The Cambridge Spies hoodwinked the Establishment by hiding in plain sight, says Ferdinand Mount

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A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean by Roland Philipps (Bodley Head, £20)

Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain by Richard Davenport-Hines (William Collins, £25)

Friday 25th May 1951 was Donald Maclean’s 38th birthday. He celebrated by taking his oldest friends to lunch at Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street, notorious for its heavy German food and its surly German waiters. There he bumped into two other Fitzrovia cronies, the writers Cyril Connolly and Humphrey Slater, an ex-Communist who had been Commissar of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, during which he had changed his name to Hugh because he thought it sounded more proletarian.

That evening, Maclean joined up with Guy Burgess and caught the midnight boat train to St Malo. “The missing diplomats” as they came to be called were not reliably glimpsed again until they surfaced in Moscow nearly five years later.

Connolly and Slater both had prior reason to suspect that Maclean was a Soviet agent. Three years earlier Slater had written a remarkable short novel, The Conspirator. Its protagonist, Major Desmond Lightfoot, bears an unmistakable resemblance to Maclean, except that he is a military secretary not a diplomat and was recruited by the Soviets at Oxford rather than Cambridge. (In real life Oxford Communists tended to drift into the Labour Party.) Like Maclean, Lightfoot is tall and muscular, alternately brusque and charming, wilful but capable of extraordinary self-discipline, a master of what was not yet called “tradecraft”: vain, brutal, ruthless and an alcoholic.

Roland Philipps’s A Spy Named Orphan—his first book, though you wouldn’t know it—offers an adroit, deeply researched and richly embroidered portrait of Maclean, which replicates in almost every respect Slater’s fictional portrait 70 years earlier.

Slater had told his cousin Patience Pain, who worked in the Foreign Office, about Maclean but the allegation was dismissed as drunken gossip. All this even though “the Office” was at the time desperately seeking the identity of a high-up spy codenamed Homer, whose existence had been revealed by the US’s counter-intelligence VENONA decrypts and who fitted Maclean’s description.

It may seem extraordinary that by 1951 anyone did not know Maclean’s secret, at least in the circle of the Gargoyle Club, the high-Bohemian nightclub in Soho to which everyone so far mentioned belonged. In his drunken rampages, Maclean lurched around the club, telling the truth to anyone who would listen. “You are a Judas, and I am the English Alger Hiss [the US Soviet spy],” he shouted to his former friend, the ex-Communist Philip Toynbee. Goronwy Rees, who had in his Communist days been a purveyor of low-grade stuff to the Soviets, got the same treatment after he abandoned the faith. Maclean stumbled over to his table, collapsed to his knees and shouted at Rees: “I know all about you. You used to be one of us, but you ratted.”