The 14th Man - yet another of Anthony Blunt's recruits exposed. Amazing pictures.

It was the afternoon of Thursday 15th November 1979 that the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, prime MInister rose to make a statement in response to a Question from Labour MP for Hartlepool, Edward Leadbitter.

" In April 1964, Sir Anthony Blunt admitted to the Security Services ... he had been recruited by and ... passed information regularly to the Russian intelligence.."

Minutes after finishing her statement to a stunned House, Buckingham Palace announced that Sir Anthony Blunt, Keeper of the Queen's pictures had been stripped of his knighthood, the first instance since the trial and hanging of Sir Roger Casement in 1916. "Old Queen is outraged" was the headline on Private Eye's front page with a picture of the old Queen Sir Anthony Blunt.

Now a new book published in New Zealand reveals that Blunt also recruited fellow Trinity College student , New Zealander Paddy Costello.("The Sixth Man: the Extraordinary Life of Paddy Costello" by James McNeish is published by Vintage New Zealand (NZ$35) ISBN 9781869418915)

The New Statesman has a review of the book, published in New Zealand but not in the UK in which Francis Beckett poses the question ..."Was Paddy Costello a key member of the most notorious Soviet spy network of the 1950s - or was he framed?" Costello was a star of new Zealand diplomacy post war, revealing the Soviet possession of the atom bomb, and the first Western diplomat to penetrate the Nazi death camps at the end of the war.

PS : In The Great City Academy Fraud, published earlier this year Francis Beckett exposes the con which lies at the heart of what is nothing more than the Conservative’s old City Technology Colleges scheme, rehashed and reheated by New Labour. The present facts are these: that that a sponsor willing to put up £2 million may effectively control and run a City Academy, towards which the taxpayer will have paid a vastly greater sum, not to mention running costs and salaries in perpetuity.....Amazon