Nick Clegg was last night urged to lift a 90-year ban on secret documents that could implicate one of his ancestors in a British plot to kill Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. The Deputy Prime Minister's great-great-aunt, Baroness Moura Budberg, was the lover of Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat posted in Moscow during the Russian Revolution.
Lockhart - said to have been an inspiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond - is suspected to have been the brains behind an assassination attempt on Lenin in August 1918.
Moura, a sexually liberated Tsarist aristocrat whose colourful love life earned her the nickname the Mata Hari of Russia, was sharing Lockhart's bed in a British consular flat when Red Guards burst in to arrest them after the attack.
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