A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  In retrospect, Freeman was right to oppose re-armament. The huge programme changed the £307 million surplus balance of payments in 1950 to a deficit of £369 million in 1951 – a dramatic turnaround. Lord Croham, who was in the Treasury then and became head of the civil service, wrote after his retirement: ‘It may be too much to claim that, but for the headlong rush into defence in 1950, the UK would have enjoyed an economic miracle, but there would certainly have been much less stop-go and a much better balanced economy.’

  Did Freeman have other reasons for throwing in the towel? He was ‘browned off’, as Dalton wrote. Tony Crosland said John Freeman resigned because he was ‘a New Statesman leftist, happiest in opposition’. In fact, during those same weeks, he was offered a job with the New Statesman.

  These views are all speculation though, for Freeman never discussed in a public forum why he resigned. At the general election in October, he did not follow his advice to Bevan to make the huge cost of re-armament, with its welfare implications, a matter of principle. This extraordinary reluctance to defend his resignation (which had cost him his career) disappointed his fellow Bevanites. Barbara Castle wrote:

  Now he had resigned, we all waited expectantly for him to carry the debate on to the high intellectual level of which we knew he was capable. Instead, he made no personal statement at all, either in the House or in the press. In one stormy meeting after another he stood against the wall, almost hiding himself behind the window curtains, but did not speak.

  She gave a partial reason for this, and, as she was soon to become his lover, she ought to have known: ‘After years of studying his complex personality I decided he was afraid of giving himself too fully to anything or anyone. I once told him his motto ought to be: Je me sauve [I protect myself ].’15

  This brings to mind what other friends have said, including Paul Johnson (‘He is exceptionally hard of access’) and Norman MacKenzie (‘John has the capacity to put up the shutters that is excelled by nobody except a shopkeeper during riots’). Freeman was very private, self-protective and coldly distant when he wanted to be, but the question that remains unanswered is why?

  It is clear that Freeman actually disliked power. He said so himself, in no uncertain terms: ‘I personally find the pursuit and exercise of power arid, unsatisfying and distasteful.’ What is more, according to John Birt, who worked under Freeman in the 1970s at London Weekend Television, he also disliked proselytising: ‘He did not want to impose himself on the world, and that was the theme of his career. He did not want to stand on a platform and parade his views or ask to be loved. He was not self-regarding and he was without ambition.’

  So why was Freeman’s career a case of moving from one powerful job to another? He gave a convincing answer to William Hardcastle in an interview for Radio 4 in 1968:

  If you mean by power merely the responsibility of running something that you think is worthwhile – well, I enjoy that very much. But this, I think, is rather different from the whole apparatus of soliciting other people’s votes, and of governing and instructing them, which is something that I find psychologically unsatisfying.

  To which the next question must be why did Freeman go into politics in the first place? What, in particular, was his approach to socialism? Anthony Howard worked with Freeman closely at the New Statesman and wrote an insightful portrait of him in 1961:

  If his original conversion [at school when he met Gandhi and watched the hunger marchers] was emotional, it very rapidly became entirely intellectual. A deliberate decision seems to have been taken to root out feeling, like a cancer, and to put in its place the radium of the intellect.16

  Politics without a gut feeling, without tears and wounds, must be rooted in shallow soil. Freeman’s ‘Keep Left’ and then Bevanite politics (‘almost Trotskyite’ was a verdict at the time) were superficial compared to those of the working-class Bevanites he knew or the eastern European intellectuals he was about to meet on his next seminal journey. It was their lives that were at issue, whereas for Freeman it was only a matter of lifestyle. The gap between poor and rich was so wide, so socially unjust, that the poor seemed to belong to another world.

  This is how Freeman put it in 1964:

  Thirty years ago, when my own political prejudices were formed, up to 15 per cent of our population was unemployed. Real poverty and malnutrition were commonplace. The main anxiety for two or three million families was how to eat. In the case of injustice and cruelty on that scale, the course of political action seemed plain: get the Tories out so that the people of Britain can inherit their own country. The need was so great, the abuse so evident, the cause so simple, that it would have been accepted as axiomatic by even a tribe of South Sea Islanders.

  This being the case, any sacrifice to Freeman’s own lifestyle would be as irrelevant as it would be unexpected. Freeman could live comfortably in a democratic state, secure behind a set of rational assumptions that he considered self-evident.

  This was just as well because, as Tony Howard wrote, ‘The most common, concerted criticism of John Freeman, made by his friends and enemies alike, is that he is the greatest establishment figure of them all.’

  ‘I have the faults of an English gentleman,’ Freeman once said, although Tony Benn (who entered Parliament in the 1950 election), put it another way.17 Freeman, he said in his diary, is as ‘pompous, smug and urbane as ever’.

  When Catherine Dove met Freeman a few years later, she did not find someone with strong political convictions so much as someone who was above politics. She quoted Walter Landor: ‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.’

  Marghanita Laski, who had been at Oxford with Freeman and also wrote for Cherwell, said much the same thing: ‘John is incorruptible because he is too grand to be ambitious. He cannot be bought.’

  Richard Crossman, however, who had clashed with Freeman in journalism and politics, took a more cynical view, simply saying: ‘John is a complete nihilist.’

  However, in April 1951, Freeman had no intention of leaving politics. He had resigned from government but not from Parliament. He was shortly to fight, and win, Watford for the third time, in a bruising election. He would stay in Parliament for another four years.

  On 30 June 1951, Tom Driberg married Ena Binfield at St Mary’s Church near Sloane Square, London. John Freeman had arranged the marriage, was best man and, it was rumoured, a former lover of the bride. Lizi has no doubts that her stepfather married off his rampantly homosexual friend on purpose: ‘He engineered the wedding, of course. She was a friend of ours, a lovely widowed Jewish lady. It was a cover-up to conceal Tom’s sexuality. I don’t know why she agreed to it.’

  Freeman provides an answer to that:

  Ena discussed with me at length the pros and cons of marrying such a hopeless case. I don’t think she expected to reform Tom, but she probably did expect that if she could provide him with a comfortable and stable background, his behaviour might become less promiscuous and self-destructive.18

  There was little sign that this happened. In some ways, however, the couple was well matched. She was gregarious, witty, and popular in left-wing Labour circles. In fact, they met at a party hosted by George Strauss. She needed companionship, too, and, according to her son by a previous spouse, accepted that the marriage would probably not be consummated.

  The wedding was a charade. A large number of Tom’s constituents came up by charabanc and arrived early so that, according to Roy Jenkins (one of the ushers), they packed into the front pews leaving the ‘po-faced diplomats’ and ‘high literary society’ (such as John Betjeman, Constant Lambert, Osbert Lancaster and Osbert Sitwell) standing at the back. Alongside them were the leaders of the Bevanites, including Nye himself, his wife Jennie Lee, and the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin. Most of them were secularists, so the high nuptial mass that lasted over an hour was a trial. According to Driberg, Kingsley Martin sat looking ‘quite shocked’, Bevan growled that his ‘Calvinist blood was roused’ and the
communist scientist J. B. S. Haldane filled his pipe to register his disapproval. Driberg wrote afterwards in his diary that all this had given him ‘a twinge of naughty amusement’.

  Lizi and her mother were in the congregation and she remembers that Driberg chewed gum throughout. He wrote later that he was very nervous, though fortified before by one or two brandies supplied by his best man. He gasped a loud ‘phew’ after silence followed the obligatory announcement by the bishop of ‘if any man can show any just cause why they may not be joined together in holy matrimony, let him now speak, or else hereafter hold his peace’.19 Afterwards there was a champagne reception at the House of Commons and then a honeymoon in Brighton. ‘Thank goodness it’s over anyway,’ wrote Driberg in his diary. ‘This evening I am still dazed – but much happier than when I woke up this morning.’

  John Freeman’s wedding present was a cheque for £12. As far as is known, he kept a straight face throughout.

  Attlee called for a general election on 25 October 1951 after twenty months in office, in order to increase the Labour majority. The result was that Labour polled more votes than any previous political party at a general election (13,948,605), but still won twenty-six fewer seats than the Conservatives. As the Liberal Party was reduced to six seats, this meant any coalition was impossible and Labour was out of power. Churchill had sneaked back but Dalton, for one, was not depressed. He said the result was ‘wonderful’ and reported that Attlee told him he expected to be Prime Minister again in two years. In fact, Labour was out of office for thirteen years, by which time Attlee had retired to be succeeded by Harold Wilson.

  Freeman’s election in Watford was a rough experience. His political organiser, the secretary of the Watford Socialist Party, had resigned, saying: ‘The Labour Party does not believe in itself or its principles.’ According to the Daily Mail, when Nye Bevan came to speak there on 10 October, a bearded man brandishing a crucifix and shouting ‘Vermin!’ and ‘Rubbish!’ gave him a ‘lively reception’. This seems an understatement: ‘The orchestra platform behind the stage on which Mr Bevan was speaking became a battleground at one time for hecklers and supporters, with women members of the audience noisily trying to keep the peace.’ Nevertheless, Bevan sat down to ‘thunderous applause’.

  Freeman looked thin and pale in his election brochure ‘John Freeman: A Man You Can Trust’. The pamphlet did not refer to his resignation from government, but it did stress, in general terms, the Bevanite line of negotiation rather than re-armament being the answer to communist aggression. In the end, Freeman scraped home by 508 votes (after a recount) out of over 43,000 cast – a very large turnout of 87 per cent.

  This was the occasion, so he wrote in the New Statesman, that he was lying in the bath as the returning officer made the announcement. When the press asked him later what he intended to do next, he replied: ‘Go home and have a whisky and soda.’

  In 1953, he announced that he would not stand for the constituency again. He was feeling ill. On 19 September, Dalton had recorded in his diary:

  Back to flat to receive Freeman at 10.45. Rather ill, and overwrought – pain in his ears and very tired, going off for ten days’ rest before the election. Tony [Crosland] thinks he has become more and more emotional (a word of discredit in Tony’s vocabulary) and confused about politics.

  Not that his rest did him much good. Dalton wrote a month later: ‘Freeman is still having great trouble with his ears (daily treatment at hospital) and with his sinus (very painful weekly wash out). He is below par.’ Was this a psychosomatic reaction to the traumas of the previous few months?

  His time in Parliament was taken up with the ‘Keep Left’ group, later known as the Bevanites, the aim of which was to push left-wing views and get Bevan back in power. Straight after the general election it instituted weekly meetings and appointed a chairman – Harold Wilson. One of its members, Ian Mikardo MP, was proud of the punch that it packed:

  Out of the forty-nine members [in 1952] forty-seven were MPs. We included five ex-ministers, fourteen future ministers, nine current or future members of the party executive. We had among us six distinguished writers and nine members who were in the front rank of parliamentary orators.20

  Freeman was one of the ‘distinguished writers’. The worry within the Labour establishment was that the Bevanites might become a caucus within a caucus, a group within a party, which was not what Freeman wanted. Tom Driberg found the composition of mainly middle-class intellectuals and journalists – who were good talkers and equally good drinkers – very congenial. He called it ‘the smoking room within the smoking room’.

  Freeman was not ‘a joiner’, but he was part of the inner group as he was one of the foremost writers. Already, in July 1951, he had been a named writer in the Tribune pamphlet ‘One Way Only’, which quickly sold 100,000 copies. The main theme of ‘One Way Only’ was that all the resources being poured into re-armament to meet an exaggerated threat from the Soviet Union should be diverted to social services and to support the ‘social revolution in Asia, Africa and the Middle East’, where millions were still dying from famine. He made a speech at the Fabian Society summer conference saying much the same thing, and this was printed up as ‘Re-armament – how far?’. This message went down well with the working class particularly, who still admired the socialism of the Soviet Union and its contribution to the defeat of fascism.

  The strength of the Bevanites became clear in March 1952, when Bevan led fifty-seven Labour MPs to vote against the party’s support of the government’s defence White Paper increasing re-armament expenditure yet again. Freeman was one of them. The Daily Herald was furious – a clear sign that the Labour leadership was worried: ‘Bevan and his supporters are challenging the democratic decisions of the Parliamentary Labour Party. There must be an end to this minority’s egotism.’

  While most of the Bevanite work was researching, writing and publishing policy papers, the group kept contact with the public through its Brains Trust – copied from the BBC radio version and organised by Tribune. These meetings, said Ian Mikardo (who was usually the question master), were a ‘runaway success’. He remembered an audience of 900 in Worthing, despite it being ‘scarcely the most fertile soil for the seeds of socialism’.

  John Freeman and Barbara Castle travelled the country together and it was then that they began an affair, Michael Foot told me. On one occasion, at Lowestoft in 1953, they were asked what the attitude of a socialist ought to be to the coronation. Realising the huge popularity of the new Queen, Castle was considering a careful answer when Freeman said tersely: ‘Deplore it!’ He said the coronation was ‘a shocking waste of money’ and, true to his view, on the day of the coronation (2 June 1952) he gave up his seat in front of the TV rather than watch it.

  Driberg had no such reluctance, reporting from inside Westminster Abbey for a big spread in Picture Post. Presumably, as a royal reporter for the magazine, Mima was on duty too, though she has no article printed under the Mima Kerr byline. She had already done her royal duty, with an article a year earlier on the Queen’s first official visit to Scotland entitled ‘Scots welcome their Queen’, and another in December 1952 on the Queen’s first portrait painter, Douglas Chandor.21

  That same year, Barbara Castle and John Freeman found themselves on a private tour of the Middle East organised by a Lebanese businessman – Emile Bustani. There were four other MPs too. ‘By common consent,’ Castle wrote, ‘We gave John Freeman the job of conducting our press conferences, which he did with consummate skill, keeping the nervy Arab journalists happy while not giving anything away.’

  At the Labour Party annual conference, held in Morecambe in September 1952, the Bevanites won six out of the seven national executive seats up for election, including one for Driberg. This was ‘the worst Labour conference for bad temper and hatred since 1926’ wrote Dalton, who was incensed by Driberg’s election. He moaned to Freeman (who had not put himself forward for election) about Driberg’s dilettante behaviour.
/>
  This, however, was the high-water mark of the Bevanites. Attlee realised they needed cutting down to size, and in October he made an unequivocal speech. He found ‘the existence of a party within a party quite intolerable. I say work with the team. Turn your guns on the enemy, not on your own friends.’22 This struck home. Bevan announced that he was ready to rejoin the shadow Cabinet and wished to throw open the Bevanite group to the whole party. This was not enough for Attlee, who demanded a vote among Labour Party MPs on whether or not the Bevanites should be disbanded. He won and they were.

  A much smaller, inner group continued to meet every week for a working lunch in Richard Crossman’s house in Vincent Square. This consisted of six members of the NEC – Bevan himself, Driberg, Castle, Mikardo, Wilson and Crossman – plus the journalists’ group, including John Freeman.

  In 1954, the Vincent Square meetings became the focus of a row that, in Freeman’s view, could have broken the rump of Bevanites. Bevan had rejoined the shadow Cabinet but resigned again in May over a foreign policy issue. To the amazement of his fellow Bevanites, Harold Wilson accepted Attlee’s invitation to take his place. They regarded this as an act of betrayal. Once again, out of pique, Bevan threatened to resign from the inner group; once again, Freeman wrote him a persuasive letter attempting to change his mind: ‘I hope you will come to lunch at Dick’s tomorrow. If you don’t come I fear the inner circle of your following may be broken – perhaps irreparably. Harold’s ambition has created a disastrous situation.’23

  In fact, Freeman had never considered Wilson a sincere member of the group: ‘He wore the label of Bevanite like a poppy on Remembrance Day – for form’s sake.’24 In the end, this squabble was patched up, but its legacy was Freeman’s dislike of Wilson. He had no time for the placement of personal ambition above loyalty. The Bevanites continued but often without Bevan himself, for he was not a team player. Freeman, though conscientious, was losing interest.