IFP give consent to Miss Moneypenny Diaries trilogy

Britain's oldest publishing house admitted under pressure yesterday that an attempted literary coup purporting to be the secret journal of a colleague of the real James Bond is fiction - reports Times Online.

“It’s a spoof,” conceded Roland Philipps, managing director of John Murray, which will publish The Moneypenny Diaries in October.

Echoing last year’s hype around Belle de Jour, the supposed diaries of a London call girl, Philipps had maintained for several days last week that the book was authentic.

Dealing with secrets in 1962 at the height of the cold war, it offered “a ringside view of many of the events which shaped the post-war world”.

“From the moment I heard about this remarkable discovery I knew it would be a crucial piece of historical record from a previously unpublished source,” he said initially.

He suggested that the book, which is littered with footnotes referring to cold war archives, would rewrite the history of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which brought America and the Soviet Union close to war.

“It shows that the British had a greater role in that crisis than we previously thought,” said Philipps, whose predecessors at John Murray published Jane Austen and Lord Byron.

The Moneypenny Diaries tap into the glamorised version of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) created by Ian Fleming in his Bond novels and brought to life on film by a series of stars in the title role — from Sean Connery to Pierce Brosnan.

In the novels, a Miss Moneypenny is the assistant to Bond’s boss. The new book is being publicised as the “explosive, true, private diaries of Miss Jane Moneypenny, personal secretary to secret service chief M, and colleague and confidante to James Bond”.

Purporting to use the name James Bond as a pseudonym for a genuine intelligence officer, it affects to tell the stories of ultra-secret operations that Fleming — himself a former officer in naval intelligence — could not reveal.

The subterfuge began to unravel after the top literary agent behind the book, Gillon Aitken, confessed that the name of the “editor” of the diaries, Kate Westbrook, might be a “nom de plume”.

The historical conceit behind the spoof is that, when Moneypenny died after a lifetime’s work for SIS, she left her diaries to Westbrook, her niece.

Westbrook is described in the publishers’ notes as a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. But the college — where the Soviet spies Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt studied in the 1930s — said last week that no Kate Westbrook either works there now or has worked there.

Confronted with this denial, Philipps initially seemed surprised. “I’ve met her . . . and she certainly seemed like an academic to me,” he said.

Aitken, whose clients include Helen Fielding, author of the Bridget Jones Diaries, then admitted that Westbrook might not be her real name.

“The author is, though, an academic at Trinity and she will be named when the book is published,” he insisted.

Ian Fleming Publications (IFP), copyright-holder to the Bond books, had given its consent for the publication of the diaries.

“There has always been conjecture that James Bond novels may not have been strictly fictional and we have therefore read Westbrook’s book with a great deal of interest,” said Corrine Turner, IFP’s managing director.

“We always take protection of our intellectual property seriously and, in normal circumstances, would have stopped this book. However, after detailed negotiations with John Murray we have reached an agreement to allow this project to receive the public attention it deserves.”

Turner added: “If this is fiction then it is very hard to tell the difference between fact and fiction. It’s very well put together. We were certainly led to believe by the publishers that there was a real Miss Moneypenny.”

Excerpts from the book did not stand up to scrutiny from writers on SIS, however.

Moneypenny refers to her boss as M, the fictional codename for the head of MI6 in the Bond novels. In reality, C was his usual code name.

In one episode she describes helping fighting off assailants with “James” and almost throttling an attacker with a scarf: “It was a move I practised many times in the gymnasium on the self-defence course which M had insisted we go on. It worked exactly as the instructor had demonstrated.”

Experts were sceptical. “What’s written in this diary seems at times implausible and improbable,” said Stephen Dorril, who has written extensively about the security services. “I have, for example, never heard of any secretary being trained in self-defence.”

“I’d never heard of any MI6 assistants writing any diaries,” said Tom Bower, the biographer of Sir Dick White, who was head of MI6 in 1962. “White himself never wrote any diary.”

Andrew Lycett, who wrote Fleming’s authorised biography, said: “I never came across any possible Moneypenny Diaries when I was researching my book on Ian Fleming.”

Philipps continued to insist, however, that the book is “an exciting and page-turning read with the James Bond glamour of the SIS of its time brought brilliantly to life”.

Thanks to `Moore` for the alert.

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