A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  He was finding parliamentary life increasingly tedious. Time was heavy on his hands, particularly in the evenings when MPs had to hang around to vote, sometimes until dawn. He wiled away the hours gambling at canasta, although it was illegal in Parliament. He had hosted the card table since his time as junior minister, because the rank qualified him for his own small room in the House of Commons. Driberg was the croupier and sat with his back to the door, preventing the policeman – who came around opening doors and shouting ‘Division!’ (the call to vote) – from seeing what was going on inside. The other members of the canasta school were Woodrow Wyatt, Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins.

  The Bevanite split had not isolated Freeman. ‘He was of such apparently controlled and ice-cold a temperament,’ wrote Jenkins, ‘that it did not make much difference to relations whether one agreed with him or not.’25 Idleness brought out the hedonist in Freeman. He admitted to being ‘self-indulgent and lazy’. Given the chance, he said, he surrendered to ‘wine, Dr Castro cigars and warm-hearted women’.26

  He was not a natural House of Commons man and this contributed to his dislike of the institution. On his frequent social visits to Woodrow Wyatt’s home, the two ‘spirit of 1945’ MPs discussed why their ambitions to change the world appeared to have stalled.

  ‘But the House of Commons is such fun, such an education in human nature, such a good club,’ said Wyatt.

  ‘That,’ said Freeman, ‘is just what I hate.’

  He confessed to doodling during ‘unspeakable committee meetings’, demonstrating a small repertoire that might well interest a graphologist looking for psychological insights. First, there was a ‘very freehand map of the British Isles’; then a fancy arrangement of swallows in flight; then ‘a mouse couchant’; and also a pictorial presentation of the Pythagorean theorem. ‘In this last, incidentally, one can pass a pleasant enough fifteen minutes variously shading the resultant network of triangles,’ he wrote in the New Statesman. He also tested his memory through mental arithmetic: ‘Simple multiplication and division – nothing tricky. But oh, what joy awaited me! What could be more natural than to start multiplying 123,456,789 by various figures? And what more rewarding than to find that if you multiply it by 8, the answer is 987,654,312?’27

  Freeman obviously possessed a very retentive memory and enjoyed testing it, which might account for his appearances on the Chan Canasta TV show a few years later. Chan Canasta was described as a ‘pioneer of mental magic’.

  The Freemans spent much of their leisure time at Bradwell Lodge. Lizi slept above the library and remembers being kept awake late into the night by canasta. On one occasion, Driberg, Freeman and others played all night and through breakfast, until 11 a.m.: ‘I thought this was very wrong, very naughty!’

  Lizi made friends with the live-in couple – Hilda the cook and Joe the gardener. She breakfasted with them while the grown-ups had breakfast in bed. They were all sorry for Ena, who was often ‘very unhappy’, because, said Lizi, ‘she had to rescue young men whom Tom had picked up in the pub or railway station and brought home. Then they would suddenly find they were in a house party they weren’t expecting. We would find a stranger in our midst!’

  From the start of their marriage, Driberg had treated Ena ‘abominably’, said Freeman. The first Christmas after the wedding, he had gone off to the Sudan leaving her on her own. She spent Christmas Day with the Freemans at their flat in Heath Mansions, where they had lived with Lizi since about 1948. ‘John was being fairly intolerable,’ Ena wrote. ‘He slept during the afternoon and Mima took down her back hair and I comforted.’

  Since that Christmas, Ena’s relationship with Driberg had gone from bad to worse. Weekends alone at Bradwell Lodge were spent in moody silence. He insisted that she slept at the other end of the house, while he played endless games of solo canasta and communicated with her by notes. She felt lonely, humiliated and prepared to separate. It was Freeman who dissuaded her, by pointing out what a bad effect separation would have on Tom ‘professionally and socially’. So she agreed to stay, on the following conditions:

  I will be with you occasionally at Bradwell – say one weekend a month, the first Sunday if you like, so that we can go to church together. I will go with you to such functions in London and elsewhere as will serve to keep up the façade of friendly relations between us … I am very sorry our marriage has turned out so badly, but you have so consistently undermined my self-confidence by your behaviour to me that I cannot let it continue.28

  The Freemans spent other weekends with Lord Faringdon, a leading member of the Fabian Society. He was a gay friend of Tom Driberg’s, known for his effeminate ways such as opening a speech in the House of Lords with ‘My dears’ instead of ‘My Lords’. He was also a supporter of left-wing causes. At his country estate Buscot Park, prominent refugees from Franco’s Spain could find themselves with the Bevanite group holding a policy weekend. ‘During this time, Freeman cultivated his taste for fine wines, which he’d established at Oxford and continued in the Driberg cellar. In September 1952, he sent his host a postcard from Bordeaux:

  I have visited and drunk in the cellars of the Chateaux Olivier, Haut Brion, La Mission Haut Brion, Pichon Longueville, Mouton-Rothschild, Hautellan, Cissal, and several smaller ones; also in the enormous cellars of Calvet and Erchenauer and Kressman. The ’47s are excellent for both Medoc and Graves; ’49 very good for Graves; ’49 and ’50 and ’51 promise quite a good average for the Medocs. ’52 looks – the harvest is next week – as if it will be outstanding; the best, certainly, since ’47, perhaps since ’34.29

  This particular visit led to a series of articles for the New Statesman. When Freeman became editor he would bring in wine corks after a particularly fine meal and invite his team to enjoy the fragrance.

  By the time of the general election in May 1955, Freeman had had enough. He had made his intention clear not to stand again at Watford and he turned down a last-minute invitation to become Labour MP for Durham. Apart from disliking the job, he had a political reason for leaving Parliament. The phrase of 1954 was ‘Butskellism’, meaning a convergence of middle-of-the-road policies by the two Chancellors of the Exchequer, the Conservative Rab Butler and Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell. This amounted to bi-party approval for a Keynesian mixed economy, with moderate state intervention to promote social goals, particularly in health and education. It was debated at the Labour Party conference in Scarborough and Freeman was strongly opposed to it:

  While it can be argued that a policy of Butskellism might be the easiest way of winning an election, it seems to me the surest way of destroying the Labour Party. Labour has never been a tightly organised party of disciplined militants, but it has always been a party held together by a belief in socialist economics and socialist ethics. Its rank and file has always been deeply rooted in the class-conscious working class. These two characteristics are intimately connected, and they are the strength of the party. It is the socialist content of its idealism that has distinguished it from other progressive groups and cemented the loyalty of the working class. It is working-class loyalty to a non-communist Labour Party that has kept strong in Britain the flame of democratic socialism, at a time when it burns so low in the rest of the world. I would rather lose an election than betray the hopes of Labour supporters.30

  A powerful statement and a political epitaph.

  Just before the election, Freeman vented his frustration in an article for the New Statesman called ‘Night Thoughts of an Ex-MP’. He began: ‘My principal thought at this time is one of thankful relief.’ There follows a carefully balanced article, in which the reader is left waiting for the sting in the tail. He said he would miss his daily companions, who would change into distant friends, and, above all, he would miss his sense of being at the centre of things: ‘It is the community of interest in power and responsibility, which pervades the Commons, that makes it, outside the formalities of the debating chamber, the very best of talking shops.’

  Then comes
the sting – Freeman’s vision of his future if he stayed:

  I have in my mind a disenchanted vision of parliamentary man at his worst: at forty-five [he was forty] he is pallid, bald and ulcerated; arrogant, narrow-minded and periphrastic. And worse, he is complacent about it all. Too many MPs cease to look outside. They perceive one another with the vapid intensity of a goldfish. If he understands at all that he has deteriorated, he claims he has sacrificed himself to his cause. This is true in a few cases; but more often he has sacrificed himself to the sheer self-indulgence of being a public man.31

  Freeman told Edward Hyams, a colleague at the New Statesman, that he had detested parliamentary life. He considered his ten years as an MP to have been worse than his five years as a soldier. Freeman had done his best, but ultimately ended his career because Parliament had not been to his taste.

  In 1964, when Labour was planning its return to power after thirteen years in the wilderness, Freeman was asked by his old friends Barbara Castle and Richard Crossman, who would both become Cabinet ministers, if he would consider standing for Parliament again, if he was guaranteed a place in the Cabinet. He refused.

  Could Freeman have become Prime Minister? This, of course, is impossible to answer. He did, in my view, fulfil most of his own prescription: ‘The great political leader requires not only the courage, ability and integrity of the statesman; he must also understand intuitively the emotions, prejudices and ambitions of fools and rascals. Paradoxically, he must contain in himself something of the rascal and something of the fool.’32 No one could call Freeman a fool, but nor did he tolerate fools. Nor would he have enjoyed the scheming, public performances and confrontation that the Prime Minister’s role required. He was, nevertheless, an outstanding leader – in the army, in politics, in diplomacy and in business.

  Endorsements for the top job came from an impressive variety of those who knew him well, from the elder statesman Dr Henry Kissinger (‘He would have made a great Prime Minister’) to a fellow government minister at the time, Woodrow Wyatt (‘He could have been Prime Minister but he disdained the grubby atmosphere of political life’) to the comedian Tony Hancock, who gave him the vote of the man in the street (‘He should have been Prime Minister’). Paul Johnson, who succeeded Freeman as editor of the New Statesman, told me:

  He could have become leader of the Labour Party and then Prime Minister – a great Prime Minister. He was in the mould of Attlee, essentially a staff officer, a major who led with quiet authority. In the Cold War tensions, he would have been a calm – cold, perhaps – hand at the helm: unflappable, reasoned and authoritative.33

  Had he not resigned, it is very easy to see him as a senior member of Wilson’s Cabinet, perhaps as Foreign Secretary, on a par with his friend Tony Crosland. After that, there is no point in speculation: I was told with certainty that he did not vote Labour again after 1966.

  In fact, much later in his life when he was teaching at UC Davis in California (see Chapter 12), he said he regretted the radical left views of his earlier years – ‘they did a lot of harm’. This is an admission to ponder.

  Notes

  1 Never Again, Britain 1945–1951 by Peter Hennessy, Vintage Books, London, 1993, p. 389

  2 Pimlott (ed.), op. cit., entry dated 20 February 1951, p. 506

  3 Aneurin Bevan: A Biography, vol. 2, 1945–1960 by Michael Foot, Athaneum, London, 1963, p. 327n

  4 Pimlott (ed.), op. cit., entry dated 22 April 1951, p. 536

  5 Nye Bevan: A Biography by John Campbell, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1994, p. 226

  6 Hennessy, op. cit., p. 417

  7 Ibid.

  8 Quoted in Hugh Gaitskell by Philip Williams, Jonathan Cape, London, 1979, p. 249, n. 80

  9 Foot, op. cit., pp. 326–7

  10 Williams, op. cit., p. 260

  11 Dalton, op. cit., pp. 368–9

  12 Crisis in Britain 1951 by Joan Mitchell, Secker & Warburg, London, 1963, pp. 186–7

  13 Pimlott (ed.), op. cit., p. 537

  14 Wyatt, op. cit., 1985, p. 213

  15 Castle, op. cit., p. 191

  16 The Scotsman, June 1961

  17 Year of Hope. Diaries, Letters and Papers 1940–1962 edited by Ruth Williams, Hutchinson, London, 1994, p. 165

  18 Quoted in Wheen, op. cit., p. 246

  19 Ibid., pp. 250–51 (see also: The Best of Both Worlds by Tom Driberg, Phoenix House, London, 1953, pp. 52–7)

  20 Back-bencher by Ian Mikardo, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1988, p. 120

  21 ‘Scots Welcome The Queen’ (12 July) and ‘An American Paints the Queen’ (13 December) by Mima Kerr, Picture Post, 1952

  22 Campbell, op. cit., p. 276

  23 Foot, op. cit., p. 434

  24 Wilson: The Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx by Philip Zeigler, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1993, p. 96

  25 A Life at the Centre by Roy Jenkins, PaperMac, London, 1991, p. 90

  26 ‘The New Puritanism’ by John Freeman, Queen, 1963

  27 ‘London Diary’ by Flavus, New Statesman, 26 February 1955

  28 See Wheen, op. cit., pp. 260–64 for Tom and Ena Driberg and failure of their marriage

  29 ‘Wines of Bordeaux’ by John Freeman, New Statesman, 27 September 1952

  30 ‘Some Thoughts on Scarborough’ by John Freeman, New Statesman, 25 August 1954

  31 ‘Night Thoughts of an Ex-MP’ by John Freeman, New Statesman, 7 May 1955

  32 ‘Stafford’ by John Freeman (his obituary for Stafford Cripps), New Statesman, 26 April 1952

  33 Paul Johnson interview with the author, 2014

  Chapter 5

  Television interviewer – Panorama

  WHEN FREEMAN WAS asked by Nigel Lawson in the 1990s why he had not written his autobiography, he replied that he would have been too rude about too many people. However, if there was one person Freeman admired and praised without qualification it was Grace Wyndham Goldie. She was the founder of the new-look BBC TV programme Panorama, which came on air on 19 September 1955. In his biography of her, The First Lady of Television, John Grist writes:

  John Freeman, by any reckoning an outstanding man of his generation, said that, in retrospect, his education, St Pauls [sic] and then Oxford, was outshone by two other periods, army staff college and working with Grace Wyndham Goldie. He thought her classical values represented the finest liberal approach to life and duty. He thought she was outstanding compared to the grey-suited men who ran the BBC. She should have been director-general.1

  Grace Wyndham Goldie was fifty-five in 1955. Her civil service type title (assistant head of talks television) was evidence of how fundamentally un-visual factual television was in those days – a radio-led, outmoded practice she was determined to change. It was a misleading title, too, because Grace was assistant to nobody. She had to be in charge of any activity she was engaged in, so her boss Leonard Miall wisely gave her the task of launching new projects. First and foremost was Panorama.

  Wyndham Goldie was fearsome. A future director-general, Sir Ian Trethowan, wrote: ‘Her sharp tongue and angry snapping eyes were feared and disliked by newer and more junior members of her staff, but older hands held her in deep respect, even awe.’2 She was a workaholic who demanded total commitment – ‘If you don’t dream about television every night you are no use to me!’ – and her moods were so unpredictable that she was said to rule ‘with a whim of iron’.

  Her biographer, John Grist, who also worked with her in the 1950s, gives an insider’s picture of Grace Wyndham Goldie at an editorial meeting (a BBC institution that anyone who has worked there knows may determine success or failure):

  She carried an aura, and senior men shuffled their papers when she came into a meeting and moved their bottoms in their chairs when she interjected some comment, looking uneasy. She talked very well and laughed a lot with her young men. She was immensely proud of ‘her boys’ and would defend them against all comers, but would box their ears, figuratively, and glare in a steely way. I confess I did not
like her, but, like everyone else except perhaps Huw Wheldon, I was frightened of her.3

  Catherine Dove (later Freeman), then a young producer in her department, remembers Grace as:

  A colourful small bird, with bright eyes always darting about the room and a thin mouth. She dressed elegantly but conservatively, neatly nipped-in jacket, always a brooch in her lapel. I respected her totally, and had every reason to like her, because she was always very kind and supportive of me.

  Pre-eminent among ‘Goldie’s boys’ were a handful of former junior ministers from the post-war Labour governments, who had left Parliament between 1950–55, just when television factual programmes were on the cusp of change and needing new-look reporters and interviewers. John Freeman was one of them. Now forty, and despite his record of high achievement in both the army and politics, he was probably not averse to being a Goldie boy.

  Others Goldie boys were Christopher Mayhew (once under-secretary of Foreign Affairs), Aidan Crawley (Air) and Woodrow Wyatt (who had been given Freeman’s post of under-secretary in the War Office after Freeman had moved to the Ministry of Supply). The difference between Freeman and the others was that, while they returned to politics in the 1960s, he never went back. However, what they all shared, in Grace Wyndham Goldie’s view, was ‘a cross-bench mind’. Mayhew moved from the Labour to the Liberal Party; Crawley crossed the floor and became a Conservative MP (before leaving politics and becoming chairman of London Weekend Television); and Wyatt became a thorn in the side of the Labour Party, with very right-wing views. Freeman, in her words, ‘abandoned the party political scene, became editor of the New Statesman and, in the television series Face to Face, showed interviewing skills comparable to Edward R. Murrow in the United States’. None had any problem being fair and impartial. She sensed in all of them disillusionment with party politics: