Barbara Castle and the spy who tried to love her
Labour grandee viewed seducer as ‘gentle Italian flower’, files show
BARBARA Castle regarded a Cold War communist spy who targeted her in an attempted honeytrap as a ‘gentle Italian flower’, intelligence files say.
The late Labour Party grandee was wined and dined by journalist Renato Proni, codenamed ‘Andrej’, who tried to charm her on behalf of the Czechoslovakian secret police, the Statni Bezpecnost (StB), in the 1950s, according to the documents.
Proni, who in a written statement had pledged his allegiance to the StB against ‘American and British imperialism’, reported back to his bosses how he flirted with the married MP for Blackburn, whose husband was Labour activist Ted Castle. The papers in the StB archives tell how Lady Castle, who was granted a life peerage in 1990 as Baroness Castle of Blackburn, was given the codename ‘Monika’.
Proni, an Italian, took her for drinks and meals and told StB spymasters that her enemy ‘ is capitalism and not communism’.
Proni paid her £15 a time to write newspaper articles for him and he ‘drove her to election meetings, discussed with her a lot and they got very close, saying that she introduced him to her friends very cordially, calling him a “gentle Italian flower”.’
Lady Castle, who went on to hold Cabinet posts including transport minister, employment secretary and health secretary in Harold Wilson’s governments in the 1960s and 1970s, is said to have discussed that she liked ‘dancing and wine’ but didn’t ‘enjoy her husband much’.
She also rarely saw her husband, then the editor of Picture Post, at home and he was always using their new car, a Ford Consul, Proni reported.
Proni was instructed to ‘consolidate’ his relationship with her at Labour’s conference in Margate, Kent, in 1953, the papers suggested.
One StB memo about her said: ‘As her fast progress shows and based on the testimony of Andrej, she is a selfconfident and ambitious woman, who confided in him with the intention of getting a leading position in the Foreign Office in case of victory of the Labour Party’, The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday.
Other papers in the dossier previously reported by The Mail on Sunday have told how at a meeting in September
‘Didn’t enjoy her husband much’
1956 Proni drove the MP home from the Commons, was reportedly invited inside and described her flat as ‘very nice’. They then discussed politics and their views on socialism – and Proni ‘told her she looked young and pretty’.
The following month they had a meal at London’s Savoy Grill, and Proni later wrote that he hoped to ‘bust’ her marriage because she would then ‘probably fall on me’.
But there is no evidence that Lady Castle ever succumbed to Proni’s advances, that she spied for the Czechs or even that she knew Proni was a spy.
The StB files relating to her came to an abrupt end at the close of 1956, when Lady Castle would have been 46.
Last year it was revealed that another Czech agent, Jan Sarkocy, who also worked for the StB, told his bosses that Jeremy Corbyn had a good supply of information after they first met in 1986.
The Labour leader has strenuously denied passing on any confidential information and described claims made in Mr Sarkocy’s memos as ‘a ridiculous smear and entirely false’.
Oxford-educated Lady Castle died aged 91 in 2002. An MP from 1945 to 1979, she gained the nickname the ‘Red Queen’ for both her red hair and her fiery speeches.
Jeremy Corbyn’s fight to free the Birmingham Six was ‘not helpful’, it was claimed in declassified documents.
The Labour leader campaigned to free the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, who were all wrongly convicted of IRA attacks.
But a letter from the Irish embassy in London to the Irish government in 1989 reveals that ex-SDLP leader John Hume ‘commented that the involvement of people like Jeremy Corbyn in the B6 campaign... was not helpful’.
It was felt that the backing of ‘church leaders and other Establishment figures’ would have been more beneficial.