Labour grandee Robinson denies spying for Czechs in Swinging 60s

GEOFFREY ROBINSON, the one-time Labour minister who was forced to quit over a £373,000 loan to Peter Mandelson, has long enjoyed a reputation as a champagne socialist and bon viveur.

If Cold War documents are to be believed he may have acquired a taste for the high life when, it is claimed, he passed over information regarding the UK’S nuclear deterrent to Czechoslovakia during the Sixties, according to The Mail on Sunday.

As he was working his way up the Labour Party he was allegedly setting up meetings in opulent restaurants and clubs in Mayfair with his Czech contact who is accused of being a spy. It was alleged that Soviet intelligence had also tried to recruit Mr Robinson.

The allegations were vehemently denied by Mr Robinson, 80, a minister during Tony Blair’s tenure, who called them “highly defamatory” and a “lie”.

The paper alleged he shared 87 confidential pieces of information between 1966 and 1969 and that the Czechs said he was one of the Communist country’s “most productive sources”.

A statement issued through the lawyers of Mr Robinson, Labour MP for Coventry North West, denied all the allegations, stating: “These allegations are highly defamatory and false and Mr Robinson strongly refutes them.

“The allegations, which are apparently based on documents put together by Czech authorities in the 1960s, are a complete fabrication. At no time did Mr Robinson ever pass confidential government documents or information to any foreign agent and he did not have access to such material.”

The dossier lists several alleged meetings with Karel Pravec, codenamed Comrade Pelnar, in the hot spots of Swinging Sixties London. Mr Robinson, then in his 20s, boasted of being a “Leninist”, according to the files, but did not shy away from Mayfair and Chelsea’s best restaurants and nightclubs, among them the exotically titled Georgian Pussy Club with its “gorgeous hostesses” and the Pigalle, a favourite haunt of the Kray twins.

The Mail on Sunday says it was given access to a 390-page dossier on intelligence allegedly passed on by Mr Robinson which was said to include details relating to Britain’s Polaris missile programme and Nato briefing notes.

Much of that intelligence was allegedly shared with his contact amid a backdrop of decadence and drink.

Mr Robinson, codenamed “Karko”, had a “tendency to drink”, according to one of the claims by Mr Pravec, who first met him at the 1966 Labour Party conference in Brighton.

Pravec noted that Robinson “drinks almost exclusively whisky with ginger beer, and in considerable quantities at that”. A few weeks later it is claimed the pair dined together at Maison Prunier in London. “I had to make an effort to keep up with him to an acceptable extent,” wrote Mr Pravec in a note sent back to Prague. “He drank several double shots of whisky with ginger beer (even after dinner instead of cognac) and, as part of dinner together with me, two bottles of wine.”

Three days before Christmas in 1966, Mr Pravec was said to have presented Mr Robinson with a “gallon of whisky”. Before Mr Robinson married Marie Elena Giorgio in Malta in 1967, the Czech spy is alleged to have handed him gift vouchers from Harrods, worth £200. On another occasion, Mr Robinson turned down a gift of Harrods vouchers because it was money for which Czech “labourers worked really hard and should be returned”.

The files, the paper claimed, showed Mr Robinson had by 1969 grown so close to Mr Pravec that at a meeting in

‘Robinson drinks almost exclusively whisky with ginger beer and in considerable quantities’

San Frediano restaurant, he asked him for advice on his sex life. The friendship between Mr Pravec, now aged 88 and living in New Jersey in the US, and Mr Robinson began to wane when the Czech agent left his job with the secret state security service in London.

Mr Pravec said: “I’m not discussing what happened in the Sixties. This is all a very long time ago and I won’t talk about any of it.” Mr Robinson quit as paymaster general in 1998 in the fallout from the undeclared £373,000 home loan he had given to Peter Mandelson to help him buy a house in Notting Hill in 1996. The scandal prompted Lord Mandelson’s first Cabinet resignation.

Mr Robinson studied at Cambridge and served in the Army’s Intelligence Corps during his national service.

He became an industrialist in the Seventies, rising to chief executive at Jaguar at the age of 34, but his real fortune is said to have been made in partnership with Robert Maxwell, the media mogul, who died in 1991.

Mr Robinson bought the Left-wing New Statesman magazine in 1996 and sold it 12 years later.

He owns a villa in Tuscany, a mansion in Surrey, a Park Lane apartment and properties in the south of France.

Attention turned on him in the wake of the deal with Lord Mandelson. It was claimed his mistress was the Italian actress Annabella Incontrera, who described him as a “very good lover”.

In contrast, some years earlier, in May 1967, Robinson was “very shy” on a trip to the Georgian Pussy Club and backed away from introducing himself to the girls, Mr Pravec claimed.

Agents of the Statni bezpecnost, or STB, were among the most brutal enforcers of Communist tyranny in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. The Czechoslovak secret police agency used every reprehensible tool at its disposal – from torture to blackmail – against anyone who was deemed to pose a threat to the regime. It also operated abroad, spying on behalf of the Warsaw Pact. In other words the STB was the enemy, both of the West and of freedom in general.

One of the Stb’s methods was to recruit or groom people in positions of political influence, to mine them for information or worse. Was Geoffrey Robinson, the Labour MP, one of these useful idiots? The allegations, which the former paymaster general and Gordon Brown ally denies, are extraordinary. He is accused of passing intelligence regarding the UK’S nuclear deterrent to Czechoslovakia across 51 meetings between 1966 and 1969. This was a period that included the Prague Spring and the ruthless crushing of dissent in the country by Eastern Bloc forces in 1968, an event that had left most Western Leftists horrified by the truth of life behind the Iron Curtain.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, has also denied allegations – made by a former STB intelligence officer last year – that he was a collaborator or agent of the Czechoslovaks in the Eighties. How many more senior Labour figures can we expect to deny claims of spying for our enemies? These individuals are not historical throwbacks, but people of significance on the Left. Voters are entitled to know if the claims are true before entrusting them with the security of the nation.