A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  Within months, Freeman was de facto editing the paper when Kingsley Martin was abroad. He was learning journalism too, although as a former editor of Cherwell and a writer of political reports, it was hardly from a standing start. What united all Freeman’s careers was his talent as a communicator. He told C. H. Rolf, another regular New Statesman writer and the editor of Kingsley Martin’s Letters and Diaries:

  Kingsley was one of the formative influences in my life. And one of the things to remember about him is that, for all his ‘good causes’ and so on, he was a very crafty and skilful old journalist; he knew all the tricks of the trade and could teach them. I find constantly, in writing or in making other people write, that I am embodying Kingsley’s rules into my own work.7

  For the next four years, Freeman combined being a backbencher in Parliament with writing for the New Statesman. His promotion to deputy editor became assured in 1955, in circumstances that would have embarrassed anyone with a less ‘ice-cold temperament’ than Freeman. Richard Crossman MP – considered one of the most brilliant political journalists in Britain, and chief leader-writer for the NS on foreign affairs since the war – had made clear to Kingsley Martin that his spiritual home was the New Statesman, not Parliament, and he wished to succeed Martin as editor. If he knew he was the heir apparent, he told Martin, he would resign his parliamentary seat. Martin had not responded. Then, in July, Crossman was offered a tempting job on the Daily Mirror. He tried to use this offer, clumsily ‘holding a pistol to Martin’s head’, with the threat that, unless Martin named him formally as deputy editor, he would defect to the Mirror, which was offering him four times as much money.

  Freeman’s reaction to this was clever, and possibly duplicitous. Crossman claimed in his diary that Freeman wrote him a note to the effect of ‘rather than lose me he would like to see Kingsley resign and me take his place, in which case he would serve under me’.8 This is quite possible, bearing in mind that they had been Bevanite colleagues in Parliament until Freeman’s resignation. The opinion in the NS office, however, was that Freeman outwitted Crossman by a lateral move. Realising that Kingsley Martin would find it easier to lose Crossman if there was another fluent, polemical leader-writer waiting behind his typewriter, he travelled to Paris and persuaded Paul Johnson, the very young NS correspondent in France, that there might be a job on the London staff. Johnson was delighted.

  Kingsley Martin sacked Richard Crossman, by phone, at 8.30 a.m.: ‘I’ve thought it over and it’s quite definite that there is no room for the three of us [meaning himself, Freeman and Crossman] on the paper.’ Later, C. H. Rolf discovered among Martin’s papers this note about Crossman: ‘I have never worked on the paper with anyone so brilliant but so impurely motivated. I think he lacks the qualities that will bind a staff in loyalty to him and the integrity, disinterestedness and judgement that will make him a good editor.’9 The implication of this damning note must be that Crossman’s attempted putsch was doomed before it even started. John Freeman wrote Crossman a chivalrous letter:

  I think the loss of you from the Statesman is a terrible blow; but the blow is to us rather than to you. I am sure you are right in saying that your chances of inheriting the editorial chair at Great Turnstile in the long run are made neither worse nor better by your going off now.

  I would just like to say that the last few days have been exceptionally unpleasant ones for me, since I cannot help being aware that, had I never arrived at Great Turnstile, it is almost certain that the present situation would not have arisen. Nevertheless, I think you do probably understand – and I would certainly wish you to – that I have tried my best to behave towards you as a good colleague; for many reasons, not the least is that I regard you as a very much better journalist than I am.10

  The trouble with writing about John Freeman – so private; so ‘hard of access’, in Paul Johnson’s own terms – is that it is sometimes impossible to find out what his motives really were. At my suggestion, Norman MacKenzie asked Freeman why Kingsley Martin had preferred him to Richard Crossman. Freeman replied: ‘You know, he was like a Tudor monarch with court favourites of the moment. I was preferred at that time.’ Possibly true, but not a revealing answer.

  That was not quite the end of the story. Two days after the breakfast phone call, Martin met Crossman face to face. He was less candid than he might have been, but forthright nevertheless:

  KINGSLEY MARTIN: There can be no question, I’ve thought about it and I would never trust you to put the New Statesman first in your politics.

  RICHARD CROSSMAN: I’ve told you – I’d give them up.

  KINGSLEY MARTIN: I don’t believe it – you’re a politician, and John Freeman isn’t. He’s really given up politics to live for the New Statesman.

  RICHARD CROSSMAN: I knew you brought him in for that purpose, Kingsley – to get rid of me.11

  Watching this bloody battle for succession from the sidelines was the gossipy political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Confined to bed at All Souls College, Oxford, he wrote to the American historian Arthur Schlesinger with a running commentary:

  The story is that John Freeman is going to become editor of the New Statesman. I don’t know who he is except that he’s a fanatical left-wing socialist – a Bevanite – with violent and stupid views on almost everything. His judgement is appalling and the reason for seeking to appoint him is that he’s about to marry someone else’s wife in such circumstances as to make his departure from politics advisable. I shall be sorry to see old Kingsley go. He was a kindly, old-fashioned, idiot journalist of an absurd, irresponsible, madly irritating, but, in some sense, human sort, whereas Freeman, by all accounts, is a humourless monster, a dreary third-rate fanatic.12

  This commentary, of course, was wrong in most respects. Martin did not leave until 1961, Freeman was not on this occasion ‘about to marry someone’s wife’ (as far as I know) and he was hardly a third-rate fanatic either; but it shows Isaiah Berlin’s dislike of socialism and, perhaps, Freeman’s reputation with women.

  Freeman was appointed deputy and, from then on, it was simply a matter of time before his succession, for Martin thought the editor had to be from within the paper. But when was the best time for Martin to retire?

  Like many chief executives, Martin claimed he wanted to retire – his ‘Sunday painting’ and book-writing were tempting him – but he could not bring himself to do so. Initially, Freeman was content to edit the paper as deputy while leaving Martin to write the diary, ‘into which’, said Martin, ‘I put my heart, and which I was determined always to keep fresh and gay, as well as writing other articles.’ Freeman was loyal, comfortable with his de facto editorship and on the crest of a wave at the BBC. But by 1960 their roles had changed. Martin wrote that he was tired and had little new to say. Freeman added to that; he considered that Martin’s writing had deteriorated because he could not make his mind up what he wanted to say. He told C. H. Rolf:

  I think there are basically two kinds of journalist: one that wants to expound a situation, and one that wants to redress a situation and doesn’t care much about the facts – he wants to preach a sermon. Kingsley was a preacher. While he was absolutely certain about his tenets and what he wanted to say, he wrote like an angel. I think if there was a decline in his writing it was at least as much due to the decline in his certainty as to any decline in his powers to concentrate.

  Further, said Freeman, Martin’s incoherence was spreading. He was increasingly incapable of making decisions and, in this general confusion, the circulation was beginning to fall. For Freeman’s part, he had received several other offers of work and, although he did not say so, it was clear that broadcasting was no longer offering the challenge he needed. He told Martin: ‘I should find it difficult to stay unless you made way fairly soon.’ He was more explicit to C. H. Rolf:

  The point was not that I wanted to edit the paper above everything else – though perhaps I did – but that his continued retention of the editorial chair had become seriously dama
ging to the paper. I saw no purpose in continuing what I could not longer support. It seems that he never quite got the point, and this is why he felt so resentful afterwards.13

  The breakdown of friendship between the second and third editors of the New Statesman was to follow.

  After the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to Moscow in 1951 – and their subsequent unmasking as communist spies, followed by a similar defection and revelation about Kim Philby in 1963 – the British press was on the hunt for the ‘fourth man’ and indeed the ‘fifth man’. There had to be another member of the ring who had tipped off the others. The ‘fourth’ turned out to be the art historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Anthony Blunt, who was secretly granted immunity in 1964. Speculation about the ‘fifth’ still lingers. The wildest speculation extended as far as John Freeman. His three surviving colleagues on the New Statesman to whom I spoke (Norman MacKenzie, Paul Johnson and Anthony Howard) had all heard these rumours – indeed, it was Norman who alerted me to them – and all dismissed them as preposterous. Nevertheless, they must stem from the reputation of the New Statesman during the Cold War as a nest of ‘fellow travellers’ (communists who were not party members), MI6 informers, or both at once. ‘Walking on both sides of the street’ was the phrase used.

  In fact, the New Statesman had form. The very first editor, Clifford Sharp, had worked secretly for the Foreign Office political information department in 1918–19 writing strongly anti-Bolshevik reports. When they later appeared in the New Statesman he changed the content to a condemnation of counter-revolutionary excesses, because he thought this is what his public wanted to read about.

  George Orwell has a lot to answer for. After the war he wrote for Tribune magazine, which represented the socialists on the left of the Labour Party (later the Bevanites). He and Michael Foot would frequently lunch with Norman MacKenzie near Great Turnstile. That did not stop Orwell in 1949 from presenting to the government’s Information Research Department a notorious blacklist of ‘cryptocommunists and fellow travellers … who should not be trusted as propagandists’. The New Statesman was strongly represented. The list included: the present and future editors, Kingsley Martin and Richard Crossman (though Orwell thought Crossman was ‘too dishonest to be an outright FT [fellow traveller]’); the revered columnist J. B. Priestley (‘a strong [communist] sympathiser’); another writer, Dorothy Woodman (Kingsley Martin’s future partner); Tom Driberg; and assistant editor Norman MacKenzie. At the same time, according to a later New Statesman editor, Anthony Howard (1972–78), some staff were also reporting to MI6: ‘The relationship between journalism and the secret intelligence services has always been a grey one. It was probably most closely consummated in the offices of the left-wing New Statesman.’14

  This apparent dual allegiance is not hard to unravel. All the staff at the New Statesman in the ’40s and ’50s were campaigning socialists, including Freeman, of course. Some had been communists, like, for example, Tom Driberg, and briefly Norman MacKenzie. There was a Cold War; the government was convinced that the Soviet Union might well invade or at least infiltrate western Europe. The New Statesman writers often travelled to eastern Europe, the Soviet Union or China for their work (MacKenzie was the expert on communism). What could be more reasonable than to use socialist credentials to access the other side of the Iron Curtain? What could be more professional for MI6 than to ask these journalists to act as couriers, photographers and contacts? What could be more patriotic than to accept? Norman MacKenzie, later a gentle, bookish professor of educational technology at Sussex University, was a dramatic example.

  When MacKenzie left for academia in 1962, John Freeman wrote: ‘He has long been our expert on communist affairs on both sides of the iron curtain. His interpretation of the Soviet CP since Stalin has proved far more accurate in his prognosis than many of his more publicised rivals in the field.’15 Freeman was probably hinting at Mac-Kenzie’s extraordinary scoop in 1955.

  MacKenzie’s Bulgarian contact, Tseko Etropolski, had summoned him to a meeting on a pedalo at a Bulgarian Black Sea resort. Khrushchev had just tipped off the Cominform at a secret meeting in Sofia about the extent of Stalin’s purges, a full four months before he stunned the communist world by revealing everything at the notorious 20th Party Congress. MacKenzie’s Bulgarian contact had memorised much of Stalin’s highly secret disclosures and repeated them to MacKenzie at this out-of-eavesdropping meeting. His scoop fell on deaf ears. Neither MI6 nor the Foreign Office nor, even, Kingsley Martin, wanted to take any action. When MacKenzie read reports of Khrushchev’s speech the following February he recognised passages word for word.16

  MacKenzie had been a member of the Marxist socialist Independent Labour Party (ILP) in the late 1930s. It is even possible that MI6 had asked him to join the Communist Party in 1940 for its own purposes. To add to his credibility with the Kremlin, he sometimes wrote for Telepress, a Soviet-backed news agency in Fleet Street that published atrocious communist propaganda. Leonard Woolf, a director of the New Statesman, must have been taken in by MacKenzie’s procommunist stance since he once described him as ‘the most dangerous man in the New Statesman’. MacKenzie found this ‘rather strange’ because he was a patriot. In fact he had worked under the protection of MI6, part of the British security service, since the early 1940s. As the war ended and east Europe fell into the Soviet-occupied zone, so MacKenzie travelled increasingly into communist Europe on an MI6 ticket, though he received no other payment. His special areas were Romania and Bulgaria.

  On one occasion MacKenzie was caught photographing the outside of a prison camp near Bucharest. He was briefly imprisoned before being moved to a hotel, but still under arrest. Drifting in through his window, he heard the mellifluous tones of a violin played by, he was soon to discover, David Oistrakh. Soon after he was handed two tickets by the Security – one was an air ticket to London, the other was for a seat at Oistrakh’s performance. MacKenzie said the whole episode was like ‘a fairy tale’ but that can’t be how it appeared at the time. Many years later he met an old friend at a school reunion who sounded embarrassed: ‘I’ve been feeling guilty all these years. Didn’t I see you in chains on Bucharest station?’ (This story is independently verified). MacKenzie admitted it was true and added that he had got worried when the plane transporting him out of Romania appeared to be heading north towards the Soviet Union, before it circled back and landed him in Yugoslavia. ‘I gather you’re doing useful work in the Balkans,’ said Kingsley Martin enigmatically when he returned to the office.17

  Anthony Howard recalled that after one press trip to eastern Europe he noticed a New Statesman colleague reporting to MI6: ‘When I raised the matter with him, he got quite shirty and inquired whether I regarded myself as a patriot or not?’ The trouble with ‘walking on both sides of the street’ is that it’s sometimes unclear in which direction you are walking.

  With MacKenzie there can be no doubt. In the spring of 1956, for instance, at the request of Kingsley Martin, he travelled to Budapest to assist a former New Statesman writer and BBC broadcaster, Pál Ignotus, who had just been released from jail in the wake of the Khrushchev disclosures. This was months before the Hungarian Revolution but nonetheless a mission of some danger. Ignotus had spent the war years in London but had decided to risk a return visit to the land of his birth in 1949, just after Hungary became a communist state under the severely repressive Mátyás Rákosi. MacKenzie had warned him not to go back. He had been right to do so because, on his arrival, Ignotus was seized, thrown into prison, tortured and kept in solitary confinement. There is a coda to this story. On his release Ignotus married Florence, the woman from the neighbouring cell with whom he had exchanged months of increasingly romantic ‘tapping’ messages without once seeing her. They decided to remain in Hungary but fled in November 1956 after the Soviet puppet, János Kádár, betrayed the ideals of the October revolution.

  The next year MacKenzie was one of the first journalists, with Woodrow Wy
att, to detect the vote-rigging scandal in the Electrical Trades Union (ETU). Freeman wrote: ‘It was entirely due to his foresight that the NS became committed to liberate ETU members from the communist caucus.’ No one could deny then that MacKenzie had done his bit for Queen and country. MacKenzie told me in 2004: ‘I’m sure John [Freeman] had some kind of intelligence connections.’ He should know.

  Aylmer Vallance was more mysterious. His story is worth telling because he became one of John Freeman’s few real friends. In fact, Freeman nursed him on his deathbed in 1955 and in 1961 he named his first son after him, Matthew John Aylmer.

  Vallance turned up at the ‘Staggers’ offices at the outbreak of war in 1939 wearing the uniform of a lieutenant colonel in the War Office. He worked part-time for military intelligence. At the same time he was about to marry a member of the Communist Party who was close to its leadership, including general secretary Harry Pollitt. This must have strained the marital relationship during the Nazi–Soviet Pact 1939 –1941 when they worked for opposing sides; but perhaps it didn’t, no one knew with Vallance. At the end of the war Lieutenant Colonel Vallance slipped this unsigned editorial into the New Statesman when it was at the printers, thereby avoiding the red pencil:

  Its foundations [the new world order] must be based firmly on recognition of the essential unity of the working people of all nations. Their needs and desires – work and security and a ‘dinner of herbs where love is’ – are one and the same. The Captains and the Kings have made, between them, a century of greed, aggression, hatred and blood. They may now depart. (12 May 1945)

  George VI and the Chief Captain (Churchill) had just received the ovation of the crowd at Buckingham Palace. Leonard Woolf, who was in the editor’s chair that week, was furious: ‘It [the editorial] is full of the slants, snides, sneers and smears that communists and fellow travellers habitually employ as means for building a perfect society.’18