“For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices -”

He obviously hasn’t met roy.

@2

du-bum tish!

Turing’s one of my few heroes.

I’m more keen on a posthumous knighthood for Turing than an apology though. Turing’s not here to benefit from either but an apology from those not directly responsible for his persecution is hollow; a knighthood, on the other hand, is a recognition of his achievements.

And while his work cracking the Enigma code is undoubtedly vital to the war effort, the foundations he laid for computers have possibly MORE long term importance.

There are at least TWO reasons we are free to celebrate him here, today.

From a review of John Maynard Keynes: The Economist As Saviour 1920-1937 A Biography, by Robert Skidelsky:

“It is rare that a scholarly biography or a treatise on economics would attract attention, but the first volume of Skidelsky’s intended three-part work on John Maynard Keynes, Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920 (1986), did just that. Skidelsky successfully portrayed Keynes the person, not just Keynes the economist, including a frank investigation of the impact of Keynes’ homosexuality on his life and work and a discussion of his relationships with other members of London’s noted Bloomsbury group. . . ”
http://www.queertheory.com/histories/k/keynes_john_maynard.htm

An interesting insight is that Keynes, in his lifetime, escaped censure. Indeed, public knowledge of his sexuality was mostly contained within a small circle until the posthumous biographies by Robert Skidelsky and DE Moggridge were published and that despite Keynes’s international reputation as an economist and his role as an adviser to HM Treasury in both World Wars. Both Keynes and Turing were fellows of King’s College, Cambridge in the 1930s.

However, try googling now on “keynes homosexuality” and trawl through the extraordinary diatribes and stuff that exercise retrieves from the web.

I didn’t know Keynes was gay, I just assumed that being an economist he didn’t have a sex life, one way or the other.

“I didn’t know Keynes was gay, I just assumed that being an economist he didn’t have a sex life, one way or the other.”

I didn’t know either until the Keynes biography by Moggridge came out and I regard(ed) myself as a keynesian-type economist. Famously, the first biography of Keynes by Roy Harrod, published in 1951, made no reference to Keynes being gay or bisexual.

Of course, Keynes did eventually marry Lydia Lopokova, one of Diaghilev’s principal dancers in the Ballets Russes, in 1925. By many accounts, it was a happy marriage. For more on Keynes, his marriage and circle of friends in the Bloomsbury group, try:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/bloomsbury-ballerina-by-judith-mackrell-823324.html

In the inter-war years, personal knowledge of gay and lesbian relationships seems to have been treated with discretion and tolerance, as in the several examples from the Bloomsbury group and also with Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, who were bisexuals in a strong marriage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Nicolson

On the other hand, the promiscuous heterosexuality of Lloyd George and HG Wells was also treated with discretion and tolerance.

I speculate that the switch to the rampant homophobia of the 1950s was probably related to the Communist sympathies of the Cambridge spies, and to Guy Burgess, in particular, following his unanticipated defection to Moscow, along with Donald Maclean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Burgess

Just as likely the Cambridge spies were recruited because, as William Burroughs once said, homosexuality is a good cover for a spy. It’s a perfect excuse for meeting other men in private, and if you are in an important position or have friends in high places, people aren’t inclined to ask too many questions.

“homosexuality is a good cover for a spy”

I think the perception of the security services was – and perhaps still “is” – that a (? male) homosexual is especially vulnerable to blackmail pressures, particularly if they have access to valuable information privately or confidentially held, whether relating to defence security issues, party politics or to market sensitive business facts and commercial intelligence. Of course, the more popular and pervasive homophobic sentiments become, the more vulnerable homosexuals are to blackmail.

“It’s a perfect excuse for meeting other men in private”

C’mon. The traditional British gentlemen’s clubs were mostly exclusively male and only agreed to admit women in the last 20 years or so under pressure. Think of the tradional formal, traditional dinner parties for the English “upper classes” where the ladies withdrew after the meal leaving the gentlemen to talk and smoke or whatever over the port.

Of the Cambridge “five”, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt were gay but, by accounts, the others weren’t and, of them, Kim Philby had a reputation as a successful womaniser. Of other notorious Soviet spies in Britain, there was no suggestion that Karl Fuchs or George Blake were homosexual. And try this:

“I regret nothing, says Stasi spy”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1999/09/99/britain_betrayed/451366.stm

Vic Allen – whom I once met in the early 1970s – and Robin Pearson aren’t gay.

At another extreme, Oswald Mosley – founder of the British Union of Fascists in 1932 and who was interned during the early years of WW2 – was a hugely successful womaniser. Curiously, after the franchise in Britain was extend to all adult women in 1928 some retired Suffragettes were subsequently attracted to the cause of fascism – or to Mosley.

You can see why this has been headlined – after all it’s one thing Gordon Brown can do without a cock-up – apologising to a dead man.

“You can see why this has been headlined”

C’mon. The treatment of Turing really was not just a scandal in its time or should have been, it was also incredibly stupid. The net result of that particular homophobic fest was that we were all robbed of Turing’s genius when he was only 41:

“In 1999 Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century for his role in the creation of the modern computer.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

Of course, those responsible hadn’t a flaming clue as to his significance and what he had contributed. It’s not often I link to the Daily Mail but its potted biog of Turing is worth reading:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212910/How-Britain-drove-greatest-genius-Alan-Turing-suicide–just-gay.html

As for why the Mail gives so much space to posthumously celebrating Turing, perhaps it’s because one of the Mail’s own leading journalists was another victim of homophobia just a year or so on from Turing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wildeblood

I still think it worth reflecting on how and why Keynes, the Bloomsbury group and Harold Nicholson and his wife escaped public censure in the interwar years and then homophobia flourished in the 1950s. I see Mail also subscribes to my theory above – posted before I’d read the Mail on Turing – that the change in public sentiment connects with homosexuals among the Cambridge five. Btw the Mail is wrong about Donald Maclean being gay – check out the Wikipedia entries on him and Kim Philby.

Try this piece about Alan Turing in New Scientist, including a video clip showing the rebuilt Colossus machine at Bletchley Park for decyphering coded messages:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327256.200-the-real-turing-test-learning-to-say-sorry.html

Doh, I’m more or less agreeing with Shatterface twice in one day.

I liked the tone of Gordon Brown’s statement stressing regret and changing times, because only the prosecutors could apologise to Turing.

A posthumous knighthood is as silly as an apology, but there are other ways to recognise Turing. The poor bloke is best known for the Turing Test, a dismal trial between an artificial intelligence machine and a human being, which produces dismaying results. Apologies to AI workers, but that is how it looks.

The Turing Award is an entirely different thing. Many great winners, so it deserves greater recognition.

The list of Turing Award winners is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award

I think this apology is a great idea, and should be well received. Recognition of the persecution, and how very short a time ago it was, is very necessary. It’s all about recognition, and recognition is never hollow or meaningless.

“homosexuality is a good cover for a spy”

“Now, repeat after me: Homosexuality is the best all-round cover an agent ever had”. A cookie if you know what the obscure reference is to…

All these exciting posts above about clandestine trysts and safe houses reminded me of the accounts in the public domain of the 7-year affair between Joan Bakewell and the late, hugely esteemed dramatist, Harold Pinter. For sources, try his well-reviewed and much produced play: Betrayal (1978) and her autobiography: In the Middle of the Bed (2003).

Not that for a moment do I suppose they were Soviet agents any more than I suppose John Scarlett (currently C of MI6 but previously head of Moscow station in the 1980s) and Col Gordievsky (previously of the KGB) were engaged in a gay relationship in 1985 when Gordievsky was spirited out of Moscow, while under surveillance by the KGB, only to rematerialise in London under the care and protection of MI6.

Far more interesting and relevant in the present context has been the present government’s unbridled enthusiam for pervasive surveillance of British citizens at home and about along with its fixation on commissioning national databases of personal information, as for DNA, medical records, and identity cards, all valuable resources for blackmailing as well as for weaving political spin.

Exaggerating? I think not:

“Fears that the UK would ’sleep-walk into a surveillance society’ have become a reality, the government’s information commissioner has said.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm

“Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, announced a review of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), which the government says is designed to stop the powers being used for ‘trivial’ purposes.

“Ministers proposed that senior officials, such as council leaders, should be able to authorise the use of the powers and said the review would look at which public bodies could use them.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/17/council-surveillance-abuse

A generally under-appreciated feature of mobile phones is that their respective networks have to be “aware” of the location of their handsets within 100 meters or so, a factor which has occasionally surfaced in criminal trials in order to establish the location of the accused. Remember the proposals for a mandatory database of the origin and intended destination of all emails and telephone calls? Of course, speed cameras and the congestion charge system are excellent for tacking motor vehicles but have only limited coverage. Road pricing will anable a more comprehensive system of surveillance.

As the late and unlamented Dr Goebbels used to say: Those who have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear.

‘Now, repeat after me: Homosexuality is the best all-round cover an agent ever had”.

The Naked Lunch. Can I have my cookie?

Interesting to contrast the treatment of Burroughs (a literary genius and folk hero, but one who killed his wife playing William Tell) with Turing’s persecution for fuck all reason.

compare and contrast Brown’s acceptance of Turing and his condemnation of so-called “violent pornography”, of which I am sure Mr Turing would have been a consumer. Sheer hypocrisy…what a surprise coming from that “son of the manse”…Brown…the Golden Dustman de nos jours…everyhting he touches turns to shit…

“his condemnation of so-called ‘violent pornography’, of which I am sure Mr Turing would have been a consumer.”

What evidence do you have for assuming Alan Turing would have been a consumer of “violent pornography” – whatever that amounts to?

Curiously, the best-known and, arguably, most internationally esteemed sado-masochistic literature in the literary canon, published since WW2, L’histoire d’O, was written by a French woman:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Desclos
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jul/25/fiction.features3

L’histoire d’O was first published in Paris in 1954, the year Alan Turing died. My experience of browsing bookshops is that most Waterstone stores have English language editions as regular shelf copies nowadays in their Fiction sections. Anyone can also easily purchase a copy from amazon online without any apparent restriction.

Btw compare: The double life of Catherine M – which is substantively autobiographical and not at all violent:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/19/biography.features

There is an illuminating interview with Catherine Millet here – with subtitles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TicidqAe18Q

Readers here will probably be pleased to know that Alan Turing’s seminal paper on: ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”, published in 1937, can be accessed here:
http://www.dim.uchile.cl/~mkiwi/ma50b/08/paper-turing.pdf

A more technical assessment of his fundamental contributions to computing theory can be found in the biographical entry for him in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

Chemical castration was an appalling idea, when deportation to Tangier would have sufficed.

“Chemical castration was an appalling idea, when deportation to Tangier would have sufficed.”

LOL ! I’ve no idea what Tangiers was like in those times or since but the Cold War and spy phobia, after the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, doubtless figured in the calculations of the authorities.

Bletchley Park and the codebeaking done there during WW2 were still deeply held secrets in the 1950s. I can recall when the news surfaced in the 1970s and thinking then that the many histories of WW2 would need rewriting to take account of the extent to which the Allied command had access to many of the most secret radio communications of the German Third Reich high command.

Even with my limited grasp of war history, I can pick out that the decyphering of the coded messages was important, if not crucial, for the war in north Africa and the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943, which had to be won in the build-up to the Normandy invasion in June 1944. My understanding – subject to correction – is that the decyphering became less significant after Normandy because far more of German military communications were by landline and the Luftwaffe had already lost any claim to air supremacy.

The story of codebreaking was held secretly after the war in the hope that other governments – apart from the US and main Commonwealth countries, which were in on it – wouldn’t catch on about their own secret communications being open to interception. The machines at Bletchley were broken up; its decyphering functions were transferred to GCHQ. Turing with his high level technical knowledge probably came to be regarded as a security risk by officials who lacked insights into the significance of his contributions to the theory of computing.

Guy Burgess – the notable gay among the Soviet agents working for the Foreign Office – was obviously unstable and given to drinking bouts: he had left Cambridge without graduating before joining the Foreign Service but his background – Eton etc – was regarded as impeccable. I suppose it was assumed by some that Turing, being gay an’ all, must have similar factors in his personality.

This fascinating BBCTV doc (1hr 29min) on: Philosophy, Physics, Mathematics: “Dangerous Knowldge”, is not about Turing but about some of those who can, in a sense, be regarded as among his illustrious predecessors, including, especially, Kurt Godel. One of the themes of the TV doc is they all died verging on insanity:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-5122859998068380459&ei=A2WvSuP4Lc2E-

“In mathematical logic, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, proved by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are two theorems stating inherent limitations of all but the most trivial formal systems for arithmetic of mathematical interest. The theorems are of considerable importance to the philosophy of mathematics. They are widely regarded as showing that Hilbert’s program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all of mathematics is impossible, thus giving a negative answer to Hilbert’s second problem.

“In [Turing's] momentous paper ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’ (submitted on 28 May 1936), Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel’s 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel’s universal arithmetic-based formal language with what are now called Turing machines, formal and simple devices. He proved that some such machine would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

“Turing machines are to this day the central object of study in theory of computation. He went on to prove that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable: it is not possible to decide, in general, algorithmically whether a given Turing machine will ever halt.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

By apologising for the disgraceful treatment of Alan Turing, Gordon Brown was simply responding to the 3rd most popular petition on the No10 Website.

The question is: Why does he ignore the No1 petition? SEE HERE: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/list/open?sort=signers

“By apologising for the disgraceful treatment of Alan Turing, Gordon Brown was simply responding to the 3rd most popular petition on the No10 Website.”

So what?