When Michael Gillard approached us with a story for the magazine, we were thrilled to be working with a journalist we have long admired. The story he writes below, of the life of the diplomat Sir John Guinness, is unlike anything we’ve ever published before. It’s a salacious slice of reportage, yes, but it’s also an exposition of the private life of a man who died two years ago. We feel that there is an overwhelming public interest in running this piece: it fits within those tropes of post-war British society that are so familiar that they almost feel redundant: the government mandarin, aristocratic kink, private members’ clubs and hints of an establishment cover-up.
It’s the world of Ian Fleming, le Carré, Graham Greene, but it’s all too important to remember that their rich fictional imaginings were based on a series of scandals that revealed a grim and unsustainable hypocrisy in the way in which this country was governed: that rules didn’t really apply if you were one of the chaps, and that you could lead a life of wild indiscretion – while running the country – as long as you kept your mouth firmly shut.
When John Vassall, an admiralty clerk, was caught spying for the Soviets in 1962, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan upbraided the director of MI5, Roger Hollis, for broadcasting the news with an exuberantly patrician simile:
‘When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the Master of Foxhounds’ drawing room; he buries it out of sight.’
The Profumo affair, which happened the following year, produced an extraordinary media frenzy and suggested to the government that such scandals should be swept firmly under the carpet: the liaisons between Ronnie Kray, the East End gangster, and Lord Boothby, government minister, might well have been broadcast in the national media had Boothby, who was bisexual, not been the long-term lover of Dorothy Macmillan – the Prime Minister’s wife.
Boothby, Profumo, and most of all the icy academic Anthony Blunt – these shades of history shape the way we read the life of Sir John Guinness.
The Spy and his Lover
A former diplomat responsible for Britain’s energy security was a security risk who indulged a dangerous compulsion for sadomasochism throughout his distinguished political career, including while advising on the Queen’s art collection.
An investigation into the secret life of this loyal mandarin at the heart of Britain’s establishment can reveal that Sir John Guinness, a permanent secretary at the department of energy and advisor to prime ministers, risked all in pursuit of dungeon masters to thrash, torture and choke him out. Indeed, towards the end of his life, Sir John, who died in 2020 aged 84, paid more than £400,000 in hush money to a ‘master’ known on the BDSM scene as Ares.
