Ball, Chamberlain and Truth

Abstract

Sir Joseph Ball is not a name that echoes with any great resonance in the plethora of historical works devoted to the premiership of Neville Chamberlain and the pursuit of ' appeasement'. Historians have caught fleeting glances of him, but have been unable to pin him down. As director of the Conservative research department and a personal friend of Chamberlain, it is generally conceded that he must have been important, even if it has been impossible to decide exactly why this should be so. His use as a personal go-between for Chamberlain with the Italians has often been discussed, but, as with the rest of his career during the inter-war period, this episode has never been satisfactorily confirmed. Did he or did he not chat to Count Grandi in the back of a taxi? The confusion surrounding this question is symptomatic of the confusion surrounding the rest of Ball's career. The only point that is clear about Ball is the reason for such confusion; as befits an ex-MI5 officer, by destroying all the records of his involvement with the Conservative party and all his own private papers he has successfully removed himself from the history books. In Soviet parlance, he has become a ' non-person'. The most that so eminent a historian of the Conservative party as Lord Blake has been able to manage is that Ball became a 'quintessential eminence grise' in the affairs of the party, whose influence ' cannot be measured by the brevity of the printed references to him '.' There is one area of activity, however, in which the direct influence of Ball can be traced and that is in the secret direction and control of the weekly newspaper Truth. An account of Joseph Ball and Truth not only sheds some light on the darker recesses of Ball's own career, but it also helps to explain much of the motivation guiding Chamberlain in his approach to the problem of the European dictators in the years 1937-40. For it is in the pages of Truth that Chamberlain's real political sympathies and prejudices can be found; political sympathies that were often in striking contrast to the official political postures adopted by his own government. The most salient details of Ball's early life can be briefly sketched. Having trained as a barrister, he was recruited (as Major Joseph Ball) into MI5 just after the First World War; in which organization he rose to become head of the 'Investigation branch'. Naturally, no records of his service with MI5 are in the public domain, but what is evident is that sometime during the course of the early I920S his work at MI5 either attracted the attention of the Conservative party, or that he attracted their attention himself by possibly being the intelligence officer who first brought the existence of the 'Zinoviev Letter' to the notice of Conservative central office in 1924.2 Having forged a link with the party, of which he was a fervent political supporter, in