[Blunt blew his last chance of getting any…]

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Blunt blew his last chance of getting any sort of mitigating copy in the press when he barred most of them from his press conference.

In the eyes of the Express, the Mirror, the Star, the Sun and the rest of the fuming hacks left standing in the rain outside the Times offices, this was the worst crime of all.

Not only had they failed to track down this devilish Russian spy, but they had to get their carefully emasculated version of events second hand while Blunt took smoked salmon with the editor of the Times!

It gave added outrage to the frenzied jingoism which covered their pages day after day.

Sober heart

Did the Queen know? Was she acting under orders? Is there a crime more foul than leaking 'our' secrets? Espionage has clearly taken over the role of patricide as the king among crimes.

It is easy to ridicule the Pavlovian reaction of Fleet Street, and there has not been a shortage of bourgeois columnists prepared to do just that.

But behind its posturing exterior, Fleet Street has a calculating sober heart.

Industrial sector

On the morning of the day on which Derek Robinson was sacked the papers took an ominous and prescient note.

Background pieces appeared in all the papers explaining the recruitment of Soviet agents in the 30s-but stressing that the future aristocrats from Cambridge were no longer the target. • The new recruiting field was declared as the industrial sector of the British Communist Party.

There is little doubt that this 'information' was fed to the press in the knowledge that Robinson was about to be Witch-hunts against nowadays rarely take the form of singling out the Communist Party for special attention.

The obvious role of the CP as an arm of the bureaucracy in dampening down the struggles of the workers means that 'Trotskyite' has often become the catch phrase for all militants.

•Las week this was entirely missing. Having identified the industrial wing of the CP as the enemy, the way was left open for the sacking of Robinson to be followed up with headlines labelling him "Robbo the Red"

In this way the Blunt affair has been consciously utilised as a tool for ensuring the best possible propaganda for Michael Edwardes.

Open conspiracies by the press are not frequent-in nine cases out of ten the instincts of well-trained reactionary newspaper editors can be relied on to achieve the effect which the capitalist class requires.

In the case of the Robinson sacking it is evident that these instincts were not thought to be sufficient.