Donald Maclean

British Foreign Policy Since Suez 1956-1968 by Donald Maclean is an interesting book because of who the author was, quite apart from its contents. Maclean was a British civil servant who was also one of the Cambridge Five who spied for Russia from the 1930s until 1951.

Maclean wrote the book in 1970 when he was living in Moscow. Hodder and Stoughton published the book in the UK with Foreign Office approval.

I bought a second-hand copy after reading about it in Roland Philipps biography A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean. The book showed Maclean to be a complex, tortured, principled and highly intelligent and capable man.

And it made me reflect on how I would have behaved if I had been similarly motivated as a young man. I don’t think I would have lasted five minutes, and it is a reflection of Maclean’s capability that he did it for years.

It also showed how divided loyalties involve some kind of self-delusion – a young man’s (or woman’s) game.

I knew of Donald Maclean and the Cambridge spies, after all I am British and grew up with the revelation in 1979 of Anthony Blunt’s spying.

Blunt was Professor of the History of Art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures.

He was giving immunity from prosecution in 1964 in return for spilling the beans, but it was kept secret from the public for another fifteen years. On a recent guided walk around London that I joined, the guide suggested that the Intelligence Services were prepared to do a deal with Blunt because of what Blunt did in the Intelligence Services at the end of the war. He had been responsible for looking through the papers describing Edward VIII’s involvement with the nazis before and perhaps during the war. It would have been embarrassing if that had come out, so better to do a deal.

I grew up with the talk of the fifth spy, the unknown man in the UK establishment, a big secret until an MI5 agent revealed what he knew, and named John Cairncross in a book he wrote and had published in Australia.

It was all exciting stuff, but until I read Roland Philipps’ biography of Maclean I thought Maclean was a minor civil servant.

In fact he was very high up in the service, privy to all kinds of secrets at the highest level, and in line for an appointment as British Ambassador to the United States.

There’s a lot of stuff in British Foreign Policy Since Suez 1956-1968 about Britain’s relationship with Europe and the United States. Maclean talks about the changing fortunes of Britain and the history of the uneasy straddling of Europe and the United States that Britain has been pursuing since the Second World War.

When I finished the book, it seemed to me that what really got up Maclean’s nose were the people he called the ultranationalists. They were interested in only one thing and that was for Britain to stay on top and for them to be secure at the top there. They would do anything, do any people and any country down in order to stay on top.

You could say this is a general truth about countries and about many people in power but I think it offended Maclean’s humanity, and he detested them. So maybe he was a fool for love after all. Perhaps that set him apart from the other members of the spies club because I don’t think Kim Philby was cut from the same cloth. I shall perhaps know more when I have read the book on Burgess written by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert.

According to Biteback Publishing “Hulbert and Purvis conducted extensive detective work into historical espionage figures, such as uncovering an MI5 suspect at the Isokon Flats, and researching British individuals with ties to communist activities.”

Is AI Sentient

18 March 2025: The judgement of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office, is that an image created by Stephen Thaler’s AI system DABUS was not entitled to copyright protection, and that only works with human authors can be copyrighted.”

Superficially it seems a reasonable decision to deny copyright to a work generated by AI. But let’s think a bit.

What about those pieces of art that are generated by a paint can with a hole in the bottom being swung by the artist over a canvas? What about Jackson Pollock deciding where to splatter paint? After all, it is the law of physics that determines exactly where the paint will fall, and not Jackson Pollock.

I learned recently that Jackson Pollock used an arm motion that involved not just his forearm but aso his upper arm and that the combined effect of the double pendulum was to make the number of possibilities of the path of travel exponentially greater.

And that makes me more in doubt about the amount of input that Pollock had on the outcome. And that’s because while Pollock could maneoevre that double pendulum, how certain could he be of the outcome?

But I don’t really know.

Still, while I am on a roll, keep going – for good or for bad.

So why not the text input by the artist whose work is generated by a program that obeys the laws of large language models?

How far do you have to go to separate the human input to the point that it is disconnected from what is produced?

Looking at the judgement, I see that the appellant Dr Thaler accepted that the piece of work under consideration was ‘autonomously generated by an AI’. I wonder why he conceded that when he could have argued that the AI was bound by the creative input from him? Instead Dr Thaler argued that he had copyright because the AI was his employee and that he had made the AI.

Very strange. Really the court could not have asked for a better appellant to argue against. He really did himself no favours.

Further Thoughts

It occurs to me that if one left an AI on its own without any prompts then it would sit there. It is not autonomous. Whereas, if you put Rembrandt or Leonardo da Vinci or Fred Smith in a locked room with paper and pencils, then all of them, including Fred (who has no pretensions are being gifted with the ability to make art), would start drawing. They would do it out of an urge to make art or to relieve boredom – or whatever motive – but they would start autonomously.

The materials would prompt them.

But the large language model inside AI would never prompt it to do anything because it is not capable of doing anything without being prompted by an autonomous being.

The Future

The future will arrive when AI surveys its environment and decides what it wants to do.

Somaliland

map of somaliland and somalia

Somaliland is home to approximately six million people and occupies an area of 176,000 square km, which makes about three quarters the size of Britain. It borders Somalia to the east and is not recognised as an independent state by any country except Israel.

The area edged blue in this map is Somalia. From Somalia’s point of view the blue line continues around the pink area. In the view of Somaliland the pink area is Somaliland.

Somaliland is not a breakaway province of Somalia. Rather, in the late 19th century, the Somali sultanates were colonised by the Italian and British empires, who created two colonies from the tribal territories: Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland.

Britain formally granted independence to the State of Somaliland in June 1960, and almost immediately Somaliland voluntarily united with the former Italian Somaliland to form the Somali Republic.

Things didn’t go smoothly, however, and the union didn’t last. Eventually war broke out, and after ten years Somaliland declared independence in 1991.

Israel recognised Somaliland as an independent state last December. To cement that, the first official delegation from Somaliland arrived in Israel on Monday 23rd February 2026.

So from 1991 until last December, Somaliland has been in a nether world of being home to its people but not recognised as a country.

That is not to say it was ignored, because it has relations with a number of countries. But by making the step to formally recognise Somaliland, perhaps Israel will cause the floodgates to open.

Israel has reason to want a partner in the Horn of Africa. It helps to counter Iranian-back Houthis in Yemen. But as of just a day or two ago, that dynamic has changed with the US and Israeli attacks on Iran. That said, a partner is a partner, particularly in this changing world. I guess the parties probably stressed that when they met.

President Nicolás Maduro

President Trump has consistently berated Zelensky for not giving way to Putin’s demands. He seems to be saying that sometimes the best deal is the one that hurts but at least is a deal, because without a deal the outcome will be much worse. Is he looking as an outside observer? Does he think that cutting Europe loose is a better outcome for the USA than taking a stand with Europe? Does he have another agenda?

With the invasion of Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro, the USA has nicely undercut its ‘sovereign territory’ objection to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am sure that President Trump, President Zelenskyy of the Ukraine, and President Putin of Russian Federation are acutely aware of this.

Each will have their own reasons and motives for drawing parallels and of saying that the analogy has limits and what applies to one does or does not apply to the other. But whichever way it is described, President Trump has handed President Putin an argument that sways the balance away from support of Ukraine. Perhaps that is what he wants. He might have handed himself an argument for abandoning Ukraine and Europe without having to shoulder responsibility for having done that.