The Fragile Polity

Recent or current self-inflicted wounds on both sides of the Atlantic have focused my attention on the fragility of our democratic systems. There is something wrong when the President of the United States feels constrained to fire a man he would later describe as a “national hero.”

There is something wrong, too, when Britain’s top civil servant and Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Robert Armstrong, is subjected to the kind of ordeal he went through in a Sydney, Australia, courtroom over the propriety of allowing a former member of Britain’s Security Service (MI-5) to publish material that has already been published elsewhere. After all, it is public (and highly publicized) knowledge that Mr. H. Chapman Pincher’s two books, Their Trade Is Treachery and Too Secret Too Long, were largely based on the personal confidences of that same MI-5 man, Mr. Peter Wright, who lives in Tasmania.

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Brian Crozier

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Recent or current self-inflicted wounds on both sides of the Atlantic have focused my attention on the fragility of our democratic systems. There is something wrong when the President of the United States feels constrained to fire a man he would later describe as a “national hero.”

There is something wrong, too, when Britain’s top civil servant and Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Robert Armstrong, is subjected to the kind of ordeal he went through in a Sydney, Australia, courtroom over the propriety of allowing a former member of Britain’s Security Service (MI-5) to publish material that has already been published elsewhere. After all, it is public (and highly publicized) knowledge that Mr. H. Chapman Pincher’s two books, Their Trade Is Treachery and Too Secret Too Long, were largely based on the personal confidences of that same MI-5 man, Mr. Peter Wright, who lives in Tasmania.