How Britain plays the spying game
The concept of Deep State is the premise of my novel, A Very British Coup, which was conceived in October 1980.
I was on a train back from the Labour Party conference with Stuart Holland, newly elected MP for Lambeth Vauxhall, and Tony Banks and Peter Hain, both of whom became MPs too.
We were discussing how the Establishment would react to a left-wing Labour government.
The right-wing press were working themselves up into a frenzy at the prospect, and the Americans were planning to install cruise missiles in their British bases, triggering huge protests.
Some events in the novel, which were mere speculation at the time, later turned out to be true. The same could be said of the Deep State now.
Look what is happening with Jeremy Corbyn, and how the right-wing press is haranguing him over supposed links to a communist spy and his approach to the poisoning of a double agent Sergei Skripal.
In 1980, there was an MI5 agent on the council of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. MI5 were spying on unions and the National Council for Civil Liberties.
In 1985 it was revealed that an MI5 officer was to be found in room 105 at the BBC’s HQ. His job? To vet applicants for employment or promotion, and stamp upturned Christmas trees on the personnel files of those he deemed unsuitable.
Two years later, a senior M15 official, Peter Wright, caused a sensation with his memoirs. They revealed that the security services had spied on Labour PM Harold Wilson, under the delusion he was a Soviet spy.