ABSTRACT
Of all the periods in Morton’s highly secretive life, his time in Downing Street poses the greatest difficulties to the biographer. This seems perverse: it was a time when he was at his most ‘visible’ both in Whitehall and internationally, installed at the heart of government as Churchill’s confidential adviser with special responsibility for liaison with the Intelligence community and with Allied governments in exile, and consulted by the Prime Minister on a wide range of issues. Diligent and tireless in committee work, ubiquitous in the incestuous social life of Europe’s London-based exiles and overseas visitors, thorn in the flesh of the Chiefs of Staff, the Foreign Office’s bad fairy – his name can be found more frequently in official documentation between May 1940 and July1945 than at any other period of his life. Yet in many ways he is at his most elusive during the war years, and the massive and still expanding bibliography of the period serves only to obscure his role further.
