Rev., Tom Hollander and the shrinking market for Nick Clegg trivia

I went to put some flowers on my mother's grave this afternoon. When I got back I saw a tweet by Andrew Male about rewatching Tom Hollander's situation comedy Rev. He said it has lasted well and even looks prescient:

I now realise how much it was a show about a changing Britain, one where humanity and generosity were gradually being replaced by something more cruel and corporate.

That made me think about how the series and I how I would watch it on DVD with my mother in the days when she was still well enough to come over to my house. 

Andrew Male says that, like Doctor Who, it's all on iPlayer at the moment.

Then a tweet arrived from a Senior Welsh Liberal Democrat Who Now Writes Political Thrillers, asking if I knew that Nick Clegg had been directed in a play by Sam Mendes. I didn't know it. 

Peter Black's tweet sent me to one by Marie Le Conte. which quoted a 2010 Guardian article about... Tom Hollander's situation comedy Rev.

The vital passage says of Hollander:

At Cambridge, where he studied English, he took the title role in a memorable 1988 production of Cyrano de Bergerac that brought together an interesting array of talent. Sam Mendes, a childhood friend from Oxford, was the director, their pal Tom Piper was designer and Nick Clegg, then a frequent student actor, played Carbon de Castel-Jaloux, captain of the cadets.

The market for Nick Clegg trivia has been falling for years, yet I can remember when a blog post about his great great aunt was enough to get you a column with the New Statesman website.

And Tom Hollander's verdict on him has lasted as well as his sit com:

Hollander can't recall Clegg's student performances, but thinks he did well in this year's televised leadership debates. "I would say he's a better actor than Gordon Brown and a worse actor than Tony Blair."

But it was when Blair stopped acting, and everyone else despised him, that I came to have a grudging respect for him.

A biography of Moura Budberg

Back in 2007, I wrote a short article about Moura Budberg for the New Statesman website. Moura may or may not have been a Soviet spy: she was certainly Nick Clegg's great great aunt.

Now comes news that a biography of her is on its way. A Very Dangerous Woman by Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield will be published in May.

On her website, Deborah McDonald writes:

This is the first book to make use of the Freedom of Information Act to evaluate the woman who was Moura. MI5 files, Lockhart’s unpublished diary, letters and extensive interviews with those who knew her help create a detailed and vibrant picture of one of the most fascinating women of the 20th century. 

As her lover H G Wells wrote, ‘But the Moura who was never really there has vanished now for ever and nothing in earth or heaven can bring her back.’

New light on Moura Budberg, Nick Clegg's great great aunt

View image | gettyimages.com

Back in November 2007 I wrote an article about Moura Budberg, Nick Clegg's great great aunt, for the New Statesman website.

I wrote:

Part of Moura’s mystique was that throughout her career it was equally possible to imagine her working for either side. The Allies or the Germans. The Whites or the Reds. The British or the Soviets. 

The enigma had not been solved by the time of her death in 1974, but there is a remarkable postscript to her story. 

A few years ago a batch of secret service files was released. They revealed that in 1951 Moura had told a British agent - a guest at one of her celebrated dinner parties - that Anthony Blunt was a Communist. But the report was ignored and MI5 did not rumble Blunt until 1964.

Andy McSmith has a substantial article in today's Independent - it is based on a trawl of documents in the National Archives at Kew - and comes to much the same conclusion.

Bertie Wooster adds: It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.

Trivial Fact of the Day with H.G. Wells

There was an article on H.G. Wells by David Lodge in the Guardian this morning, which mentioned Moura Budberg, but this is even more interesting.

Joseph Wells, the father of the writer, played cricket for Kent. He made only eight appearances for the county - according to the Wikipedia entry for H.G. Wells, his career was cut short by a broken thigh - but in that time he became the first man to take four wickets in four consecutive balls in first-class cricket.

And according to the British Listed Buildings entry for the former cricket ball factory in the grounds of the Paddocks at Leigh in Kent, the Wells were cousins of the Duke family. Duke cricket balls are still used in England's home test matches.

An Estonian Childhood by Tania Alexander

Regular readers will know of my interest in - and debt of gratitude to - Nick Clegg's great great aunt Moura Budberg. It was writing an article about the old girl for the New Statesman website that got me a fortnightly column there for a while.

Back on this blog, I suggested three years ago that anyone who shares this interest should also read the Times obituary of Budberg's daughter Tania Alexander.

The good news is that Alexander's memoir An Estonian Childhood has recently been republished as a Faber Find:

The tone of her memoir, mainly set in Kallijärv, is almost idyllic, surprisingly so given the political upheaval of the period. In her own words ‘my early life was influenced by three women, all of them complex characters and strong personalities, who had to find their own way of adapting to very different from those they might have expected to enjoy. My Irish governess, Micky, sacrificed her family and suffered exile - a mother ostracised by the pressure of Victorian values. My Aunt Zoria lost everyone who was dear to her, as well as her homeland and her position in society. And my mother, who stayed behind in Russia throughout the terrifying events of the revolution and civil war, lost her home, her husband and, perhaps most important to her, her great love - a loss which profoundly affected the rest of her life.’

Her mother was Baroness Moura Budberg and ‘her great love’ was the famous diplomat and spy, Robert Bruce Lockhart, expelled from Russia in 1918. Among her other lovers were Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells who both feature in this memoir.

You can also find The Condition of England by my favourite Edwardian Liberal Charles Masterman republished in this Faber series.

A sighting of Moura Budberg

Nick Clegg's scandalous great great aunt gets a mention into today's Guardian.

In review of his review of Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family by Jeremy Lewis, Ian Thomson writes:

Of [Graham] Greene's female cousins, Barbara Greene emerges as the most intriguing. Berkhamsted-educated, she was friendly with Baroness Moura Budberg, a Russo-Estonian exile living in London (and mistress, among others, of HG Wells).

Another interesting character is Raymond Greene, one of Graham's elder brothers. Thomson claims that he conquered Everest in 1933, which would have been news to Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tenzing.

But Stefan Collini, reviewing the same book in the London Review of Books, may be on firmer ground when he quotes Lewis as saying of Raymond:

he enjoyed obstetrics and, years later, took a retrospective pride in having delivered Antonia Fraser.

The Clegg family pyramid in the Ukraine

This blog has long taken an interest in Nick Clegg's Russian ancestors. We introduced you to his great great aunt Moura Budberg (writing about her got me a New Statesman column for a while - and Nick remembers meeting her) and recently revealed that Nick is a kinsman of the Canadian Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

But there is more. At the height of Cleggmania during the election campaign, the Guardian wrote about Nick's great great grandfather Ignaty Zakrevsky, a former attorney general in the imperial Russian senate.

The newspaper described how Zakrevsky lived on a large estate in what is now the Ukraine, not far from Kiev. The crumbling estate is currently occupied by an agricultural college, but still boasts a two-storey classical mansion, annexes, and a large park.

Zakrevsky was described by Valentina Gonchar, who runs a museum in the district where the estate is situated as "a man of liberal views and European education". He also described how his "articles on legal topics appeared in many journals at the time. He was also a leading Mason. Tsar Alexander III sacked him from the senate in 1900 after he wrote a letter to the Times in support of Alfred Dreyfus."

But there was more, because the family estate also had a pyramid:

Zakrevksy – like Clegg, a passionate internationalist – travelled to Egypt as ambassador in 1898. He came back with building material and ordered the brick pyramid to be built in his garden. He died in Cairo in 1906, was embalmed, taken home and buried under it.

The Guardian kindly provided a link to what appears to be a museum website. My Russian, self-taught from chess magazines when I was a teenager, isn't that good, but I assume that the photograph I have borrowed shows the pyramid under which Nick's great great grandfather is buried.

How they are related: Nick Clegg and Michael Ignatieff

Older readers will remember Michael Ignatieff as an arts broadcaster in Britain in the 1980s - "the thinking woman's crumpet". Today he is leader of the Candadian Liberal Party.

A reader has alerted me to an article from the Globe and Mail which shows that he is also a kinsman of the British Liberal leader Nick Clegg:

Both men descend from Russia’s old Tsarist nobility. Their families fled to the West after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Barred from their former homeland for class and political reasons for nearly a century, they share a history, which includes a branch of their family trees.

Mr. Clegg, 43, has led the Liberal Democrats to a strong showing in opinion polls in the lead-up to Britain’s national vote on May 6 following stellar performances in two party leaders’ debates.

His paternal grandmother, the Russian-born Baroness Kira von Engelhardt, is the first cousin of Alla Vladimirovna Ionova, who married Count Leonid Alexeievitch Ignatiev – the first cousin of Mr. Ignatieff’s father. The children of the two are cousins to both leaders.

Nick Clegg did meet Moura Budberg

I have been up in Sheffield today interviewing Nick Clegg with a number of fellow Lib Dem bloggers. I shall be writing it up in the party newspaper next week, but one important fact cannot wait.

I have written in the past about Nick's great great aunt Moura Budberg, and once observed in House Points that she had lived long enough (until 1974) to have dandled him on her knee.

Today I was able to ask Nick if he had met Moura. Not only did he meet her: he remembers her very well.

Sandy Bruce-Lockhart's Liberal connections

The New Statesman website recently called me "the family historian of British politics". So I would be failing in my duty if I failed to note these connections.

Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, the Conservative politician who died on Thursday, was the great nephew of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart. R. H. Bruce Lockhart (as he is better known) was a British agent in Russia during and after the Revolution and (or so the legend goes) was the lover of Moura Budberg. And she is Nick Clegg's great great aunt.

Better than that, according to R. H. Bruce Lockhart's Wikipedia page he was a friend of the occultist, Aleister Crowley. Crowley was also a friend of Frieda Harris (she painted a set of Tarot cards for him), the wife of Sir Percy Harris. Sir Percy was Liberal MP for Harborough 1916-8 and Bethnal Green South West 1922-45. As was recently revealed, he was also the great grandfather of Matthew Taylor, the current Lib Dem MP for Truro and St Austell.

I wrote about both the Budberg/Clegg and Harris/Taylor connections in a House Points column in March.

Moura Budberg documentary on BBC4

I was wondering why people have been landing on this blog over the past couple of days after searching for "Moura Budberg".

The answer is that there was a documentary about her in BBC4's Storyville series. In it Dimitri Collingridge attempted to uncover the truth about her life. Moura is his great, great aunt, just as she is Nick Clegg's.

You can watch the documentary via the BBC website for the next few days.

It comes to much the same conclusion that I did in my New Statesman piece. While Moura undoubtedly had connections in the intelligence world, the idea of her as a spy was largely the stuff of legend - and she helped to write that legend herself.

Never mind the 30 women, what about the cacti?

In all the fuss over Nick Clegg's GQ interview, has the real story been overlooked? Never mind Nick's lovers, what about the poor cacti?

The Times has lengthy extracts from the interview:

PM Why did you abuse the cacti?

NC I drank too much and left the party with a guy I was at school with called Tom Brown [laughs]. I shouldn’t find that funny. We wandered around the garden and found two greenhouses, and decided to go inside.

PM With malicious intent?

NC No, no, no. It was an accident. One of us had a lighter and turned it on, and this place was jam-full of furry, fuzzy cacti, and the flame nicked one of them and up it went. The effect was a beautiful glowing halo of fire, and we obviously wanted to repeat it.

PM So it ceased to be an accidental abuse of cacti and became deliberate arson?

NC It didn’t feel like it, but I suppose it was.

PM How many did you set fire to?

NC Oh, maybe 20 or so.

PM It is now mass cacti arson.

NC On reflection, yes it was.

Pretty shocking stuff, I am sure you will agree. Time, perhaps, to recall Lord Bonkers' take on the subject:

The pride and joy of my gardener Meadowcroft is his collection of rare hairy cacti. He gathers them from the arid south of Rutland and tends them in the way that a particularly attentive she wolf looks after her whelps.

I well remember his fury when a young whipper-snapper from Westminster School burnt down the glasshouse where he keeps them. My first reaction was to hand the lad over to the Proper Authorities, but learning that he was some sort of nephew of my (how shall I put it?) old friend Moura Budberg, I relented and dealt with the matter myself. I informed the errant youth that he would work for Meadowcroft until he had made full and proper restitution for the loss of the aforementioned prickly crop.

Over the years Nick Clegg (for it was he) has had himself elected to the European Parliament and the Commons, but he still comes to the Hall regularly to do odd jobs. (What with compound interest and the strength of the Rutland pound, debts can take a long time to pay off.)

This afternoon Meadowcroft and I find Clegg perched on a garden seat writing a speech. “Never mind being a scholard,” says my favourite horticulturalist, belabouring him with a broom, “get out and sweep up they leaves.” “I think Clegg has just left his comfort zone,” I observe as he rushes out to work in the garden.

House Points: Moura Budberg and Percy Harris

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. You can find out more about Moura Budberg and Percy Harris on this blog.

Family stories

The banking system is collapsing around our ears. At times like this I find history a great consolation - particularly the family history of Liberal Democrat MPs.

I am indebted to Nick Clegg’s great great aunt Moura Budberg. This formidable lady knew all the leading Bolsheviks and was the lover of both Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells. She was portrayed in the 1934 film British Agent, directed by Michael Curtiz who went on to make Casablanca.

But when she became a society hostess in London after World War II, Moura was thought to be a Soviet agent. The Moscow Embassy warned that she was a very dangerous woman who had once given Stalin an accordion. But MI5 should have listened to her: she told one of its agents that Anthony Blunt was a Communist years before he was exposed.

Moura died in 1974, late enough to have dandled the infant Nick on her knee. I am in her debt because, after writing about her for the New Statesman website last year, I was offered a regular column.

Readers of The Times will know another family story. Matthew Taylor was adopted as a baby and a few years ago decided to trace his birth mother. She turned out to be the granddaughter of a Liberal MP.

Sir Percy Harris was returned for Harborough - the constituency where I live - at a by-election in 1916. There was a wartime truce between the parties, but he still had to beat a strong Independent backed by the Daily Mail.

Although he was on the social reform wing of the party, Percy remained loyal to Asquith because he did not trust Lloyd George’s scheming. As a result he did not receive the Coupon at the 1918 general election and Harborough, which had been Liberal since 1891, was lost to the Tories.

In 1922 Percy was elected for Bethnal Green South West and was to keep the seat until 1945, serving as chief whip for many years. Even after 1945, he sat on London County Council. Percy Harris died in 1952, but his son Jack - Matthew’s grandfather - is alive in New Zealand aged 102.

So make room on the window ledge. There are many more stories to tell.

Nick Clegg's forebears

The Daily Telegraph gently shakes our new leader's family tree.

And don't forget Moura Budberg.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Nick Clegg in the garden

After Monday there generally comes...

Tuesday
The pride and joy of my gardener Meadowcroft is his collection of rare hairy cacti. He gathers them from the arid south of Rutland and tends them in the way that a particularly attentive she wolf looks after her whelps.

I well remember his fury when a young whipper-snapper from Westminster School burnt down the glasshouse where he keeps them. My first reaction was to hand the lad over to the Proper Authorities, but learning that he was some sort of nephew of my (how shall I put it?) old friend Moura Budberg, I relented and dealt with the matter myself. I informed the errant youth that he would work for Meadowcroft until he had made full and proper restitution for the loss of the aforementioned prickly crop.

Over the years Nick Clegg (for it was he) has had himself elected to the European Parliament and the Commons, but he still comes to the Hall regularly to do odd jobs. (What with compound interest and the strength of the Rutland pound, debts can take a long time to pay off.)

This afternoon Meadowcroft and I find Clegg perched on a garden seat writing a speech. “Never mind being a scholard,” says my favourite horticulturalist, belabouring him with a broom, “get out and sweep up they leaves.” “I think Clegg has just left his comfort zone,” I observe as he rushes out to work in the garden.

Clegg in sex and spying scandal

Well, not Nick Clegg so much as his great great aunt Moura Budberg.

I have written an article for the New Statesman website telling the story of Nick's scandalous forebear who was the lover of H. G. Wells, Maxim Gorky and a famous British spy, and quite possibly indulged in some espionage of her own.

Given my nostalgic feelings for the Statesman in the 1970s, I am feeling rather chuffed.

For a photograph of Moura, see an earlier posting of mine.

Moura Budberg: Nick Clegg's great great aunt

Just when you thought the Lib Dem leadership campaign was going to be dull, the press has discovered Moura Budberg. Nick Clegg's great great aunt, she makes even Elspeth Campbell look mundane.

As the Mail on Sunday tells it:

Of all the many colourful names in the Clegg family tree it is his greatgreat- aunt (sic.) Moura Budberg who stands out above the rest.
The Russian-born noblewoman was widely suspected of spying for both the Soviet Union and British intelligence. Sensuously beautiful – and with a distinctly liberal attitude to sex – her life was full of shadowy entanglements and glamorous liaisons.
MI5 was warned by the British Embassy in Moscow in the early Twenties that she was 'a very dangerous woman'.
She was mistress to science fiction writer H.G. Wells and the Russian literary giant Maxim Gorky, as well as Robert Bruce Lockhart, probably the most famous diplomat and spy Britain ever sent to Moscow.
According to one account she offered sexual favours to a Lubyanka prison commandant after the 1917 revolution to secure her own release.
She then took food parcels and books to her lover Lockhart, jailed in a Kremlin dungeon under suspicion of masterminding an attempt to assassinate revolutionary leader Lenin in 1918 and topple the Bolsheviks, before brokering his release.
Later she came to know both Lenin and Stalin, once giving an accordion to the great dictator.

And there's more.

The Mail says Budberg was born Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya in St Petersburg in 1891 (though Wikipedia claims she was born in the Ukraine). She married the Tsarist diplomat Count Djon Benckendorff and they lived at Jäneda in Northen Estonia. The Count was later shot by an Estonian peasant. (We phoned Lembit Opik for a comment, but he was out.)

Back in 2002 The Times got very excited by the release of Budberg's MI5 file, claiming that she had revealed that Anthony Blunt was a Communist at a dinner party in August 1951. Another guest, himself a former intelligence officer, had reported the conversation to MI5:

“The most startling thing Moura told me was that Anthony Blunt, to whom Guy Burgess was ‘most devoted’, is a member of the Communist Party. When I said, ‘I only know about him that he looked after the King’s pictures’, Moura retorted, ‘such things only happen in England’.” Having read the report, an MI5 officer sent a typed note to B Branch on September 3 1951: “Do you think we should extract the last paragraph for the file of Anthony Blunt? Is it sufficiently reliable?” Hand-written on the note, and in capitals, is the word “NO”.

Budberg wrote - or at least translated and adapted - two film scripts. The Sea Gull (1968) was directed by Sidney Lumet, and Three Sisters was directed by Laurence Olivier. She even appeared as an actress in the film of Peter Ustinov's film of his play Romanoff and Juliet.

And according to Godfrey Smith, she fell hopelessly for H.G. Wells because his skin smelt of honey.

We do not often talk about great great aunts, but the Mail explains the relationship:

Budberg's sister, Alexandra, was the mother of Clegg's grandmother, Baroness Kira von Engelhardt, who was born in Russia in 1909.

Those interested in the family should also read the Times obituary of Budberg's daughter Tania Alexander.

If, as everyone seems to be agreeing, the Lib Dem leadership contest is about personality rather than policy, Chris Huhne may be in trouble.

See also my article on Moura Budberg for the New Statesman website.