Your mission, should you choose to except it, is to keep on reading.

Now, the following won’t strike your leg like a ricin-tipped umbrella - but it will shock – because it’s been revealed that MI5 investigators in the early Sixties considered that (then) fast-rising acting star Stanley Baxter could well be a Soviet agent.

I know. You’re laughing at the very thought. Stanley? The Spy Who Loved to Make Me Laugh? The Spy Who Came in From the Close?

But it’s true. Other targets for our secret services also included acting legends Kirk Bogarde, James Robertson Justice and Geordie star Bill Travers, with the backdrop to the accusations being Britain’s Cold War battles with Russia, with defections by Cambridge-educated spies such as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.

Yet, you’re wondering what’s the connection with Baxter, our Parliamo linguist, our cheeky sketch king, the man who loved and lived to play other people? Easy. The spy defectors were all assumed to be gay. And as such were more vulnerable to blackmail. And Stanley, MI5 claimed, was a ‘practising homosexual.’

Stanley Baxter at 90 (Image: Paul Stuart) Stanley didn’t know of the MI5 suspicions at the time. If he had, he would have used the line he once offered in private. “I’m not practising. I’m actually quite good at it.”

MI5, however, deemed Stanley and his fellow actors a possible........

© Herald Scotland