Christopher Mayhew

Christopher Paget Mayhew (12 June 1915 - 7 January 1997) was a politician, broadcaster and writer. During his time at the Foreign Office, he supervised the creation the Information Research Department.

In his autobiography Denis Healey writes:

Chris Mayhew was one of the few socialists at Oxford in my time who never joined the Communist Party. He had been in the clandestine unit, Phantom, during the war, with Norman Reddaway, who became his private secretary and later head of the Foreign Office's so called Information Research Department...Two decades later he was my Navy Minister, and resigned over my decision to phase out the aircraft carriers, afterwards leaving the Labour Party and becoming a Liberal.

Creation of IRD

In 1948 Mayhew was instrumental in the creation of the Information Research Department. IRD was not created openly with the knowing support of the Labour Cabinet. Rather the author of the paper which went to cabinet - Mayhew - was a Labour right winger and cold warrior. Mayhew dissembled to the cabinet about the purpose and function of the IRD by claiming that it was to be a 'third force' campaign, understood as policy intended by the left to be independent of both the US and the USSR. According to Mayhew himself:

I thought it was necessary to present the whole campaign in a positive way, in a way which Dick Crossman and Michael Foot would find it hard to oppose. And they were calling for a Third Force... so I recommended in the original paper I put to Bevin that we call it a Third force propaganda campaign.

As Mayhew himself noted 'the turning point' was the speech of George Marshall the US secretary of State in June 1947. From 'the middle of 1947 onwards, decisions were taken towards uniting the free world, at the expense of widening the gap with the Communist world... our immediate objective changed, from "one world" to "one free world"'.