On November 15th, 1979, the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, stood up in the House of Commons and read a statement to the effect that Sir Anthony Blunt, the eminent art historian and former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, had, in 1964, in return for a promise of immunity from prosecution, confessed to having been a spy for the Soviet Union during the war, at a time when he was working for British Intelligence. Mrs Thatcher, in the way of these things, was replying to a question from the backbench Labour MP Ted Leadbitter, one of history's bag-carriers, who the previous day had been given Blunt's name by Downing Street. On the way out of the chamber, Leadbitter met Thatcher, who said of Blunt that "it damn well serves him right". Within minutes, Buckingham Palace had announced that Blunt's knighthood was to be revoked, only the second time in history such a thing had happened, the other disgraced knight being Roger Casement.
Blunt, who was in his 70s, had been living in fear of exposure at least since 1964, so that when the blow fell it did not come as a surprise, although it was still a shock. Rumours about his wartime spying had been afloat in security circles for decades, and in the months before Thatcher's announcement he had been named by Private Eye as the "fourth man" in the Cambridge spy ring, along with Philby, Burgess and Maclean; the Eye also revealed that he was a homosexual, and, characteristically, added a pack of lies about shady picture dealings and millions hidden in foreign banks. The immediate spur for the Conservative government's decision to expose him was the imminent publication of a book by the journalist Andrew Boyle which, while it stopped short of actually identifying Blunt, dropped sufficient hints to leave informed readers in no doubt as to his identity.
What was a surprise to Blunt and the few friends who remained loyal to him was the reaction of the press to Thatcher's announcement. The level of vituperation was unprecedented. "Traitor at the Queen's Right Hand", screamed the Daily Mail, while in the Evening Standard Malcolm Muggeridge, who really should have known better, described Blunt as a "pansy aesthete", and in the Express John Junor, of whom better would not have been expected, called him a "treacherous Communist poof". There was a suggestion in the Telegraph that while serving with the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1940 Blunt had been not only a "hopeless officer" but also a coward. There were newspaper accusations that he had misattributed paintings to the benefit of his dealer friends, that along with Earl Mountbatten he had been involved in "an old boy network which held gay orgies in country houses on both sides of the Irish border", and even that he might have had links with the Kincora children's home scandal. Most damaging, though, was the Sunday Telegraph's claim that as head of the Netherlands section of the Special Operations Executive during the war, Blunt had been responsible for the deaths of 49 Dutch secret agents. In fact, the reporter had confused Blunt with another intelligence officer of the same name. Blunt wanted to sue for libel, but his lawyer advised him against it, saying that as he was a named traitor and a homosexual, no court would find in his favour.
Why such fury? Blunt had done little more than supply the Soviet Union with military information which by rights should have been given to it by the Allies, except that they were intent on bleeding Russia white so that after the war it would be too weak to pose a threat to the West.
Of particular annoyance to many in England was the guarantee of immunity which had been granted to Blunt, while others suffered the full rigour of the law - George Blake, the MI6 double agent, had been sentened to 42 years in prison - and the fact that after his confession he was allowed to continue to work at Buckingham Palace and to move freely among the Royal Family. The Establishment had been tricked by one of its own, and for that there would be no forgiveness.
Certainly, Anthony Blunt's credentials were impeccable. His father was a clergyman, and his mother was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother - who, incidentally, was Blunt's special friend among the Royals, and defended him in private after his disgrace. The only odd bird in the family tree was Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, poet, atheist, anti-imperialist, and champion of Irish Home Rule, who was sent to prison in 1889 for encouraging Irish tenants to resist evictions. Young Anthony was sent to school at Marlborough, and met and befriended the future poet Louis MacNeice, and then went on to Cambridge, where he first studied mathematics, but later switched to art history.
Like so many young Englishmen, Blunt discovered himself at university. It was at Cambridge that his sexuality blossomed - unusually for his time, he was utterly unashamed of being homosexual - that his love of painting became a passion, and that he met the man who was to be the strongest influence on his life, Guy Burgess.
Burgess was a wild man amid the neatly barbered lawns of 1930s England. Large, louche, and unwashed, with the look, as Miranda Carter elegantly puts it, "of a slightly overripe cherub", he had an insatiable appetite for sex, drink and secret power. He liked to regale any company he found himself in with the story of why he was a homosexual: when Guy was 13, his father, an admiral, had died while making love to his wife, and the boy had walked in on the scene, the sight of which had put him off heterosexuality forever; much later, after he had defected in the company of fellow spy Donald Maclean, a suggestion was made that the two had been lovers, which outraged Burgess: it would have been, he said, "like going to bed with a great white woman".
It may have been Burgess who converted Blunt to communism - if, indeed, there really was such a conversion. When late in life Blunt was asked why he had spied for Russia, he sighed and said merely: "Cowboys and Indians".
Certainly, he had a conscience, which, allied to a deep antipathy toward many of the Establishment's values, led him to seek for ways in which to tackle injustice. In the 1930s, communism seemed the only defence against the tide of fascism surging across Europe. The confrontation of the two ideologies in the Spanish Civil War seemed to show the starkness of the choice: either Hitler or Stalin, with no compromise possible in between, certainly not the milk-and-water democracy that had allowed the "old men" to squander millions of young lives on the killing fields of Flanders.
When war with Hitler came, Blunt joined MI5, and at once began to pass intelligence secrets to his Soviet controllers. The most important material he supplied was the information gleaned from German wireless intercepts by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park. There is, Miranda Carter insists, no evidence to support claims that Blunt was responsible for the deaths of agents in the field. Peter Wright, author of Spycatcher, had suggested that Blunt had exposed an MI6 spy based in the Kremlin, but the author Nigel West, certainly no admirer of Blunt, says the relevant information did not come from Blunt, and that in any case the spy in question was never caught.
In his statement to the press after his exposure, Blunt said that he had stopped spying for the Soviets in 1945. It appears that this was a lie, and that he was still in contact with his controllers at least up to 1949. Yuri Modin, Blunt's last Soviet handler, tells a curious, Harry Lime-ish story of how in 1954 Blunt was asked to pass money along to Kim Philby. Blunt and Modin met on a road in Islington, where Modin, in the act of handing over £5,000, suddenly became convinced that they were being watched, at which Blunt sheepishly told him that a figure standing nearby in the shadows was Philby himself. Cowboys and Indians, indeed.
After the war Blunt became one of the most respected figures in the art world, running the immensely influential Courtauld Institute, publishing books on artists as disparate as William Blake and Nicolas Poussin - on the latter's work he was, and still is, the leading authority - and continuing to advise the Queen on matters of art, despite the fact that in 1964 she had been informed of his confession. There is a story, not told by Carter, that in the 1980s, on a visit to the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge, Queen Elizabeth found herself standing before Poussin's Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, which had once belonged to Blunt. She gazed at the picture for a long moment, then shook her head and murmured: "Poor Anthony". It is, one supposes, as good an epitaph as any.
Miranda Carter, whose first book this is, has written a shrewd, informed and stylish life of a complex and enigmatic figure. She is diligent, thorough, generous in detail, and scrupulously fair in her judgments. Her poise and clarity would no doubt have been admired by Sir Anthony himself.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times