming and he wasn’t known as “twice-nightly Whiteley” without good reason. [Although in truth, he was given the nickname because for many years he presented both Countdown and Yorkshire TV’s Calendar programme on the same day.]

‘He was also courageous. He was at the Grand Hotel in Brighton on the night it was bombed when Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister.’

Former Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken, who was the first presenter of Calendar, which launched in 1968 when Mr Whiteley also joined the show’s team, said: ‘I knew him pretty well and my guess is this is pretty good baloney.’

Mr Aitken does, however, remember Mr Whiteley being ‘extremely interested’ after he came back from interviewing former Prime Minister Anthony Eden, or Lord Avon as he was then, about the Soviet Union invasion of Czechoslovakia.

‘He asked me so many questions about what Eden was saying,’ Mr Aitken said. ‘But I didn’t think any more of it than, “Gosh, Richard is extremely interested in what I’ve been doing”.

‘From what I know about Mr Tomlinson, I would sup with a very long spoon.’

However eccentric the claim about Mr Whiteley sounds, Left-wing campaigners have maintained that there is evidence that Red Under The Bed was subject to Establishment influence. It featured footage of some of the defendants taking part in protest marches interspersed with scenes of violence.

A long-running campaign to clear the names of Tomlinson and Warren, who died in 2004, has uncovered documents which Andy Burnham, Shadow Home Secretary, in 2015 said ‘suggests that a conspiracy against these trade unionists went right to the top of the (Edward)