School for Scandal by Gavin Whitehead

December 7, 2025·1 hr 5 min·5 clips

Soviet operative Arnold Deutsch recruited Antony Blunt to spot future spies among Cambridge students.

Blunt is already a puzzle. The excerpt treats his pull toward espionage as more than plain ideology. Temperament, secrecy, and possible personal alienation all seem to be doing some work. Authority did not impress him. Carter's phrase, "deliberate perversity and contrariness," helps explain how nose-thumbing had become almost a habit by then. His secrecy mattered too. A colleague says that after 30 years working with Blunt, he still never felt he really knew him. Then comes the Cambridge job. In January 1937, with departure due in June, Blunt becomes a talent spotter and recruits three spies in his final months. Michael Strait, John Cairncross, and Leo Long all appear, though Strait is the one the episode keeps close. Strait arrives with pedigree. He is American-born, tied to the influential Whitney family, then pulled into a Devon settlement preaching social and sexual freedom. Cambridge changes the weather. At Trinity College, he studies economics, attends communist meetings, and at first treats them so casually that homework wins the room. By 1935, that changes. Strait grows more interested, joins the Communist Party, and travels on the same Soviet Russia interest tour as Blunt. The irony has bite. The remembered image is not grand theory but Strait buying clothes from real Russians and trying on revolutionary identity. Funny at first, then colder. Under the costume joke sits the question of why privileged young men made themselves useful to a clandestine cause.

As heard by us

A sharp account of Blunt's secrecy, contrariness, and the Cambridge world that fed his double life.

Gavin Whitehead keeps Anthony Blunt at the center of a story shaped by class, secrecy, and Cambridge ambition. The episode traces how Blunt thumbed his nose at the establishment, questioned authority, and may have felt little loyalty to a country that criminalised his sexuality…

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Why you'd press play

A Cambridge espionage story with double lives, politics, and a nasty little edge.

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