The Guardian journalist who took Red Gold to spy for the Kremlin – but who hated Britain so much he’d have happily done it for free! QUENTIN LETTS

Somewhere in Moscow this week, a government official will have opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a dusty folder.

When KGB informants die, the records must be altered and moved to the catacombs. Our clerk will have gone through the file and checked his name: ‘GOTT, Richard, senior journalist at London’s Guardian newspaper’. What will be the reaction when you read more? Admiration? Indifference? Or laugh at the treacherous greed of another naive, privileged British intellectual?

Richard Gott, one of The Guardian’s most persistent Leftists, was the newspaper’s literary editor in 1994 when it emerged that the KGB had a presence. He immediately admitted that the story was true. The Guardian and he left the company.

In Gott’s obituary this week, the newspaper acknowledged that the espionage controversy was ‘extremely damaging to him and the newspaper’. For older Guardian revolutionaries, the Gott affair remains a sore wound. Although they sympathized with Agent Gott, they could see that his dishonesty undermined the ostentatious religiosity of the paper’s Hampstead intellectual base.

The truth is that neither Gott, nor the newspaper, nor Gott’s Left-wing friends in London ever acknowledged that what he did was terrible. For all their anger at Western ‘imperialism’ and indeed their hatred of tax evaders, they could see little wrong with pocketing secret money from the Soviet empire.

We can be sure that Richard Gott, who has died aged 87, never included these KGB bribes in his annual returns to the Inland Revenue. He was reportedly frustrated that his cashiers in Moscow could never pass state secrets to them – but he had his uses, too.

He wrote about international politics from an anti-Western perspective, spread national self-hatred, condemned the United States, and was a shrill critic of Margaret Thatcher.

“Did we get everything wrong about Pol Pot?” Gott’s 1979 Guardian article ran the headline defending the Communist dictator who oversaw the slaughter of two million Cambodians. He argued that, far from being a brutal tyrant, Pot was a statesman who guided his people towards liberation from capitalism.

I showed up at trouble spots with alarming frequency. The most dramatic of these was his presence in Bolivia when Marxist guerrilla leader Che Guevara was killed in 1967. It was Gott who officially identified Guevara, one of two people who met him there.

Richard Willoughby Gott was born in 1938 into a wealthy family. He was educated at Winchester College. At Oxford University, his politics began to become evident and he was nicknamed ‘Gott the Trot’. But as far as his mother was concerned, Gott could do no wrong. He attempted to register a racehorse under the name Ban The Bomb, hoping racegoers would shout the name in the final stretch. The Jockey Club blocked the idea.

In 1962, he began working at the foreign affairs think tank Chatham House. This gave him access to London’s diplomatic circle, and in 1964 he was approached about becoming a paid informant at the Soviet Union’s London embassy. Gott would later claim that he only received expenses, but this was not true. His managers regularly gave him packages worth £300 or more.

After leaving Chatham House, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. After a fight with fellow pacifists, he moved to The Guardian as its lead writer.

In 1966 he left his journalistic duties to stand as an independent in the Hull North by-election. Wilson’s government badly needed to win the seat, and for a few weeks it appeared that Gott might bring down Her Majesty’s government by splitting the Left vote. One photo captured him in a phone booth, wearing a Russian-looking fur hat and a sly expression with a beard. How disappointed the KGB must have been when its advocate garnered a pitiful 253 votes and the government survived.

Hull North’s loss was Santiago’s gain when Gott moved to the Institute of International Studies at the University of Chile. From there he continued writing for The Guardian and produced a book titled Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. It provided an explanation for Gott’s developing friendship with Guevara, whom he first met at the Soviet embassy in Havana in 1963.

After Guevara’s death, Gott remained in Bolivia and ‘investigated the role’ of another Marxist guerrilla group. Eventually, the Bolivian government imprisoned Gott as a communist and expelled him from the country.

Gott also reported from the Falkland Islands and Vietnam, before becoming foreign editor of the Tanzania Standard, where he tried but failed to incite anti-British sentiment, giving him a mandate to make the paper more radical. Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, soon tired of the idea, and Gott returned to London as the New Statesman’s Third World correspondent.

The story of Gott’s involvement with the KGB was broken by a journalist named Alasdair Palmer in The Spectator after he was tipped off by Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, himself a former KGB colonel. The general reaction was more joy than anger. It seemed delicious that such an honest pulpit was caught with his fingers in the Moscow coffers.

As The Guardian’s Latin America correspondent in the 1970s, Gott praised socialist leaders and criticized right-wing generals. And from the beginning he was under the pay of nuclear-weapons-dealing despots in the Kremlin.

Shortly before his exposure, Gott had condemned intrepid ITN reporter Sandy Gall’s reporting on the Afghanistan mujahideen and claimed that Gall was some kind of Pentagon stooge. We now knew that The Guardian’s great fighter for honesty had bought thousands of pounds worth of trousers from Moscow. Mein Gott!

There was also a funny touch. The idea of ​​this bearded little field mouse taking on such a flashy job as spying was like learning that Mother Teresa spent her Friday nights playing the alto saxophone in a jazz bar.

Above all there was duplicity, duplicity and treachery; Rather than the British – perhaps we expected this from the professional Left – it is a betrayal of journalism and its principles.

Leftists reacted angrily to Gott’s revelation. The BBC called The Spectator a ‘Right-wing’ magazine (in fact it is) but made no mention of The Guardian’s leanings. The late Peter Preston, the paper’s editor and an old friend of Gott’s, said the story was “slimy stuff” with “a barely hidden agenda”.

He claimed that The Spectator was acting on behalf of Conservative Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, who The Guardian had exposed as perjury. This claim was not true. Dominic Lawson, editor of The Spectator, actually had little time for Aitken.

In his Spectator editorial, Lawson argued that the Left had ‘completely eliminated their future moral right to criticize the corruption in public life they claim to hate’.

Thirty years later, considering the BBC’s reluctance to report Labor Party scandals, we can reflect on these small changes.

As for Gott, who was twice married and had two adopted children, he continued to unashamedly support Leftist causes. He wept publicly over the 2013 death of Venezuela’s anti-American president, Hugo Chavez (who gave him the medal).

He wrote a fascinating history of communist Cuba. He wrote a 60-page polemic against British colonialism.

Perhaps the only mistake the Soviets made when hiring their men 61 years ago was offering to pay him.

Richard Gott hated his own country so much that he’d probably do it all for nothing.