10 - Viva Lewes

PETER HENNESSY
Steve Ramsey meets a fairly secret statesman
Clangclangclangclang! I really hope that’s not
a �re alarm. I’m interviewing Professor Lord
Peter Hennessy in �ve minutes. A building
evacuation is the last thing I need, particularly
as the building in question is the Houses of
Parliament, and it would take quite a while.
Fortunately, it’s just the division bell. Lord
Hennessy arrives, and explains that he hasn’t
ever heard the �re alarm. He imagines it must
sound ‘like a banshee’s wail’, to distinguish it
from the horrible tone of the division bell.
We head to his of�ce in the Lords, where I
get out my two dictaphones. One jams almost
instantly. I press the wrong button on the other,
playing Lord Hennessy an excerpt from the
Beatles song Little Piggies, which I’d recorded
earlier to test the machine.
I quickly sort it out, and press on. We have loads
to get through; Hennessy has had his phone
hacked, and spoken to someone who may well
have saved the world. He’s an academic, Orwell
Prize-winning writer, and peer. And he only has
�fteen minutes to spare.
Hennessy hands me a thick book; Anthony
Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain Today. He
received a copy as a sixth form prize in 1965,
and fondly recalls how it, along with Samuel
Brittan’s Treasury Under the Tories, “aroused
an interest which has never been dampened” in
the secret workings of government.
“[Sampson] was an eye opener into a world
that intrigued me, about what really goes on,
in terms of how the country’s run. Not just
government but industry, city, all that...Because
even if you read the newspapers every day, as
I did and have done since 1956 ... you don’t
normally get a sense of what I later called ‘the
hidden wiring’ beneath all this stuff, keeping it
going.”
Before he studied the hidden wiring as an
academic, he wrote about it as a journalist.
Sometimes his stories were based on classi�ed
information leaked by government insiders.
This didn’t please the Home Of�ce, which
would occasionally tap his phone, legally. Hennessy
didn’t mind though: “Quite often I was
warned about this by the people who’d helped
me...and so I wouldn’t use the home phone; I’d
have to �nd a non-vandalised telephone box
somewhere in the vicinity of where I lived. But I
wasn’t bothered; it was all done properly under
Home Of�ce warrants, and as long as I knew, I
never got resentful about it ... It was only when
there was a special leak inquiry going on after
something I’d written.”
This hasn’t happened recently, though. For
his book The Secret State, he waited for the
relevant documents to be made public. Some
“were so sensitive they were kept back longer
than [the standard] 30 years”. This makes the
book “an example of what I call ‘catch-up’ history,
or, more sensationally perhaps, ‘now it can
be told’ history”.
The Secret State describes Whitehall’s preparations
for nuclear war, which were incredibly
detailed. There was even a plan to save Britain’s
most important artworks by moving them to
quarries in North Wales and Wiltshire.
Whitehall may have been worried about nuclear
war, but how much danger were we really in?
“Oh it was very considerable. We were much
more perilously placed at the time of the Cuban
Missile Crisis than we realised at the time. It
came very close indeed. Kennedy ... didn’t know
that on the island of Cuba already were the
warheads for the tactical nuclear missiles, which
would have been used on the American forces if
they’d invaded from the sea, as they landed on