Royal Scandal Exposed: Late Queen ‘kept in dark’ over palace spy as treachery hidden for almost a decade!

Queen Elizabeth II was kept in the dark for nearly a decade about the full extent of the betrayal of one of her top courtiers, according to recently released official documents. In 1964, Sir Anthony Blunt, the Royal Family’s picture surveyor and renowned art historian, finally admitted that he had been a Soviet agent since the 1930s.

He was recruited as a young don at Cambridge into one of the most infamous spy rings of the 20th century. Despite passing vast amounts of secret intelligence to his KGB handlers during his time as a senior MI5 officer during World War II, Blunt was allowed to keep his position within the British establishment due to fears of a major scandal if he was dismissed and the truth came out.

When the Queen was finally told the full story in the 1970s, she took it “all very calmly and without surprise”, according to declassified MI5 files now available at the National Archives in Kew. The decision to fully inform her came amid growing concerns in Whitehall that the truth would inevitably emerge when Blunt, who was seriously ill with cancer, passed away and journalists, who were already on the scent of the story, were no longer held back by libel worries.

In February 1973, then-Prime Minister Edward Heath braced for a storm of bad press over the Blunt scandal, instructing Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary, to give her the heads up. On March 19, MI5’s top dog Michael Hanley got wind that Sir Burke Trend had clapped eyes on a “personal manuscript letter” from Sir Martin, confirming Her Majesty was in the loop.

“Charteris wrote that he had spoken to the Queen about the Blunt case. She took it all very calmly and without surprise,” noted Hanley. Professor Christopher Andrew, penning MI5’s official history, revealed Mr Heath later learned the Queen wasn’t totally out of the loop; she’d been tipped off “in more general terms about a decade earlier”.

Yet, she didn’t let on about any prior tip-offs, only conceding she’d been aware of suspicions about Blunt when his spy pals, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, hotfooted it to Russia in 1951. “Obviously somebody mentioned something to her in the early 1950s, perhaps quite soon after her accession,” scribbled Hanley.

Rewind to November 1972, and Hanley had tried to convince Sir Martin to cut Blunt loose from the Palace. But Sir Martin wasn’t having it, arguing there was no point as Blunt was nearly out the door anyway.

“Charteris thought the Queen did not know and he saw no advantage in telling her about it now; it would only add to her worries and there was nothing that could done about him,” Mr Hanley reported. “Contrary to what Blunt may have said in the past, Charteris affirmed that the Queen was not at all keen on Blunt and saw him rarely.”

The files indicate that, prior to this point, communication between MI5 and the Palace regarding Blunt had been irregular.

In April 1964, the then director general, Sir Roger Hollis, briefed Sir Martin’s predecessor, Sir Michael Adeane, just as they were about to confront Blunt with the new evidence of his treachery, which ultimately led to his confession. “Sir Michael Adeane thanked me for letting him know the position,” Sir Roger reported.

“He said that he did not propose to tell anyone else about it, but asked that we should let him know if there later appeared any possibility of publicity so that he could at that stage take the necessary action.”

Sir Michael was apparently not briefed again until October 1967, more than three years after Blunt finally owned up, and then only because there was a “risk of publicity” due to a Sunday Times investigation into another of the Cambridge spies, Kim Philby. Miranda Carter, who wrote a 2001 biography of Blunt, said she believed the Queen would have been told informally some time after 1965.

“It’s the job of a private secretary to a monarch to inform them and protect them. It seems to me that she probably needed to know about Blunt in order to know how to behave if she came into contact with him,” she said. Astonishingly, the Queen’s apparent lack of knowledge was mirrored by her then prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who also wasn’t informed of Blunt’s confession.

In an incredible lapse of judgement for which he later expressed regret, home secretary Henry Brooke, who was privy to the information, chose not to tell him because he didn’t want to “add to his burdens”. Overall, the files suggest MI5 was extremely hesitant to share details about the case with anyone in government – as late as July 1965 Sir Burke had still not been informed, nor had any ministers in the new Labour government which had taken office the previous October.

Blunt was finally exposed by prime minister Margaret Thatcher in a Commons statement in 1979. He passed away in 1983 at the age of 75 after being stripped of his knighthood.

The files are now being released ahead of a major new exhibition focusing on the work of MI5, set to open in the spring at the National Archives. Exhibits will include a detailed report of Blunt’s interview when he finally confessed after MI5 officer Arthur Martin confronted him with testimony from Michael Straight, a young American whom Blunt had recruited to work for the Russians in the 1930s.

“He sat and looked at me for fully a minute without speaking. I said his silence had already told me what I wanted to know. Would he now get the whole thing off his chest,” Mr Martin penned. “Blunt’s answer was, ‘Give me five minutes while I wrestle with my conscience’. He went out of the room, got himself a drink, came back and stood at the tall window looking out over Portman Square.”

“I gave him several minutes of silence and then appealed to him again to get it off his chest. He came back to his chair and told me this story.”