Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  ‘These,’ he replied, waving the depleted bag of boiled sweets in the air. He had simply entered the boardroom without knocking and proceeded to offer a sweet to everyone present, all the while noting their conversation. They were all too startled to refuse. Besides, old Lajos was part of the furniture.

  There was plainly more to the ritual of the sweets than met the eye. But then, there was more to Lajos Lederer than met the eye, too; much more. From that time on, and for the rest of his life, he came to perform an undefined but indispensable role for me – a mixture of guru, cheerleader and house detective.

  Lajos got on well with everybody. He was trusted and liked and acted like a father confessor to some of the journalists. The point of the sweets, he once explained, was that they gave him an easy introduction to anybody he wanted to meet – and that was pretty well anybody he came in contact with, no matter how high or low their position on the paper, or even in the street or on the bus for that matter.

  Lajos had an insatiable interest in people and was equally at home dining with the rich and famous, of which he knew many, or eating lunch on a tray with secretaries and printers in the office canteen. Monty Berzinski, head of The Observer’s machine room, put his finger on the clue to his popularity: ‘The thing about Lajos’, he said, ‘is that he makes you feel good about yourself.’

  The Observer journalists would have been amazed if they had known that Lajos, for over a decade, was my chief guide and mentor, a sort of angelic Rasputin in the newspaper’s byzantine internal politics. Maybe it was his upbringing in central Europe’s tortuous history that had given him such an aptitude for conspiracy and an instinctive understanding of how to deal with complicated situations.

  He also knew how to handle rich men. Among many other services, Lajos made it his business to introduce me to his high-ranking friends, such as Denis Healey, Harold Lever, Keith Joseph, Randolph Churchill’s son Winston, Lord Shackleton, son of the Antarctic explorer, and to various branches of the Rothschild, Sieff and Wolfson families.

  The contacts were extremely useful and produced some good stories. Dinner with Sir Marcus (later Lord) Sieff, chairman of Marks & Spencer, at his house in Chester Square produced a charming story about Margaret Thatcher. When she came to dinner with him she had said, rather mischievously: ‘I hear you’re a bit of a ladies’ man, Sir Marcus.’ He replied: ‘Well, let’s see your legs, then.’ At which point she rose and did a coquettish twirl round the table.

  Lajos was a good friend of Harold (later Lord) Lever, and we went to his luxurious Eaton Square apartment, complete with marbled hall and Louis XIV staircase, to hear his views on the economy and to pick up any gossip around Harold Wilson’s government. But the great financial guru, then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, had obviously forgotten about our appointment, for he came downstairs late, still wearing his nightclothes. As he droned on about the exchange rate mechanism and other economic mysteries, I was wholly distracted by the sight of the male member of the Member for Manchester East peeping out from his pyjamas.

  Many of these influential figures were prepared to talk openly with me because I was a friend of Lajos, which broke down the usual inhibitions between journalists and politicians. After one lunch, Sir Keith Joseph wrote to Lajos: ‘I very much enjoyed meeting Donald Trelford and came away even more awed by the range of responsibilities – from industrial to philosophical – that an editor must cover. I found the discussion stimulating.’

  Once, at a dinner party given by The Observer’s managing director, he said to me suddenly: ‘Donald, your surname is very unusual. Tell me, was your father an unusually short man?’ When I said he was barely five feet tall, Sir Keith went on: ‘I remember him. He was very brave at Monte Cassino. We should have given him a medal. Perhaps we did.’

  When I raised this conversation with my father, I got the usual blank response to any questions about the war, plus a muttered comment about Joseph: ‘Mad Tory, isn’t he? What are you doing with people like that?’

  • • •

  One of the most interesting people Lajos introduced me to was his old friend Sir Robert Mayer, a tiny figure then aged ninety-nine, who had been a great patron of music, having started Concerts for Children before the Second World War and Youth and Music after it. He invited me to dinner at the Athenaeum, along with Robert Armstrong, later Sir and then a Lord, who became Cabinet Secretary in the Thatcher years.

  The dinner was given by a club whose proceedings, by convention, were never reported, and its dinners therefore attracted guest speakers of an unusually high calibre, presumably because they felt safe from the dreaded media. The speaker that night was Prince Philip, who made some remarks about the dangers of uncontrolled immigration which struck me as uncontentious, but would doubtless be regarded these days as politically incorrect and provoke screaming headlines in the papers.

  After the dinner, Prince Philip moved around the room talking to the guests. By this time, he had had a fair amount to drink and kept saying, in response to virtually anything anyone said: ‘Nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with that.’ Later I sat on a body he chaired called the British Sports Trust. We got on so well that he sometimes sent notes round to my home address that he hoped I might use in my sports column in the Daily Telegraph.

  I asked Sir Robert: ‘You know so much about music you must be able to say who was the greatest composer – one of the three great Bs or the great M?’ He replied: ‘Well, I’d have to say Brahms, wouldn’t I?’ I was surprised and asked him why. His reply was disconcerting: ‘Because he was the only one I ever met.’ He explained: ‘I was studying music at the Mannheim Conservatoire. The winner of the student piano competition played for Brahms and the runner-up sat next to him. I didn’t win,’ he said defensively, ‘because I was so short my feet couldn’t reach the pedals, but I did sit next to him.’ Later I checked the dates: Brahms died in 1897, when Mayer would have been eighteen.

  Rather dazed by this, I turned to the topic of the evening, immigration. ‘You must have been an immigrant yourself, Sir Robert. When did you first come to this country?’ ‘1899,’ he said, which silenced me for a while until I countered with a slightly jokey follow-up: ‘So which side did you fight on in the First World War – Germany or Britain?’ ‘First World War, old boy?’ he replied in a puzzled tone. ‘Much too old to fight in the First World War.’

  There I was, sitting in a London club, talking to a man who went back a century. I said to him: ‘You must have been remarkably fit all your life, to be still running around and dining out at your age.’ ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been well. I had two heart attacks in my sixties. That was my crisis. Everybody has a crisis at some time in their life: if you conquer it, they seem to forget about you. Have you had your crisis yet?’

  The following year he sent me an autobiographical pamphlet entitled My First Hundred Years. I used to have lunch with him occasionally after that at his luxurious flat near Portland Place, where I noticed that the first entry in his visitors’ book was the composer Bela Bartok, dated 1922. Because of his great age and apparent frailty, I didn’t like to stay long at these lunches, assuming he needed a nap in the afternoons. I needn’t have worried about him. Once, as I stood waiting at the lift, I heard him bustling up behind me, on his way to the Metal Exchange in the City, where he had made his fortune and tried to visit every day. He married again at the age of 101 and lived to be 105.

  • • •

  One reason Lajos and I got on so well is that his clandestine manner seemed to suit my beleaguered situation on the paper. He was the perfect ally: cunning, loyal and discreet. He operated like an East German spy, reporting directly to his chief on the words and conduct of those above or below me in the office. I felt a bit like a character in a John le Carré spy thriller – not quite knowing what the owners or the management were plotting behind my back, or what the journalists were saying – and I needed an extra pair of eyes and ears to find out.

  Most of my time on
The Observer seemed a bit like that. When I was editing the paper in Malawi, a magazine had once said I was operating in ‘a hostile and threatening environment’. At The Observer, I found myself in another one, where I never knew who was plotting against me, whether the paper was being sold, or whether I was safe in the editor’s electric chair. Three senior Fleet Street figures told me later that they had been sounded out for my job, and there may well have been others. Lederer, a veteran of Communist politicking, was an ideal guide to this duplicitous world.

  There was some jealousy between Lajos and Kenneth Harris, another office courtier who cultivated the rich and famous. Both had a wide circle of social and political contacts and attended the same sort of grand parties. Lajos told me rather sourly once that Harris had edged him out of the affections of one of the Sieffs by flattering an old widow and taking her out to casinos. She would give him money for gambling. If he won, he would keep the proceeds; if he lost, it went on her bill. When she died she left him a Vuillard painting.

  Lord Barnetson, a dour Scot who was chairman of Reuters and later of The Observer, once nudged me at a reception when he saw Harris and Lederer deep in conversation together and muttered: ‘Rival head waiters.’

  The journalists called Lajos ‘Uncle Bulgaria’ after the cartoon character in The Wombles. Every time he walked past the sports desk, Clifford Makins would mutter: ‘Here comes Trouble in the Balkans.’ A former Observer colleague, John Pringle, referred in his memoirs to Lederer’s ‘romantic and startling history’.

  His elegant good looks and mysterious background made this entirely credible. There were tales – and, according to the news desk secretaries, actual photographs – of Lajos with the present Queen when she was a girl, as her riding companion in Windsor Great Park.

  I once overheard a debate among the secretaries as to who was the most handsome man in the office. Even though he must have been well into his sixties at the time, Lajos was the unanimous choice (as I recall, Neal Ascherson, Terry Kilmartin and Gavin Young were the other finalists; to my chagrin, I didn’t rate a mention, which probably serves me right for eavesdropping).

  • • •

  When Lajos wasn’t spying for me, he was the paper’s East European correspondent. His strength was in working his charm on individuals to dig out the facts – or if facts proved too hard to come by, then gossip would do instead. He met the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the Romanian capital of Bucharest and the two men got on so well that they engaged in cheerful public banter at a cocktail party, with the other guests, including Kremlin luminaries like Gromyko, Bulgarin and Mikoyan, looking on in disbelief.

  He was an expert on Yugoslavia and developed a close relationship with Marshal Tito that provided The Observer with a number of scoops in the post-war years. Tito, born Josip Broz, led his country’s underground resistance against the Germans in the Second World War and was the country’s Prime Minister and then President from 1948 to 1980. He exercised an iron control over regions like Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, which were to collapse into anarchy and civil war after his death.

  Tito had a lively relationship with the Kremlin, which admired his control over the country but hoped for greater subservience. Lajos’s first scoop about Yugoslavia – which was relayed around the world – was to forecast Tito’s break with Moscow in 1948, when he declared a new foreign policy of ‘positive neutralism’. Lajos had not met Tito at that time and put the story together from snippets of information provided by contacts in East European capitals.

  Tito was intrigued as to how he had uncovered the story and invited him to Belgrade. ‘I was met by Tito’s secretary at the airport and treated like a VIP,’ Lajos wrote afterwards, ‘which meant there was no need to show a passport or go through the usual boring immigration procedures in a Communist country.’ He continued:

  I was taken by car to Tito’s villa at 15 Užice Street in the Dedinje district on the hilly side of the city. He was an imposing presence, a huge bearlike figure in his Marshal’s uniform covered with medals. He spoke to me in German. After some awkward preliminaries, he poured us both a glass of Slivovitz and we began to relax. He asked me about my upbringing in Hungary and what life was like there today. He asked me about Romania and other East European places I had visited. Then we got round to the story I had published about his break with Moscow. I explained that I couldn’t give him the sources of my information, for professional reasons. He accepted that with a nod, but I had the feeling he liked me and that we would be having more dealings in the future. In fact, as I left, he said: ‘I hope we will soon meet again, Dr Lederer.’ Then he lowered his voice, gave me a card and added: ‘Don’t go through official channels if you want to talk to me. Just phone my office and they will fix a date.’

  They had many meetings over the next thirty years, sometimes at Tito’s fifteenth-century hunting lodge near Bled, which looked like part of an Alpine skiing resort, and always over glasses of Slivovitz. They became so close that, at the end of his life, when Tito hosted a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Belgrade, the assembled international journalists were startled to hear the 87-year-old leader open a press conference with the booming demand: ‘Lederer, what are you doing here?’

  Lajos paid court to Tito’s wife Jovanka, a former Serbian partisan thirty years younger than her husband, who had caught the leader’s eye by mining a bridge singlehandedly to halt a German advance. Lajos sent her flowers on every birthday. He was rewarded when she gave him the exclusive inside story as to why Tito had sacked his oldest comrade, Aleksandar Ranković, head of the security services. ‘Ranko’, as she always called him, ‘has been bugging our bedroom,’ she told Lajos, plainly outraged.

  This was another world scoop for Lederer and The Observer. Later, when she and Tito split up, Lajos was able to write the best-informed account of their troubled marriage. Although the world’s press had failed to find her, Lajos managed to track her down, after a tip-off, in a crowded Belgrade street market, armed with eighty red roses.

  In those days of recondite Kremlinology, when no one knew what was really going on in the Communist world, every word or turn of phrase was scrutinised for a hidden political meaning. Lederer was greatly assisted in this task of interpretation by his good friend Edward Crankshaw, the paper’s Moscow expert and a skilled biographer of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who would sift out any gold nuggets from his interviews or tip-offs and convert them into a significant story.

  The problem was that often no one could tell if Lajos’s stories were true or not, since they couldn’t be easily checked, resting as they often did on a single, anonymous and interested foreign source. Sometimes the news desk would be nervous and relegate what looked like a spectacular revelation – a thaw in Sino-Russian relations, a power shift in Moscow or Beijing, a new purge of Soviet Jews, or a secret plan to reunite Germany – to a few paragraphs on an inside page. Years later, when his story was finally vindicated, Lajos would produce a yellowing cutting from his wallet and parade it to his colleagues in retrospective triumph.

  • • •

  Lajos had always claimed to have known the actress sisters Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor from his Hungarian childhood. When Zsa Zsa came to London to perform in a West End play, the news editor called his bluff and asked if he could get the paper an exclusive interview with the star, half-expecting it would come to nothing.

  The reporter given the assignment, Robert Chesshyre, was astonished to see Lajos ushered into her dressing room and greeted with hugs and kisses like a long-lost friend, as indeed he was. Lajos even persuaded her to come into the Observer office, draped in mink, after the show on Saturday night to see the newspaper being printed. The looks on the printers’ faces were a revelation. Somehow the subject of face-lifts came up. Zsa Zsa drawled: ‘Dahlinks, I’ve had so many facelifts I’ll soon have a moustache.’ He also took Miss Yugoslavia on a tour of the office when she was chosen as Miss World.

  • • •

  Perhaps as a conseque
nce of arriving in this country as an immigrant who knew no one, he cultivated every contact he made and usually converted them into friends. He did this in a way that might shock a modern journalist. For every Yugoslav national day, every birthday of Tito or his wife, a small gift or flowers would arrive from him at the London embassy. Each would be punctiliously acknowledged by the ambassador on Tito’s behalf.

  He went through the same performance with other embassies, especially Israel. An appearance on television by any prominent figure he knew would invariably be followed by a handwritten note of congratulations. But then he was just the same with his friends, always remembering birthdays and anniversaries and the birth of children, sending flowers or a bottle of Tokaji.

  It didn’t matter how elevated a person was – a switchboard operator at The Observer was just as likely to receive a bunch of flowers as the Queen or a foreign head of state. It was part of an old-world code that made him such an attractive figure on the London social scene, like a character from some romance about the mythical kingdom of Ruritania.

  After the war, the Lederers entertained liberally at their small house in Gordon Place, south Kensington, becoming popular hosts to an unusually wide group of friends. The Canadian High Commissioner wrote to his wife Jean: ‘I think you and Lajos give the best parties in London.’

  A regular guest was Denis (later Lord) Healey, who became Defence Minister and then Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government. Lajos had met Healey when he was head of the International Department at Transport House and Lajos was urging the Labour Party not to recognise the post-war Hungarian government as fellow Socialists.

  His inside knowledge of Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe brought him into contact with many senior members of the Labour Party, including the post-war Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Sir Stafford Cripps and Herbert Morrison – the man who, as Home Secretary, had interned him during the war.