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Menzies also forged a close relationship with Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, who, although occasionally exasperated by his loquacity at their regular chats, was a powerful ally. This was demonstrated by sustained support throughout the war for SIS’s continued institutional autonomy (if under broad Foreign Office control); the categorical assumption from at least 1942 that SOE would only be a temporary, wartime organisation; and the securing of the long-term postwar existence of SIS that was embedded in the conclusions of the Bland Report. There is evidence of Menzies’s personal strengths in the memoirs of close colleagues. Forty years after having been posted to SIS in May 1942 to improve liaison with the Foreign Office, Patrick Reilly recalled that he ‘very quickly became devoted to Menzies . . . No-one’, he claimed, ‘could work closely without feeling for him real respect and great affection.’ With experience as Menzies’s personal assistant for fourteen months, Reilly acknowledged that he ‘had no gift or liking for organisation and administration’ and observed that he was ‘never able to impose himself’ upon his mutually antagonistic chief assistants Dansey and Vivian. Yet he judged that Menzies had ‘considerable flair’ for intelligence work and, above all, ‘was a fundamentally honest man in a position of great potential power where a dishonest one might have been disastrous’.16

It was not unusual in wartime Britain for men and women to work with little respite, but Menzies, like Cumming, seems to have been unusually committed to his job. His appointment diaries (which survive for all the war years except 1941) reveal no breaks longer than the occasional long weekend over the whole war. In August 1941 he made a special application for ‘Privacy Telephone Equipment’ - a scrambler phone - to be installed at his home. ‘Without being able to talk freely to my office from my home,’ he explained, ‘I am virtually prevented from taking more than twenty-four hours leave, and now that the war has lasted nearly two years, I do feel occasionally the need for a little longer relaxation.’ Robert Cecil, Menzies’s personal assistant in 1943-5, asserted that he ‘rarely left his desk during the war’. Partly this was to be available if a summons came from Churchill, which could happen at any time of the day or night. Cadogan noted an occasion in November 1942 when Churchill, ‘overexcited’, sent for Menzies at 11.00 p.m., then said Menzies looked tired and had better go to bed. Menzies ‘admitted that he was, and would’, but at 2.15 a.m. Churchill ‘rang him up to ask a quite unnecessary question - and then apologised!’.17 The unremitting wartime workload was shared throughout the Service. Patrick Reilly noted that Menzies’s private office was ‘staffed by two splendid women, Miss Pettigrew and Miss Jones, loyal discreet, working impossible hours’. The former was ‘large and formidable’, the latter ‘smaller, better looking, elegant and gentle . . . Though they worked for several years in the same room they always called each other Miss Pettigrew and Miss Jones.’18

Menzies scarcely left London during the war and it does not seem at all likely (despite Cecil’s explicit assertion and a story told by Frederick Winterbotham, both long after the war) that Menzies ‘paid a short visit to the liberated Algiers’ late in 1942. Winterbotham’s story has plausible circumstantial detail. He says that, when Menzies heard that his ‘old opposite number’ Georges Ronin had escaped from occupied France, he flew out to Algiers to meet him. ‘Colonel Rivet and Georges Ronin’, continued Winterbotham, ‘gave Stewart Menzies and me a splendid lunch on the sun-drenched roof of a little house in Algiers. With the coffee came the news that [Admiral] Darlan had been shot in his house a few hundred yards away.’ Darlan was killed on Christmas Eve, but although there are no entries for 24 or 25 December, Menzies’s diary shows appointments in London for dinner on 23 December and an engagement in the Cabinet