Ray Mawby

Ray Mawby, a one-time electrician, served from 1955 to 1983 in the House of Commons, where he championed so-called traditional British values (he campaigned, for example, against the legalization of homosexuality). For Conservative Party members like him, hatred of communism was practically a prerequisite. Yet in 2012, a dozen years after his death, a BBC reporter unearthed a file showing that Mawby had been a mole for Czechoslovakia, then part of the Soviet bloc. Hundreds of pages of documents revealed that Mawby, who was given the codename Laval, began secretly handing over intelligence not long after Czech agents first approached him at a November 1960 cocktail party. Lacking access to classified information, Mawby supplied them instead with political gossip, such as the existence of a confidential investigation into a Conservative Party colleague. More insidiously, he also apparently provided floor plans of the prime minister’s parliamentary office, as well as details about the prime minister’s security team. For each helpful tidbit, Mawby received £100, which, his handlers implied, went toward his drinking and gambling habits. In later years, they upped the total to £400 per year. Though Mawby at one point met several times a month with his handlers, their collaboration appears to have ended in 1971. Remarkably, some Labour Party politicians are also known to have been in cahoots with the Czechs.