“We’ve been PV’d you know”, says Reg in his latest encyclical. I don’t think I have been, but I remember being involved in someone else’s positive vetting. It was of a colleague who had briefly been with HMSO before moving on to another department, where doubtless there were more important secrets than the significance of K-numbers on HMSO publications. (I’d explain what they meant, but I assume the Official Secrets Act still prevents me, just as it does – John Nash, are you listening? – to what some of us got up to on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government at 54 Parliament Street.)
The victim of the PV-ing had supplied my name as a possible person to talk to, and there turned up at Atlantic House asking for me a figure straight from central casting. He was tall, cadaverous and wearing a long belted raincoat that had once been fawn in colour. Boris Karloff could have played him between other film roles. I sat him down in my office. I was SCPS union secretary at the time – which made him edgy to begin with, as all union officials were known to be in league with Moscow – and he began. We crawled dully through known facts about the subject, and then – here it comes – we got on to sex. What did I know about the subject’s love life? I said, truthfully, that when I had known him it never came up in conversation, but I supposed him to be heterosexual. Mr Raincoat was on this like a flash: “heterosexual: are you sure?” Reasonably so, I said. At which he visibly relaxed. Irritated at such silly bias I flirted with saying, “Of course, he had little time for sex because he was too busy as convenor of his local communist cell”, but I forbore.
My former colleague passed the PV-ing and was appointed to a sensitive post in his new department. I suppose some faintly similar vetting is still in force, but happily, I shan’t ever have to go through it. Meanwhile, under the Official Secrets Act, the Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and even the Caught in the Act, I daresay we are not entitled to know why Reg was PV’d or on what grounds the raincoat brigade judged him to be no risk to British security.
Meanwhile, as HMSO continues in disguise (at the Cabinet Office?) because it would take too many amendments to Acts of Parliament to abolish it completely, I suppose it is now His Majesty’s Stationery Office. I wish it, and him, all the best. I remember Alan Cole, when presiding at the Tin Palace at Nine Elms, was presented to the late Queen when she visited a nearby establishment and on being presented told her, “I am the director of Your Majesty’s Stationery Office next door” or words to that effect. Nice one!
Thine, Tim
Hello Tim, Excellent to hear from you, in impeccable Riley form. I remember those interviews – afterwards, it is difficult to believe they ever happened. I should by rights put the article to the Director of Establishments for approval, but after 26 years I have become carefree at last. Happy memories of Nine Elms as well. I will remind Alan Cole of his brush with incarceration in The Tower. Best wishes, Reg.