JENIFER HART

As a gifted Oxford university student, Jenifer Hart was determined to succeed in the male dominated world of Whitehall’s top civil servants. In 1933, just a few years before coming third from the top of the Civil Service entrance exam — the first woman to do so — she joined the Communist Party. Student friends promptly advised her to drop her official membership and go underground as a “sleeper”.

In her biography, Ask Me No More, published in 1998, she wrote: “I was unclear what, if anything, I as a civil servant would do for the British Communist Party, but I think I supposed that I would occasionally pass them useful information.”

In those days there were no security checks on those joining the Civil Service and her political allegiance was never discovered. However, she admitted having six meetings in just her first few years with shady party members who refused to reveal their true identity.

She had served as private secretary to a Permanent-Under Secretary and in the Home Office where she worked on telephone intercepts, invariably of suspected communists. But it was while at that department she was twice interviewed by Peter Wright, the MI5 agent and later author of Spycatcher, about the company she kept. In 1947, she left the Civil Service. Four years later she wrote The British Police, an account of the history and structure of the force.

She later obtained a history fellowship at St Anne’s, where she lectured on 19th-century history and politics. She was known for her flamboyant and sometimes ferocious style. She remained there until she retired in 1981.

When she and her husband, Herbert, inherited her parents’ clifftop home in Cornwall, she wrote “my socialist principles with regard to inheritance ... evaporated.”

Until her death at the age of 91 in 2005 she insisted that she had never passed on any information to the Russians.

BERNARD FLOUD

In 1967, Bernard Floud, a Labour MP, was found dead in his gas-filled home near Regent’s Park in London.

The 52-year-old former Granada television executive was said to have killed himself while suffering depression after his wife’s death. It later emerged that the real reason could have been a gruelling two-day interview with MI5 about him obtaining security clearance to become a junior minister.

The son of Sir Francis Floud, the High Commissioner to Canada, he was born in 1915 and educated at Wadham College, Oxford. There he secretly joined the Communist Party. He trained as a lawyer, joined the Intelligence Corps at the outbreak of the Second World War and later the civil service.

When he revealed his political leanings his career stalled and he then resigned before joining the Labour Party and being elected as an MP in 1964.

That year, Anthony Blunt confessed to being a KGB agent and, in return for his immunity, named others including Floud, as a spy. However, the allegation was never substantiated and three years later, Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, appointed him junior minister. Wright’s interview became more like an interrogation as Floud’s chances of security clearance were thought to have slipped away. A few days later, after he was said to have told colleagues he could take no more, Floud killed himself.

PETER FLOUD

Peter Floud, CBE, the Labour politician’s brother, was also named by Wright as a possible KGB agent.

He studied at the London School of Economics and became the Keeper of the Department of Circulation at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Inn 1939, he was seconded to the London Regional headquarters of the Ministry of Home Security.

He returned to his work at the museum, a career during which he was appointed CBE in 1954. He died in 1960 at the age of 48.

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