Cull

I went with Dad into town at one, he to work,  me to buy Mum a card and a present for her birthday on Wednesday; I bought a copy of Marc Riley and The Creepers album Cull. I got Mum V. S. Naipaul’s Area of Darkness. I have doubts over how she’ll like it.

I packed at a leisurely pace in the evening.

Dover and Belfast dock workers have joined the stoppage and the High Court declared that the government’s ban on unions at GCHQ contravenes “natural justice.” There’s much talk of “banana skins” and “the deepening industrial crisis” etc., etc.

I watched a World-In-Action programme about MI5 ‘molehunts’ in the 1950s, ‘60s and ’70s. In 1955, MI5 broke into the offices of the Communist Party of Great Britain and stole fifty-five thousand files on membership while the staff were gone, copying them all onto microfilm and returning them before dawn. MI5 found that thirty one MPs and numerous trade unionists and “top public figures” had links with the pro-Soviet CPGB, and it was believed that numerous spies of a similar operational status to Philby and Blunt evaded detection. Even the head of MI5 was a suspect based on strong circumstantial evidence!