A Very Private Celebrity (13 page)

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:

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:

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.

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.'