Sunday 15 September 2013

Margaret Thatcher, the NUM, and the mysterious Mr Deverell

We have just put online a number of documents that offer us a glimpse into a rarely seen aspect of Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership. These documents come from folder number 494 in the PREM19 series of Margaret Thatcher’s Prime Ministerial papers. Entitled ‘National Union of Mineworkers: National Miners Left Club’, the folder gives us an insight, albeit sketchy, into the secretive work of a little-known Cabinet Office unit. 



Two items from PREM19/494 are of particular interest. The first (see here) contains two documents. One appears to be a coversheet that would originally have been attached to another document, in this case a report numbered IAG(80)10. The coversheet states that owing to the ‘very sensitive nature’ of the document in question, ‘it must not be placed on a normal Departmental file’, but must instead be returned to the Cabinet Office once it has been read. It is presumably because these instructions were followed that the report is not present within PREM19/494. Nevertheless, an annotation on the coversheet (dated 12th March 1980) gives us an idea of the report’s content. The note, signed by Clive Whitmore (MT’s Principal Private Secretary), is transcribed below:
Prime Minister
A revealing indication of Mr Vic Allen’s influence in NUM matters.
I think that we should ask whether there would be advantage in exposing the existence and activities of the Miners’ Left Club. Shall I seek Sir Robert Armstrong’s advice?
Under this note MT writes, 'Yes please'.

This annotation gives us an idea of the content of the missing report. Vic Allen was (and is) a left-wing academic who served as the official historian of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Avowedly pro-Soviet, in 1999 he was revealed to have passed information about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) to the East German Secret Police (Stasi). Obviously, we cannot know exactly what the missing report ‘indicated’ about his ‘influence in NUM matters', but it clearly has something to do with the existence of ‘the Miners’ Left Club’. Another document from PREM19/494 helps us fill in some of the gaps here. In a minute addressed to Clive Whitmore, Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong refers to the work of ‘Communist Party activists’ within the Left Club, and a ‘sub-committee set up to plan and monitor Mr. Scargill’s campaign for the NUM Presidency’. (Scargill, of course, was elected President of the NUM the following year.) These fragments therefore collectively suggest that the missing report contained information regarding a left-wing group within the NUM that was working toward Scargill's election, that this group was linked to the Communist Party, and that Vic Allen held some degree of influence over this group.


How was this information obtained in the first place? Armstrong’s minute to Whitmore talks about the risk of ‘endangering sources’ by publicising the information, so it is natural to infer that a source or sources within the NUM were passing information out, and that this information was finding its way into government reports. Beyond this, however, we can only speculate, and speculating about such a controversial area of history is perhaps unwise. However, what we can do is return to the documents we have, and see what other hints we can glean from them. 

Let’s go back to our first item, the file containing the annotated coversheet for the missing report. Also contained in this file is a note from Whitmore to Armstrong dated 17th March 1980, in which Whitmore does as he says he would, and seeks advice on ‘whether there would be advantage in exposing the existence and activities of the Miners’ Left Club’. Whitmore writes to Armstrong as follows:
The Prime Minister has seen the report in IAG(80)10 on the activities of the National Miners’ Left Club and she has asked whether this is not the kind of case where some publicity, arranged under Mr Deverell’s auspices, might be useful.
I should be glad to know what you think.
Who is this mysterious Mr Deverell? The aforementioned minute from Armstrong to Whitmore doesn’t help us much here, telling us only that Mr Deverell ‘has been examining the activities of the National Miners Left Club in the hope of finding a way of [publicising them] without endangering sources’. Nor can we find the answer by searching our own archive: the name 'Deverell' appears only in the two documents that we are currently looking at.

Fortunately, assistance can be found in the form of Christopher Andrew’s 2010 history of the Security Service, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. In Chapter 7, Andrew refers to MT's having held a meeting on the 21st October 1979 to establish a Cabinet Office unit that would 'use information from both open and secret sources to try to forestall industrial disruption’ (p.671). No record of this meeting exists in our archive, presumably because any such record (if it ever existed) was highly confidential and therefore did not find its way into the PREM19 series. Nevertheless, we can see from MT’s engagement diary that the meeting was held at Chequers at 3pm, and was attended by the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, Secretary of State for Industry Keith Joseph, outgoing Cabinet Secretary John Hunt, incoming Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong, and Clive Whitmore. 

Andrew goes on:
John Deverell, then considered one of the Service’s [i.e. MI5’s] younger high-fliers, was seconded to run the unit, which Service records suggest became a one-man band. Sir Robert Armstrong agreed with Deverell that they would ‘firmly eschew any thoughts of black propaganda’ as the risk would far outweigh the likely gains. Deverell was tasked instead with submitting proposals for countering specific cases of industrial subversion for approval by the Home Secretary and, if appropriate, the Prime Minister. [pp.671-2]
Andrew then gives an account of the unit’s ‘first successful ‘ploy’ in response to a strike-call by the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) at the government-owned British Leyland (BL) Longbridge plant’ (p.672). The strike-call was made in response to the firing by BL of Derek "Red Robbo" Robinson, a union shop steward and Communist Party member. The aim of Deverell's Cabinet Office unit was to undermine support for Robinson, and thereby to weaken support for strike action among trade union members, leaders, and the wider public.

The ‘ploy’ was to publicise the minutes of a meeting of the Communist Party’s Midland District Committee, minutes which, according to then BL chief executive Michael Edwardes, made it ‘absolutely clear that the intention [of the joint committee of the Communist Party and BL shop stewards] was to break the company’ (quoted in the 2002 BBC documentary series, ‘True Spies’ – transcript here). This information was bound to concern those members of the trade union who wished to pursue a less radical line in negotiations with British Leyland. The minutes of the meeting (again, according to the True Spies documentary) were obtained by an MI5 agent working within the Communist Party and the AUEW (Andrew's book confirms that the Security Service ‘obtained a copy’ of these minutes, but does not explicitly refer to the existence of an MI5 agent within either the Communist Party or the AUEW), and from there came into the possession of John Deverell's unit in the Cabinet Office. Andrew explains what happened next:
…at a meeting with Thatcher and Whitelaw, Deverell obtained their approval for [the record of the meeting] to be passed to the BL chairman, Sir Michael Edwardes. To disguise the source of the minutes, they were placed inside a brown envelope with a Birmingham postmark. Edwardes showed them to the president of the AUEW, Terry Duffy, who was sufficiently impressed to postpone strike action. Edwardes also contacted the Sunday Times, whose journalists tracked down some of those mentioned in the minutes. [p.672] 
This secret information, leaked by Deverell, helped to lead to a collapse in support for strike action both among the union leadership and the union members, thanks in part to press reporting of the affair. 

With all this in mind we can now return to our newly uploaded documents with a much better sense of what they show us. The final defeat of the call to strike action in support of Derek Robinson had occurred in February 1980 (see here). Our documents, concerning the NUM, are dated March 1980. It would therefore appear that our documents indicate a desire on the part of MT for Deverell to initiate another ‘ploy’ (possibly using similar tactics), this time directed against the NUM. This new idea for a ploy comes hot on the heels of the one that was successful at BL, and, like the BL ploy, apparently depends upon secret information passed to the government from a ‘source’ (or sources) whose position would have been ‘endangered’ by clumsy handling of the information.

In the case of the proposed NUM ploy, however, there was little prospect of success. In his reply to Whitmore, Armstrong notes that ‘the material which [Deverell] has immediately available and for which there is overt collateral would not be likely to cause Communist Party activists within the National Miners Left Club much embarrassment’. Instead, Armstrong suggests that 'with the coalmining scene relatively quiet at the moment, it would make sense to keep our powder dry, and our sources of information open, until a time when they could prove particularly useful’.

As we all know, the 'coalmining scene' didn't stay 'relatively quiet' for long. So did the government ever make use of these ‘sources of information’? It’s impossible to say from the documents that we currently have, and perhaps we will never know. Nevertheless, we will keep our eyes peeled for further evidence as more documents are released by The National Archives over the coming years.

Matt Hasler, Deputy Editor

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