Strange connections

Bit late to this but when I was on holiday The Critic published an article by Gerald Frost, founder and former director of the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies.

‘George Miller: Anti-Communist‘ is about my old friend George Miller-Kurakin who I wrote about here following his death, aged 54, in 2009.

For several years in the mid Eighties George and I worked on a newsletter called Soviet Labour Review. We were personally close and in 1987 I was best man at his wedding in Frankfurt (above).

Frost doesn’t say so but I’ve always thought that one of George’s secret weapons was his naive almost child-like optimism.

He and his exiled Russian colleagues were convinced the Soviet Union would collapse and with hindsight they were right.

But that wasn’t how most people saw it at the time so it took extraordinary persistence - and courage - over many decades to achieve their goal.

Unfortunately, like many (counter) revolutionaries, having won the war George and his pals couldn't agree on how to win the peace, nor did they have the expertise to do so.

Nevertheless, if you're interested in the story of someone who devoted the best years of his life to a seemingly hopeless cause, George Miller: Anti-Communist is worth a read.

It includes a quote from me and there’s even a bit about George’s clandestine trips to Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion in 1979, which is topical.

Having read his tribute to George I then stumbled on another article by Frost - 'Alfred Sherman: the original Downing Street maverick'.

As it happens I worked (very briefly) with Sherman too but unlike George he was one of the most intimidating and egotistical people I have ever met!

In 1986 I had made a bit of a splash with the publication of the very first Media Monitoring Report that exposed the extent of the political bias in Britain’s flagship current affairs programmes.

Published by the Media Monitoring Unit which had been set up the previous year by Dr Julian Lewis (now an MP and another friend of George Miller’s), the report had come to the attention of Sherman, ‘an ex-communist born to poor Russian émigrés’, who had been a leading advisor to Margaret Thatcher.

A controversial figure who had eventually exhausted even Mrs Thatcher’s patience, Sherman had set up his own research group based in a small but rather grand office on the corner of Little Smith Street and Tufton Street in Westminster.

Early in 1987 he invited me to his office and explained that he wanted to set up his own media monitoring project - much larger and better funded than the MMU - that would be modelled on two groups in America, one in Nashville, the other in Washington DC.

The Nashville operation was based at Vanderbilt University, a private research facility, and was completely apolitical, as I recall.

Its focus was on building a huge library of programmes that academics could use for research purposes.

The group in Washington was a bit like the IEA, albeit focussed exclusively on media issues.

Working from an elegant townhouse in Georgetown they published regular reports including an entertaining annual guide to hundreds of US political broadcasters and journalists, rating each one.

I would love to have published something similar in the UK but our libel laws are much stricter than the US so I’m sure someone would have sued us!

Anyway, Sherman arranged for me to spend two weeks in the US - one in Nashville, the other in Washington - researching and writing a report about the two operations in order that we could develop a proposal for a UK media research group on a similar scale.

The trip to Nashville is a bit of a blur now but I remember being hugely impressed by the media facility which featured banks of TV monitors and video machines recording TV programmes around the clock.

I don’t think staff wore white coats but there was definitely a scientific feel to the place, very different to my own situation - recording TV programmes on a couple of VHS recorders in a bedsit in Hammersmith!

On the Washington leg of the trip I stayed at the home of a friend from university. Peter Young - who subsequently founded Adam Smith International, a ‘global advisory company’ - was working for the Adam Smith Institute with a view to establishing a full-time ASI presence in America.

I wish I could remember the name of that Georgetown based media research group but I can’t. I do remember Peter’s house though because it only had one air-conditioned room (for which I was very grateful!)

Sadly Sherman’s ambitious media project never got off the ground. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the cost - based on my report and subsequent proposal - put him off.

Either way that was the beginning and end of my relationship with the enigmatic former communist who died, aged 86, in 2006.

Peter Young on the other hand is alive and well. He too was a close friend of George Miller and this is his Afghanistan story:

I remember vividly my first journey to Afghanistan in early 2002, not long after the removal of the Taliban. The late writer and journalist Steve Masty and I had persuaded two contacts from Afghan anti-Soviet Resistance days to drive us to Kabul, so we set out in their rusty old car over the Khyber Pass.

You could tell how dangerous they thought it was by what they did with the machine gun. First it was in the boot, then hung over the back of the seat, then gripped firmly by hand. In the event it was the road, full of potholes deeper than a man, that almost killed us. We were hit by a truck that sliced off part of the front, including one of the headlights. The night-time climb up the steep road into Kabul in pouring rain with zero visibility was not a pleasant experience.

See ‘How Bush, Blair and Biden lost Afghanistan’ (Cap X).