WAS MACLEAN SECRETLY GAY?

WHEN news broke that Donald Maclean had defected, assumptions were made in some quarters that he was homosexual — like Guy Burgess (left), with whom he had fled.

In the Commons, MP George Wigg asked the Foreign Secretary to ‘institute inquiries’ into the suggestion that there is ‘widespread s sexual perversion in the Foreign Office’.

Notoriously promiscuous, one of Burgess’s b boasts at Cambridge was that he had seduced Maclean, who was undeniably attractive. An undergraduate one-night stand seems likely. But did anything happen after that?

Almost certainly not, though his wife, Melinda, muddied the waters by telling a friend that Donald’s forays into drunkenness ‘brought out the homosexual streak’ in him. Yet there is no evidence that Maclean took part in any of the more lurid sexual goings-on of the louche social set he was part of in wartime London.

Nor does it seem in character for the buttoned-up diplomat to have risked his career to take part in what was still an illegal act. It is more likely that Melinda made her comments from puzzlement or anguish at the lack of a sex life with him.

The most salient fact about Maclean as a person is that he was always the cat who walks alone. His mother had observed: ‘He is completely ungregarious.’ Here was the basis of the hidden life he chose to lead.