Zinoviev did not write me a letter. He did not write to you either. He did not write to the docker, the miner, the farm labourer, the woman who could not afford spectacles. The letter that changed the course of British foreign policy, that closed the door on Soviet engagement for a generation, that helped lock Britain into an Atlantic alliance it has never since escaped — that letter was a forgery. Most people don’t know this. Percy prefers it that way.
Britain and America are, as someone once observed, two nations divided by a common language. The phrase is usually offered as a joke. It shouldn’t be. The common language was the mechanism. It made the Atlantic relationship feel inevitable, natural, like coming home. Churchill’s mother was American — Jennie Jerome, daughter of Leonard Jerome, a Wall Street speculator embedded in the heart of New York financial society. Churchill was not merely culturally half-American. He was dynastically, by blood, of the class whose interests the Cold War would serve. When he stood at Fulton, Missouri in 1946 and told the world that an iron curtain had descended across Europe, he was not a foreigner delivering a warning. He was a grandson of Wall Street coming home to do what Wall Street needed done.
Russia had no such mechanism. A different alphabet. A different literary tradition. A different relationship to irony, to understatement, to the particular English mode of not quite saying what you mean. Every time a Soviet overture arrived — Litvinov at the League of Nations in 1934, the mutual assistance pacts of 1935, the desperate negotiations of the summer of 1939 — there was enough cultural static to make suspicion feel reasonable. Percy didn’t need to manufacture the distance. He just needed to make sure it was never crossed.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 did not weaken America’s grip on British foreign policy. It tightened it. A Britain already financially dependent on American loans, already culturally oriented toward the English-speaking world, watched the crash ripple across the Atlantic and learned the lesson Percy intended: that the economies were joined, that what happened in New York happened in Manchester, that there was no separating them now. The catastrophe that American speculation had created became the argument for cleaving closer to America still.
Meanwhile Russia was industrialising. Brutally, at terrible human cost — but industrialising. Building the productive capacity that would eventually stop Hitler at Stalingrad. The Wall Street money that shaped Anglo-American foreign policy had no interest in anyone noticing that. A functioning alternative model, however barbaric its methods, was the one thing they could not afford the world to examine too closely. So the crash became a reason to tighten the Atlantic relationship. The Soviet experiment became a reason to fear the east. Percy didn’t need to plan any of this. He just needed the money to keep flowing in one direction.
Joseph Kennedy Senior, Ambassador to the Court of St James’s from 1938 to 1940, believed Germany would win, thought Britain was finished, and said so. Roosevelt removed him because the embarrassment had become unmanageable. But Kennedy was not an outlier. He was doing what robber baron money does — calculating. Fascism was a bulwark against communism. A stable authoritarian Europe was a better environment for business than a continent experimenting with collective ownership. The ideological threat from the left was, for men like Kennedy, more frightening than Hitler. Better Hitler than Stalin. Better Franco than the Spanish Republic. Better Mussolini than the trade unions. The Special Relationship was never between peoples. It was between establishments. And the American establishment had its own reasons for keeping Russia the enemy that had nothing to do with British interests.
His son became President, inherited the Cold War architecture those same men had built, nearly blew up the world over Cuba, and was assassinated before anyone could find out what a second term might have looked like.
Even the men steering Britain toward the American alliance did not fully trust it, and this time Percy’s hand is harder to separate from Britain’s own failures. Britain’s scientists had been central to the wartime Manhattan Project. In 1946 the physicist Alan Nunn May was exposed as a Soviet spy, having passed British and American atomic research to Moscow throughout the war. His arrest was the first public proof that Soviet intelligence had penetrated the programme, and it gave America a genuine, defensible reason to distrust British security. America used that reason to write the McMahon Act, cutting Britain out of nuclear cooperation it had helped build — a response disproportionate to the actual leak, and one that conveniently secured an American nuclear monopoly in the process. Both things were true at once: Britain had given Percy real ammunition, and Percy fired far more than the wound required.
Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary under Attlee, was a trade unionist with no establishment background and no illusions. His reported response to the McMahon Act was that he did not want any future Foreign Secretary talked at or blackmailed by an American Secretary of State the way he felt he had been — and that Britain must have, in his words, the Union Jack on top of it. Attlee’s government secretly authorised an independent British bomb, hidden even from most of the Cabinet, as a direct reaction. The architects of the Special Relationship did not believe America could be trusted to share what it owed.
In the summer of 1939, with Hitler already in Czechoslovakia and pointing at Poland, Britain and France sent a delegation to Moscow to negotiate a military alliance with the Soviet Union. The talks were the last chance. A credible three-power commitment — Britain, France, the Red Army — was the one combination Hitler could not dismiss. He had gambled, correctly at Munich, that the West would fold. A genuine alliance with the Soviet Union behind it might have given him pause. Might have prevented the war entirely.
The British delegation sailed to Leningrad on a slow merchant ship. When they arrived, the head of the delegation — Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Ernie-Drax — had no written powers to negotiate whatsoever. None. He could not sign anything. He had been sent to negotiate a military alliance against Hitler without the authority to agree to a single thing.
On the Soviet side: Kliment Voroshilov, Commissar of Defence, fully authorised, ready to sign.
A.J.P. Taylor — nobody’s Soviet apologist — called it the most incompetent transactions since Lord North lost the American colonies. The Soviet interpretation was different. From Moscow, the behaviour of Anglo-French diplomacy could only be explained by the desire to drag Russia into a war with Germany while Britain and France stood on the sidelines. Paranoia, perhaps. But a paranoia shared by multiple historians in the West.
The talks collapsed. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact followed within days. The road to the Second World War was open.
Admiral Drax is the grandfather of Richard Drax, the former Conservative MP for South Dorset. The family’s earlier distinction was the Drax plantation in Barbados — one of the earliest and most brutal sugar operations in the Caribbean, built on enslaved labour. The Admiral wanted to give his version of events after the war. The War Ministry told him it was not the right time.
The files are in the National Archives. The family is still in South Dorset.
It was Marshal Georgy Zhukov who won the war in Europe. He saved Moscow in 1941. He commanded at Stalingrad. At the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 — the largest tank battle in history — he broke the back of German offensive capability forever. After Kursk, Germany never seized the initiative again. The Western Allies landed in Normandy eleven months later, by which point the Red Army had already done the decisive work. The twenty-seven million Soviet dead are not a footnote to the war. They are the war.
In the Pacific, the standard Western narrative is that the atomic bombs forced Japanese surrender. The evidence is less comfortable than that. Japan had been hoping the Soviet Union would mediate a negotiated peace — Russia was not yet at war in the Pacific and Tokyo calculated it might serve as a bridge. On 8 August 1945, two days after Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and destroyed the Kwantung Army in Manchuria within days. That hope of mediation collapsed entirely. Some historians now argue it was the Soviet entry, not the bombs, that broke Japanese resolve. The country that won the war in Europe, and may have ended it in Asia, was recast as the enemy within months of victory.
Russia had not come to this moment as an aggressor seeking empire. Its entire modern history was one of defence against invasion — Napoleon in 1812, Britain and France in the Crimea in 1854, Germany in 1914, Germany again in 1941. The expansion that looks like empire is almost entirely buffer-seeking. After each invasion the lesson was the same: every time we left a gap, someone came through it. The populations absorbed were often desperately poor. There was oppression, certainly. But the economics were different from British India or the Belgian Congo. You were not getting rich off Belarus.
In 1989 Russia voluntarily relinquished more territory than any empire in history — the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet republics, everything gone. No colonial power ever did that. Britain had to be pushed out of everywhere.
The response to that extraordinary retreat was NATO expansion eastward.
Percy took the most defensive large power in the world and turned it into the permanent enemy. By comparison, America — the ally we actually chose — did not enter the First World War until 1917, and only after enormous financial advantage had been extracted from Britain’s desperation. Did not enter the Second World War until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Lend-Lease was not generosity. It was a commercial transaction that bankrupted Britain and opened its imperial markets to American goods. And at Suez in 1956, when Britain tried one last time to act like a great power, America pulled the rug without hesitation.
That is not an alliance. That is a protection racket with a shared language.
Harold Wilson refused to send British troops to Vietnam despite enormous American pressure. It nearly broke the Special Relationship. He is the exception that proves the rule — the one postwar Prime Minister who said no to Washington on a major military commitment, and paid a heavy political price for it. The leash could be slipped. It almost never was.
In 1950 Britain was two years into the NHS. Nye Bevan had just given spectacles and dentures to people who had never had either. The welfare state was fragile, underfunded, extraordinary. Every pound mattered.
Then Korea. America needed a coalition. Britain signed up. The rearmament programme that followed broke the NHS budget. Bevan resigned over prescription charges. The thing that had just been born received its first and most damaging wound — not from its enemies, but from the cost of a war on a peninsula in northeast Asia that had nothing to do with British interests.
Spectacles and dentures on one side of the ledger. Korea on the other.
As the Red Army fought street by street toward Berlin, taking casualties that beggared imagination, American units were moving through western Germany on a different mission. Operation Paperclip was its formal name — the systematic seizure of Nazi scientists, engineers, patents and industrial knowledge from companies like Bosch, IG Farben and Siemens. Werner von Braun, whose V2 rockets had been built using slave labour from concentration camps, was among those brought to America to work on the space and weapons programmes that would define the postwar order. The patents, the chemical processes, the precision engineering knowledge — much of it developed using the forced labour of people murdered in those same camps — was loaded onto American trucks while Soviet soldiers bled in the rubble of Berlin.
Russia provided the bodies. America provided the lawyers.
The division of spoils after the Second World War is one of Percy’s masterworks. The country that paid the most got the least. The country that arrived late and lost the fewest left richest. And then, within months of victory, that country turned to its exhausted, devastated ally — the country without whose sacrifice there would have been no victory to divide — and named it the enemy.
Halford Mackinder sat before the Royal Geographical Society in 1904 and said: whoever controls the Eurasian heartland controls the world. Britain’s entire strategic position depended on preventing any single power dominating that landmass. It was the whole point of the Navy, the whole point of centuries of balance-of-power policy.
In 1945 Britain walked away from it. Two offshore islands — one small, one vast, on the wrong side of the Atlantic — agreed to manage a World Island neither of them lived on.
We apply sanctions to Russia, which can rightly regard NATO on its borders as a military threat. We do not apply sanctions to the United States, which has attacked countries halfway round the world that could not conceivably threaten American soil — Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and others whose names we have largely stopped saying. The asymmetry is not accidental. It is the architecture Percy built, and the language Percy installed to make it feel natural.
American military intervention in the Gulf has consequences that arrive quietly, in the weekly shop. Urea — the fertiliser that British and European farmers depend on, derived from natural gas production whose price tracks Gulf stability — spikes when the region is destabilised. When fertiliser prices rise, food production costs rise. When food production costs rise, food prices rise. In Britain this means harder choices at the checkout. In the Global South it means hunger. The connection between an American decision made in Washington and a child going without food in the Sahel is real, direct, and almost never made in Western political discourse. Percy prefers it that way.
And then the tariffs. The country that destabilised your energy supply, inflated your food costs, conscripted your soldiers for its wars, and extracted your imperial markets through Lend-Lease — that country then imposes a baseline 10% tariff on British goods entering the United States. Not on enemies. On its closest ally. The Special Relationship has a price list. Britain has been paying it for eighty years and the bill keeps arriving.
This is not anti-Americanism. It is accountancy.
Zinoviev did not write me a letter. But someone did. And we have been paying the postage ever since.