In praise of treason

Kim Philby and the question of ultimate loyalty

1 June 2026

Kim Philby in 1961. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer

The few Brits I admire were mostly traitors. The greatest among them — men like Guy Fawkes and Kim Philby — perceived something rotten in their native country and realised that only a dramatic intervention could eliminate the stench. For others, like the legendary 17th-century pirate John Ward, treason had more complex and sometimes more down to earth motives. All of them, however, betrayed their country in the name of a higher purpose. For that reason, it is misleading to describe them primarily as traitors. They may even deserve to be called the only true loyalists. It is all the rest who are the real traitors.

Treason à l’anglais

In fact, there is a distinctly British archetype running through many of these figures: the dissenter who regards loyalty to conscience, faith, class, humanity, or civilisation as more important than loyalty to the British state. Whether they are heroes or villains depends largely on whether one agrees with the higher cause they chose. The interesting question is not “Were they traitors?” but “To whom — or to what — did they transfer their allegiance?”

Start with Guy Fawkes. The standard story portrays him as a fanatic who sought to destroy Parliament with barrels of gunpowder. Yet Fawkes himself would not have understood his actions in those terms. He belonged to a generation of English Catholics who believed that their faith was being systematically persecuted by a Protestant state. To Fawkes, the government had already betrayed England’s true religious inheritance. The Gunpowder Plot was therefore not an act of treachery against a legitimate order but an attempt — however desperate and misguided — to restore one. Four centuries later, the state still burns his effigy every November. The ritual is revealing. It is not enough that Fawkes failed. He must also be remembered as a monster. For if he were merely a defeated political actor pursuing a rival vision of England, then the comfortable distinction between patriot and traitor would begin to dissolve.

The same pattern recurs throughout British history. Again and again, those denounced as traitors have claimed that it was the ruling elite who first betrayed the nation. The accusation of treason is rarely a dispute about loyalty itself. It is a dispute about the object of loyalty. Is one’s highest allegiance owed to the state as it presently exists, or to a deeper principle that transcends it? Fawkes answered that question one way. Others would answer it differently. What unites them is the conviction that obedience and loyalty are not the same thing.

Competing loyalties

Take Philby, for example. To most Britons, he is the archetypal traitor: a trusted intelligence officer who spent decades passing secrets to the Soviet Union before fleeing to Moscow. Yet Philby never regarded himself as a mercenary or opportunist. He believed that he was serving a cause greater than Britain itself. The real enemy, in his eyes, was not the Soviet Union but fascism, imperialism, and the social order that had produced them. One may reject that judgement entirely, but it is impossible to understand Philby without recognising the sincerity of his allegiance. Like Fawkes, he transferred his loyalty from the British state to a higher ideal. The question is not whether he betrayed Britain. He undoubtedly did. The question is whether Britain had already betrayed the principles that Philby believed deserved his loyalty in the first place.

The case of John Ward is more complex. Unlike Fawkes and Philby, he was not motivated primarily by religion or ideology. Born in Kent and trained as a fisherman, Ward drifted into privateering and then outright piracy during the turbulent years of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. When the political winds shifted and his activities became unwelcome, he crossed into the Mediterranean, entered the service of the Ottoman Empire, and eventually converted to Islam. To English observers, he became the ultimate renegade: a pirate, an apostate, and a traitor. Yet Ward’s story points to an uncomfortable truth. Not every act of treason begins with a grand political vision. Sometimes a man simply discovers that his opportunities, friendships, and future lie elsewhere. The nation he abandons may imagine itself betrayed. The individual, however, may feel only that he has ceased to recognise its claim upon him. In that sense, Ward’s treason was perhaps the most honest of all. He did not pretend to serve England while secretly serving another master. He simply transferred his allegiance openly and accepted the consequences.

History is often a struggle between competing loyalties. Those denounced as traitors by one generation are sometimes remembered by later generations as the only people who remained faithful to what truly mattered. The difficulty, of course, is that this argument can be made by almost anyone. Revolutionaries, religious reformers, anti-colonial fighters, military coup leaders, and ideological extremists have all claimed to be serving a higher loyalty. The fact that someone betrays their country in the name of a higher purpose tells us something important about how they understood themselves, but it does not by itself tell us whether their cause was wise, just, or beneficial. The debate is ultimately about what deserves our loyalty in the first place.

Britain: enemy of Islam

For Muslims, the answer is relatively straightforward. Islam has never recognised the nation-state as the highest object of loyalty. A Muslim may love his homeland, honour its customs, and serve its people, but his ultimate allegiance belongs to Allah and to the moral order revealed through Islam. The Qur’an itself repeatedly reminds believers that ties of faith transcend ties of tribe, ethnicity, and territory. From this perspective, patriotism is permissible only insofar as it remains subordinate to higher obligations. When the demands of the state conflict with the demands of conscience and religion, it is the state that must yield. The Muslim who refuses to participate in injustice, even at the cost of being denounced as disloyal, stands within a long tradition stretching back to the earliest generations of Islam. The real question is therefore not whether one is a traitor. Every human being serves something. The question is what one has chosen to betray, and what one has chosen to remain faithful to.

These questions are not confined to the history books. They confront Muslims in Britain today with increasing urgency. Since Israel began its genocide in Gaza, the British state has revealed itself more clearly than ever before to be an enemy of Islam. This is not because Britain has singled out Muslims for criticism; states criticise many groups. It is because, when confronted with the destruction of an overwhelmingly Muslim population, much of the British political establishment responded not with outrage but with justification, equivocation, or silence. At the same time, Muslims who protested, organised, spoke publicly, or expressed solidarity with the victims found themselves subjected to increasing scrutiny and suspicion. The message was unmistakable. Certain forms of political expression remained acceptable, but not when they challenged core assumptions of British foreign policy. Many Muslims who had previously regarded themselves as loyal citizens began to recognise a painful truth: the state to which they had given their loyalty did not necessarily regard their deepest moral concerns as legitimate. In such circumstances, the question of loyalty ceases to be theoretical. Every individual must decide whether his highest allegiance belongs to the institutions of power or to the principles by which those institutions are judged.

Every one of the figures discussed in this essay made the same choice, even if the causes to which they attached themselves were radically different. Despite these differences, however, religion stands out as a consistent theme. Philby may appear as something of an exception here, yet for him and the other members of the Cambridge spy ring, Marxism was embraced with a quasi-religious zeal. They did not merely support a political programme. They believed themselves to be participating in a world-historical struggle between good and evil, reaction and progress, oppression and liberation. Like religious converts, they acquired a new community, a new moral vocabulary, and a new object of devotion.

What if…?

Philby began his long and painful journey from middle class socialism to revolutionary communism not long after the Labour Party’s defeat in the 1924 general election. Triggered by the collapse of Ramsay MacDonald’s minority government, the election resulted in a Conservative landslide where Labour lost 40 seats and saw the Liberals pushed to third-party status. Unlike Philby, his father remained a socialist (“the first Socialist to join the Indian Civil Service”, he once quipped) until 1930, when he accepted Islam and was given the new name of Abdullah.

The merchants of Jeddah joked that Harry St John Bridger Philby’s Muslim name should have been Abdulqirsh, which is Arabic for “Slave of Sixpence” on account of his greed. He had been an outspoken atheist until his conversion, and his decision to accept Islam may have had something to do with his desire to become part of the social life of the court of Ibn Saud, which he could not do as an infidel. Allah knows best, but Ibn Saud’s gift of a slave girl, Mariam, may have been a sweetener. According to Robert Lacey, Philby soon “became a fully fledged member of that circle of boon companions, half Privy Council, half gang of chums, who went everywhere with Abdul Aziz [Ibn Saud], chatting, laughing and arguing, discussing politics one minute, playing practical jokes the next”.

By this point, Philby junior was already a committed communist. It is interesting to speculate how differently history might have unfolded had his father embraced Islam ten years earlier, when Kim was still a child. Philby senior was then serving as Minister of Internal Security in Mandatory Iraq, moving through a world in which the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of European imperialism, and the first stirrings of organised Islamic revivalism were reshaping the political imagination of millions. Had the young Kim encountered Islam not as an exotic curiosity but as a living intellectual and moral tradition embodied by his father, would he still have become the twentieth century’s most famous British communist?

We cannot know. Yet the question is revealing in itself. Philby’s lifelong search for a cause greater than Britain did not emerge from nowhere. Like many converts — whether to religion or ideology — he was animated by a hunger for transcendence, a desire to subordinate himself to a project that promised meaning beyond the narrow horizons of class, career, and nation. Marxism supplied that meaning. Under different circumstances, another creed might have done so.

Rival gods

This possibility points towards a broader pattern. Britain’s most famous traitors were rarely motivated by simple self-interest. More often, they were seized by convictions that eclipsed their attachment to the state. Whether the object of devotion was Catholicism, communism, Islam, or some other universal ideal, the underlying structure remained remarkably similar. The nation ceased to be the highest good. It became merely one loyalty among others, and not necessarily the most important. Once that mental shift occurs, treason becomes possible. Indeed, from the perspective of the convert, it may even become a duty. The great British hero-traitors force us to confront an uncomfortable possibility: that the highest form of loyalty may sometimes appear indistinguishable from treason.

Treason is never simply a political act. It is often the outward expression of a deeper spiritual realignment. Before someone can betray his country, he must first discover something that he loves even more. The history of treason is ultimately the history of rival gods.

St John Philby in Riyadh