On 10 December 1951 the Labour MP Richard Crossman went to see Benjamin Britten’s new opera Billy Budd, which had just opened at Covent Garden. It was, he noted in his diary, "oddly topical ... Billy Budd is really pure, brave and loyal, but it is the war against the French Revolution, and he comes on board shouting “Rights of Man”! ...moreover he is deeply moved by the merciless treatment of the lower deck by the upper deck. Benjamin Britten is a Socialist, and I am not sure this isn’t all about loyalty and the Cold War."
Crossman’s comment was apposite for, as the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the loyalties of British diplomats, journalists, politicians, trade unionists and scientists were being questioned as never before. The unmasking of the ‘atom spies’ Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs was followed by the defection of Bruno Pontecorvo, a naturalised British scientist, to the Soviet Union in August 1950. Even more perplexing was the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in May 1951, although the fiction that the fate of the ‘missing diplomats’ was unknown was maintained for some time. The vetting and purging of civil servants had already been introduced in 1948, in response to fears that Communists’ ‘divided loyalty ... might in certain contingencies become active disloyalty’. Such concerns extended far beyond the civil service. The Labour Party General Secretary Morgan Phillips kept a file on the so-called ‘Lost Sheep’ (Labour MPs who were secret members of the Communist Party), and George Orwell’s listing of alleged crypto-Communists and fellow travellers, for the benefit of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), suggested that British public life was riddled with political and personal corruption. Crossman himself, in his foreword to The God that Failed, an influential collection of essays by former Communists, presented the Cold War as a quasireligious struggle for the ‘souls’ of intellectuals. As Anne Deighton has recently written, the Cold War was conceived as ‘a war of ideas, of loyalty to beliefs’.
