A Very Private Celebrity (9 page)

Dalton was high-handed with his civil servants – ‘He shits for England in the Olympic Games,' said one in 1948. Conspiratorial and a gossip, he was not trusted, and there is a story of him entering the Cabinet room ‘eyes blazing with insincerity'. He was a man of strong bias: miners, handsome young white men, socialists, and refugees from Nazi Germany were in; Germans, the rich or pompous, and Bloomsbury intellectuals were out. Freeman obviously liked this combination of public principles with private indiscretions. When the third volume of Dalton's diary was published in February 1962, Freeman reviewed it for the
New Statesman.
As Dalton died the following week, it became an obituary:

Nevertheless, Freeman was also perceptive about his faults. In 1953 he reviewed another Dalton memoir,
Call Back Yesterday
:

If Dalton divided opinion then Driberg polarised it. Norman Mac-Kenzie told me Driberg was the vilest man he had ever met, while Catherine Freeman ‘liked him very, very much. He was just so worldly, so funny, so indiscreet, but also so intelligent and affectionate.' He was forty when he listened to Freeman's Humble Address that August afternoon, but unlike many others on the Labour benches, he had been a Member of Parliament for the previous three years, as an independent (in reality, a member of Common Wealth). He had not really wanted to transfer to the Labour Party – thinking it stuffy and bourgeois – and, after 1945, he felt let down by the Attlee government: ‘There was no fundamental or lasting change in the economic or social structure of Britain.' Occasionally he worked up some enthusiasm – like on the second reading of the bill to nationalise the mines, when he saw MPs from mining constituencies trooping through the lobby in tears and singing
The Red Flag
– but most of the time he was detached; interested but not involved. ‘The whole bloody business bored him,' said the Labour MP Ian Mikardo.
10

Some thought he was a dilettante, and, according to John Freeman, he had few friends: ‘He remained an ambiguous, largely isolated figure … seen, I judge, by his Labour colleagues as not one of us, but whose heart was probably in the right place, who was a bit of a character, even though a character to be disapproved of.'
11

This then was Freeman's closest ally in Parliament – the friend with whom he spent many hours gossiping and drinking during parliamentary business.

One reason why Freeman saw so much of Driberg was because he found him entertaining. Driberg was a man of refined taste, who, after
public school and Oxford, had considered becoming a poet. He was a socialite who loved gossip and indiscretion, a journalist with a curiosity that took him to the extremes of experience (like studying the satanist Aleister Crowley) and a foreign correspondent who courted danger when, for example, he was ‘embedded' (in more senses than one) within the British troops in Normandy in 1944 and Korea in 1950. Colourful and mysterious, High Church with a lust for low life, no one could say that Driberg did not live life to the full.

Freeman enjoyed the house parties that Driberg held at his home, Bradwell Lodge in Essex. It was a beautiful former rectory of Tudor and Georgian architecture, with installed treasures like a Robert Adam fireplace inlaid with panels painted by Angelica Kauffman. Driberg liked Bradwell Lodge ‘better than anything else in the world'. He delighted in bringing together disparate guests for weekend house parties, as might a madam in a high-class brothel, he said mischievously.

One weekend just after the war, for instance, Driberg mixed the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan with the modern composer Constant Lambert and his wife Isabel, who was recently divorced from the famous journalist Sefton Delmer. As an Essex neighbour, Isabel was a frequent visitor: ‘There was always good wine and food, and conversation on all subjects, word games and Lena Horne singing in the evenings.'
12
Freeman was another frequent guest, remembering ‘weekends spent in total tranquillity with a delightful host'. Driberg's parties had quite a notorious reputation, which he did nothing to dispel. Catherine recalls a conversation with him soon after her marriage to John in 1962:

The Driberg papers in Christ Church, Oxford, and Driberg's diary for these years (published as
The Best of Both Worlds
), are silent on the matter.

Driberg may have been a ‘Jekyll' at Bradwell Lodge most of the time, but in the lavatories of Russell Square, the House of Commons and elsewhere, he was a ‘Hyde'. He was a flagrant, promiscuous gay who boasted of his adventures in the rough trade, although practising homosexuality was illegal until 1967. For instance, he recounts in
Ruling Passions
a nocturnal liaison in Edinburgh in 1943 when he was campaigning in a by-election for the Common Wealth candidate Tom Wintringham. In the dark of Princes Street, he ‘bumped into a tall figure in a foreign naval uniform'. One thing led to another and they were in an air-raid shelter, Driberg on his knees:

In desperation, Driberg threw caution to the wind. He took out his visiting card that showed he was both an MP and the author of the William Hickey gossip column on the
Daily Express
:

Freeman delighted in these stories:

Driberg was probably a spy when Freeman knew him. Although he was only ‘outed' as such after his death in 1976, Freeman must have had his suspicions, because many others did. However, as with other supposed spies of this Cold War era, whose side Driberg was on and whether he was a real threat to security remain uncertain. He had been a member of the Communist Party until early in the war and he was an acquaintance of the traitor Guy Burgess, who he visited in Moscow after his defection in 1951.

In 1981, the veteran ‘spy-catcher' Chapman Pincher wrote
Their Trade is Treachery
, in which he labelled Driberg as ‘in the KGB's pay as a double agent'. Then the author Nigel West twisted the screw by claiming that Driberg had, for many years, been a double agent working for MI5 – secretly reporting on the British and Russian communist parties, while also serving as a spy for Russia. Some said that Driberg's homosexuality made him vulnerable to blackmail; others that he was far too indiscreet to be a spy. Freeman and Wyatt discussed their old friend's spying over the dinner table in 1986. Wyatt recorded:

Whatever the truth, Freeman seems to have been drawn to the mysterious double life of the spy. In the 1950s he was also a friend – and Freeman made few friends – of the
New Statesman
journalist and spy Aylmer Vallance (see Chapter 7). Was it the enigma of the spy that appealed to Freeman – the chameleon quality of appearing all things to all men, while keeping your own counsel?

One night in the 1960s, Catherine and John Freeman were reading in bed. Her book was
The Portrait of a Lady
and his, she noticed, was
A Double Life
.

Michael Foot, a fellow Bevanite MP in the post-war Labour governments, who worked closely with Freeman, said to me: ‘John had a cold manner but undoubtedly he had another side, as his friendships with Driberg and Boothby showed. He liked rough company.'

At this time, Robert Boothby was a Conservative MP, until, in 1958, he was given a peerage. He was rumoured to have fathered three children by the wives of other men, one of them with Lady Dorothy Macmillan, whose husband was later Prime Minister (1957–63). Boothby was also a bisexual and, like Driberg, he flaunted his homosexuality at a time when it was illegal. Together in the 1960s they visited East End clubs where, in return for protecting from the law the sinister crooks, the Kray Twins, ‘rough but compliant East End lads were served to them like so many canapés'.
16

In August 1960, Lord Boothby was John Freeman's guest on
Face to Face
. This is how Freeman introduced him:

What are we to make of this? Freeman liked ‘rough company' all through his life, but there is no suggestion that there was anything sexual to this. He liked people who crossed the boundaries with impunity and entertained him; moral judgements about sexual behaviour were not among his principles.

Driberg's diary of these years was published at the same time as the first volume of Dalton's
Memoirs
in 1953. This left the reviewer of
Truth
magazine in a quandary:

Freeman's contribution to the transforming legislation enacted by the first Labour government of 1945–50 was slight. During its first two years he was at the War Office – first as parliamentary secretary, then financial secretary and then under-secretary of state to Fred Bellinger, a kindly but ineffective minister who had been an army officer and then an estate agent before entering Parliament. The story of Bellinger's dismissal by the Prime Minister in 1947 is often quoted as an example of Attlee's terse, gauche personal relations, here related by Woodrow Wyatt:

In November 1946, Freeman flew off to the Far East on a tour of overseas commands. He had already, according to Dalton, ‘made a most excellent front-bench beginning, both answering questions and speaking on adjournments … an exceptionally promising parliamentarian'. His first stop was the British Commonwealth occupation zone in Japan, where he met General MacArthur and visited the British troops. There was no chance, he told the press, of either bringing the troops home or reducing their numbers. He spent Christmas at the commander-in-chief's house in Delhi, from where he wrote to Tom Driberg. The flight from Tokyo to Calcutta had been alarming because ‘the flight pilot developed appendicitis in mid-air and damaged the undercarriage when landing'. This must have been the origin of the story Freeman told his children in the 1960s about how he had helped land an aircraft by taking over the controls and preventing a crash.