[A TACKY, MYSTERY THEME, FULL OF SYNTH-Y THERAMIN]
[CELIA and GEORGIE are recording remotely, badly]
GEORGIE
Hello and welcome to another episode of Sheeple Chase, the podcast where we question everything, including our life choices. I’m Georgie Barker…
CELIA
And I’m Celia Ripley.
GEORGIE
So, how are you doing today, Celia?
CELIA
I’m okay. Not much on outside of family stuff.
GEORGIE
Yeah? You look like you need a rest.
CELIA
Wow! I skip mascara one time and suddenly I’m the walking dead!
GEORGIE
In a hot Twilight way, not a night-of-the-living-dead zombie way! I just meant maybe don’t run any marathons today.
CELIA
But what if I have to, Georgie?
GEORGIE
Why would you have to run a marathon?
CELIA
I don’t know, what if some disaster knocked out all the world’s infrastructure and I had to send a really urgent message to someone 26 miles away?
GEORGIE
God, could you imagine? You wouldn’t even get to stop for lunch! You have to run right through lunch!
[She shudders]
CELIA
I feel like you might have other priorities than lunch at that point…
GEORGIE
Hard disagree.
CELIA
You know what? I retract my statement. You absolutely would still be obsessed with food.
GEORGIE
Damn right. So on that note, while I fish out my most tastefully erotic expanding joggers, let’s hear from today’s sponsor!
[banking app ping]
CELIA
(flat) Darn, I forgot to cancel a subscription.
[banking app ping]
CELIA
Oh, and that one –
[banking app ping]
CELIA
And that one –
[banking app ping]
CELIA
And that one! (sighs) Don’t you just hate wasting money on old subscriptions?
GEORGIE
(peppy) No! Because I have SubSub, the subscription service management service subscription!
CELIA
The subscription subservice sub… what?
GEORGIE
SubSub! The subscription service management service subscription! With SubSub, I can manage all my subscriptions in one place, so I never lose track of what I’m paying for.
CELIA
That could save me so much money.
GEORGIE
At only 49.99 a month it pays for itself! Literally, because your SubSub sub is also managed through your SubSub account.
CELIA
Wow, sounds like I really need a subscription service management subsc–
GEORGIE
Subscription service management service subscription.
CELIA
Subscription management service –
GEORGIE
Just say SubSub.
CELIA
SubSub.
GEORGIE
(increasingly deadpan) SubSub.
CELIA
(very deadpan) SubSub.
[jingle]
GEORGIE
So, Celia, now I’m all dressed to flee from any government agents, which conspiracy theory have you brought for us today?
CELIA
I think you’re going to like this one…
(narrating) The year is 1964. Rock and roll rules the airwaves, lead paint is everywhere and the cold war is getting hot… what a time for the UK to elect a KGB spy as prime minister!
[Excessively spooky sting]
GEORGIE
Harold Wilson?
CELIA
Yeah, today we’re looking at UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson and whether he was a Soviet puppet, planted in Downing Street through a combination of manipulation, assassination, and good, old-fashioned corruption. Spoilers: probably not.
GEORGIE
So what, the Tories had just hired John Le Carré as their new spin doctor or something?
CELIA
Interestingly, at first glance it does seem as if the story comes from a legitimate source. In ‘63, a KGB agent named Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the CIA, and gave them a list naming Soviet agents in the US and UK.
GEORGIE
And Harold Wilson was one of them?
CELIA
Apparently. Now, obviously, when a KGB agent wanders into the CIA offices and starts naming British politicians like he’s hosting Newsnight, MI5 don’t immediately assume they’re all spies. But they do start asking questions, like why he wore so many Lithuanian-designed raincoats.
GEORGIE
Sorry, that like an innuendo thing? “Does he… you know… wear Lithuanian raincoats?”
CELIA
The raincoats weren’t even Lithuanian. They were made in Leeds.
GEORGIE
Notorious hotbed of international communist conspiracy.
CELIA
You say that, but the guy who owned the factory was a Lithuanian immigrant and someone had already told someone who told MI5 that that guy had played chess with a guy who might have talked to a different guy who was in the KGB.
GEORGIE
Ha! What was the real reason?
CELIA
No, that’s the actual real reason. At least, according to Peter Wright, the MI5 agent assigned to the case.
GEORGIE
Wow! Okay, so if they were already investigating him for the raincoat-chess connection, they must have been totally psyched when someone actually named Wilson as a double agent?
CELIA
You would have thought so, but it sounds like they didn’t really consider it that big a deal. In his memoirs, Peter Wright said they thought it was rubbish, but because it came from the head of the CIA’s counterintelligence division, they “had no choice” but to file it somewhere.
GEORGIE
Huh. Apparently I would be a terrible spy, because I would definitely have taken that more seriously than the whole communist raincoat thing.
CELIA
Well, don’t write off your future career just yet. There were a couple of mitigating circumstances. One was that the CIA Counterintelligence chief, Angleton, was a known bullshitter with one agent describing him as “not above exaggeration” –
GEORGIE
Brutal putdown, for a spy.
CELIA
– and Wright said he was known to “manufacture evidence where none existed.”
GEORGIE
Devastating.
CELIA
And Angleton said he “definitely” had evidence, but would only share it if MI5 pinky-promised not to tell its government it was being run by a Soviet agent.
GEORGIE
And I’m guessing MI5 didn’t go for it?
CELIA
Ha! No.
GEORGIE
Even with Raincoat-gate?
CELIA
I mean, they thought he was dodgy, but not like sliding-into-Khrushchev’s-DMs dodgy.
GEORGIE
So do we know now what evidence Angleton had?
CELIA
He had the Russian defector, Golitsyn. Which sounds bad at first, but let’s just say the official historian for MI5 described him as “an unreliable conspiracy theorist.”
GEORGIE
I’m sorry, what kind of job is “official MI5 historian”? All your sources are classified, so do all your footnotes just say “trust me”?
CELIA
Pretty much. Golitsyn was claiming some wild stuff, like that Hugh Gaitskell was assassinated by the KGB to make way for Wilson.
GEORGIE
Oh wow, was he?
CELIA
Not unless the KGB invented lupus.
GEORGIE
But wasn’t this Golitsyn guy the one who identified the Cambridge Five spy ring?
CELIA
Look, I’m not saying none of his info panned out, just that MI5 didn’t trust him as far as they could throw him.
GEORGIE
Hmmm. Sounds like they might have benefited from today’s sponsor…
CELIA
Worst segue yet…
[Ad jingle]
GEORGIE
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[ad outro]
GEORGIE
So where were we?
CELIA
“Unreliable conspiracy theorist.”
GEORGIE
My kinda guy. So, given who else was named by this informant, could Harold Wilson have been a Soviet asset? Did MI5 miss something?
CELIA
Doubtful. They were already looking into him, remember?
GEORGIE
Because of the raincoats?
CELIA
Because of the raincoats. And jokes aside, they already had him under constant surveillance because of that, bugs in his offices, in his house, his car…
GEORGIE
So if he had been directly in touch with Russia, they’d definitely have known.
CELIA
Oh yeah.
GEORGIE
But what about indirect contact? Could he have used some sort of code word when he bought raincoats or something?
CELIA
I mean, it’s possible, but you kinda hope MI5 would notice. Codes are kind of their thing.
GEORGIE
I thought their thing was suspecting entrepreneurial Lithuanians.
CELIA
They can have two things.
GEORGIE
So if they didn’t think he was a Soviet spy, what were they bugging him for?
CELIA
Apparently they were “concerned he might not be aware of the risk of being compromised.”
GEORGIE
So they decided to secretly compromise his privacy?
CELIA
Pretty much.
GEORGIE
(singsong) Irony…
CELIA
Yeah, so it turns out that as a person, Harold Wilson might have been the most boring Prime Minister ever. Plus, it backfired, because Wilson figured out he was being bugged.
GEORGIE
Oh, so he did have spy instincts after all?
CELIA
I mean, everybody close to him thought it was just paranoia.
GEORGIE
But it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you!
CELIA
Well, quite.
GEORGIE
So, do you think this is what was really going on with the ghost thing?
CELIA
The what? What’s the ghost thing?
GEORGIE
You don’t know?
CELIA
Know what?
GEORGIE
Harold Wilson was absolutely convinced that Downing Street was haunted.
[Excessively spooky sting]
CELIA
Really?
GEORGIE
I mean, bear in mind, this is 50-year-old gossip from the Oxford University Labour Club. But… they say that he’d hear people whispering about him behind his back, but when he turned around, there’d be no one there. And there was this constant mechanical whirring, just on the edge of his hearing… It sounds like all that might actually have been real! No wonder he resigned so suddenly…
CELIA
He actually resigned because he was ill, though, right?
GEORGIE
Sure, but I doubt being haunted by MI5 helped.
CELIA
I suppose not.
GEORGIE
So, do you want to talk about the plotting as well?
CELIA
The… plotting?
GEORGIE
You know, the scheme to oust him as PM? I know there was a proper coup planned at some point, which I guess makes a bit more sense if people thought he was a paranoid, ghost-obsessed Soviet spy.
CELIA
Well, that’s the weird thing about this conspiracy theory. The rumours themselves resulted in three actual, real-life conspiracies against him.
GEORGIE
Three? How does something like that happen three times!?
CELIA
I mean, they might not have all been real, but the first one probably was. That was in 1968 and was orchestrated by the head of the International Publishing Corporation, Cecil King, who was also the chairman of the Daily Mirror.
GEORGIE
Classic Daily Mirror.
CELIA
It didn’t go brilliantly. Apparently one of King’s journalists, Cudlipp, happened to have met the head of the Armed Forces, Lord Mountbatten, so they arranged a visit between Cudlipp, King, Lord Mountbatten and one of Mounbatten’s mates who was some random called Sir Solly.
GEORGIE
That name doesn’t exactly scream political mastermind does it?
CELIA
So, King turns up and says, “Lads, the country’s on the brink of ruin, the government’s about to collapse, there’s gonna be blood in the streets and the army will need to take over. You up to it?” Mountebatten thinks about it, but then this Sir Solly guy says Mountbatten is no traitor, so that’s the end of it and King is kicked out.
GEORGIE
So that was the whole plot? A meeting that could have been an email?
CELIA
I mean, King did publish a front-page call for Wilson to be removed from office “by any means necessary,” but he was fired from The Mirror for it. Then Wilson was re-elected in 1974 and allegedly history repeated itself.
GEORGIE
How far did they get this time?
CELIA
Well, we don’t really know if they were plotting at all. Mostly it was just Mountebatton holding training exercises in really public places without any warning, like a show of strength, maybe.
GEORGIE
I mean, that is pretty rude, and I could see how Wilson would get a bee in his already bugged bonnet over it.
CELIA
Especially since a BBC documentary revealed multiple ex-military personnel were building up private armies to march against him if he was outed as a Soviet plant.
GEORGIE
Ah. Again, I think I might be team Wilson on this one.
CELIA
It gets worse. At the time a pair of journalists were secretly recording him with a bugged briefcase –
GEORGIE
Christ, who wasn’t secretly recording him?
CELIA
– and MI5 were feeding information on him to the Tories, so they could undermine him before the election. And his private secretary was doing the same thing for Thatcher directly.
GEORGIE
Good grief…
CELIA
Oh, and you know the raincoat guy? Apparently he bought the secretary a house, so…
GEORGIE
Right, new conspiracy theory. Harold Wilson wasn’t a Soviet spy, but he was being cursed by a vengeful Tory wizard, disguising himself as a Lithuanian chess-playing raincoat seller, who magically convinced everyone that the biggest threat to national security was a boring lefty whose main passions were council housing and widow’s pensions.
CELIA
Makes about as much sense, doesn’t it? So, what’s the verdict? Was Harold Wilson a Soviet spy?
GEORGIE
Not a chance. The KGB would have to queue for days behind all the other plots just get near him!
CELIA
Even though he did try to open up trade with the Soviet Union at one point?
GEORGIE
I recon that might be why the KGB assassinated Hugh Gaitskell. They reckoned Wilson will be a bit better for them, so they just nudged a few germs towards Gaitskell when he’s over in Russia and –
CELIA
You do know you can’t catch lupus, right?
[Beat.]
GEORGIE
I think it’s quite clear that I did not know that, no.
CELIA
Cool. And what about all the other plots against him?
GEORGIE
Let’s just say if even a tenth of them were real, the poor guy must have been wading through hidden cameras just to get to the loo at night. What about you?
CELIA
I mean, there definitely were some plots against him, even if he did take a couple of things personally. And he can be forgiven for being twitchy given all the journalists, politicians and civil servants that have admitted to sabotaging his career.
GEORGIE
But was he a spy? Our very own Mancunian candidate?
[Buh Dum Tss]
CELIA
No, I think 1960s conservatives just didn’t know the difference between wanting a slightly higher tax rate and full-on militaristic communism.
GEORGIE
Plus ça change.
CELIA
That’s it for this week, folks. Uh, thank you for listening, please don’t forget to rate, review us, compliment us however you like, Georgie and I will be back with a new mystery every week!
GEORGIE
We might actually have a special guest for an episode soon.
CELIA
Might we? Who?
GEORGIE
I don’t want to say too much right now, because it’s not confirmed yet, but I’m pretty excited.
CELIA
Well, there’s a new mystery for you already. We didn’t even have to wait for next week after all.
[tacky theme tune]
ANNOUNCER
Sheeple Chase and The Magnus Protocol are podcasts distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Share-alike 4.0 International License.
Sheeple Chase was created by Sasha Sienna, directed by April Sumner, and based on the works of Jonathan Sims and Alexander J Newall.
This episode was written by Sasha Sienna and edited with additional materials by Jonathan Sims and Alexander J Newall, with audio edits by Nico Vettese, mastering by Meg McKellar, and music by Nico Vettese.
It featured Sasha Sienna as Georgie Barker and Lowri Ann Davies as Celia Ripley.
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Thanks for listening.