less reticent. Blake’s escape received sensational media coverage and caused a good deal of public, as well as official alarm. Initially it was assumed that he had been ‘sprung’ by Soviet or Eastern Bloc authorities (Special Branch even received a tip off that he was being smuggled out of the country in an instrument case belong to a harpist with the Czechoslovakia State Orchestra). But the evidence suggests arrangements were made by Blake himself, with considerable assistance from sympathetic fellow-inmates in Wormwood Scrubs, where he had been a model prisoner, helping with literacy classes. The prison authorities, however, had considered him a ‘unique prisoner not to be trusted’; according to the Deputy Governor, ‘This man must always be under the closest supervision. He is a security risk in every sense of the word, caution always’.4 ‘A pattern of wet impotence’5 Blake’s escape was a cause of embarrassment as well as alarm, not least for Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. It was the latest in what seemed like a long list of high-profile escapes on Jenkins’ watch, including Great Train Robbers Charlie Wilson and Ronnie Biggs in 1964 and 1965; 13 prisoners with violent records who escaped on 25 June 1966 while being moved from Winchester to Parkhurst; and 6 prisoners from Blake’s own wing of Wormwood Scrubs, whose escape on 5 June had led to tightened security. Jenkins’ tenure as Home Secretary had produced a notable series of liberalising legislation, for which he faced much criticism from the Conservative Opposition, and also from the Metropolitan Police because of his refusal to restore the death penalty, abolition of corporal punishment in prisons and his call for the recruitment of black police officers. The shooting of three policemen in Shepherd’s Bush on 12 August 1966 increased press hysteria. An effective Parliamentary performance by Jenkins, and a weak one by Edward Heath meant the government defeated a motion of censure easily and also won subsequent votes on capital punishment and a Criminal Justice Bill; just before, as Jenkins points out in his memoirs, 10 more prisoners escaped from prison in December 1966, including Frank Mitchell, the ‘Mad Axeman’. ‘My nerve’, Jenkins admits, ‘was a bit shaken’. 6 A legacy of spies For Harold Wilson’s Labour Government, the Blake case was part of a much bigger legacy of espionage cases inherited from his Conservative predecessors. In the early 1960s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had been faced with a series of espionage cases, including the Portland Spy Case in 1961, when Ethel Gee and Harry Houghton, their Soviet controller ‘Gordon Lonsdale’ (Konon Molody) and spies ‘Peter and Helen Kroger’ (Morris and Lona Cohen) were convicted of spying; Blake; John Vassall, a clerk in the Admiralty arrested in September 1962; and the defection of Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge spies, in 1963. In addition, the Director General of MI5, Roger Hollis, told Macmillan in the spring of 1963 that his deputy, Graham Mitchell, was under investigation as a Soviet penetration agent; an investigation that, like the subsequent suspicion of Hollis himself, proved groundless. All this caused a major headache for Macmillan, so that the Profumo affair in 1963— which looked like, but was not an espionage case—was the last straw and a major factor in the Prime Minister’s resignation. At the same time, there was increasing evidence of
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