MI5 kept tabs on ‘Comrade Kingsley Amis’
SIR Kingsley Amis was monitored by MI5 as a suspected Communist during the Second World War, the declassified files reveal.
MI5 kept a ‘top secret’ file referring to the writer as ‘Comrade Kingsley Amis’ and his ‘Communist activities’.
The father of novelist Martin Amis came under suspicion just days after VE Day, while a lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals.
As a young man, he had been a member of the Communist Party at Oxford and received ‘regular supplies’ of its newspaper The Daily Worker, the files noted.
In 1942, Lt Col John Baskervyle-Glegg of MI5 noted there was ‘little doubt that his Left-wing opinions have not changed to any extent since he first came to notice and I accordingly think that he should remain under observation for the time being’.
He said Sir Kingsley’s commanding officer described him as taking ‘extremist views towards most aspects of life’ but added: ‘My view is that if he tried to there are few people who would take him seriously.’
When he returned to Oxford after the war, he worked as an academic, writing articles on socialism and unashamed of his Left-wing views.
Because of his activities, he lost a position on a lecture tour in 1955, organised by the German information department at the Foreign Office, the files reveal.
In February 1957 he wrote in The Daily Worker that he had ‘utterly rejected’ Marxism, which he described as an ‘ailment’.
When he later applied for a visa to go to the US that year, files reveal that Foreign Office officials believed there were grounds to block him, but feared he would make a public protest and let him travel.
The author of Lucky Jim was knighted in 1990 and died in 1995 aged 73.