A Very Private Celebrity (12 page)

Freeman's letter to Gaitskell said that breaking up the government on such a narrow issue as ‘teeth and spectacles' was the height of folly and he was working to prevent it happening. He hoped their good relations would continue and he was ‘delighted to see how clearly the mark of greatness sits upon you'.
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The strength of Freeman's position as a junior minister was that he was valued highly by both sides – the Bevanites and the Gaitskellites – and his charm and conciliatory manner therefore might have brought them together. Presumably Attlee thought so, which is why Freeman's future looked so bright. Dalton's diary continues:

The following day, events everyone had dreaded unfolded. During the debate on the third reading of the Health Charges Bill, Bevan resigned from the government. Dalton's diary drips with despair:

Dalton concludes his account of Freeman's resignation in his memoirs:

Freeman was not susceptible to flattery and, in his mind, Dalton had gone too far. He said in the 1970s that this ‘clumsy talk of promotion' had made him more determined not to change his mind, for he had interpreted it as simply a bribe to keep him without any commitment attached.

Unlike Nye Bevan and Harold Wilson, John Freeman did not make a resignation speech. Instead, he wrote to Attlee. He did not give as a reason for resigning the ‘teeth and spectacles' charges (although
he did oppose the ‘real reduction in our social services'), but instead cited his opposition to the re-armament programme – it was neither practical nor necessary and it would ‘rob us of our vitality as a nation'. He said he had hoped these difficulties would be resolved by internal discussion, given time, but that the government had forced the issue with the Budget. He felt honour-bound to resign from a post that, although minor, carried the responsibility for administering a policy of which he did not approve. The Prime Minister replied that he did not agree with Freeman's reasons and was sorry to lose him, but he accepted the resignation.
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All three men majored on re-armament as the main reason for resignation, but this was only the presenting reason. It was a common assumption that Bevan resigned out of pique, Wilson out of opportunism, and only Freeman out of principle.

Bevan certainly resigned out of pique, as his resignation speech made very clear. He did put across his central argument, but he did so with a Welsh
hwyl
(emotional fervour) that many found excessive. The American re-armament programme was a greater threat to the West, he blustered, than the Russians were, for if Britain followed it, the programme would imperil ‘the foundations of political liberty and parliamentary democracy'. Much of the rest of the speech was an attack on Gaitskell for his incompetence as Chancellor. Freeman dropped a regretful note to Dalton: ‘Nothing could have done more to influence me the other way than Nye's outburst this afternoon.'
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Meanwhile, Dalton was sure Wilson's motives had been opportunistic throughout. He referred to him dismissively as ‘Nye's Dog' and wrote: ‘I made no effort to persuade Harold Wilson from resigning. In contrast with the other two, he did not have much strength of character.' Wilson made little secret of his tactical resignation, telling Woodrow Wyatt at the time:

Wyatt felt so ‘shocked and disappointed' to hear this that he did not talk to Wilson for the next eight years. Freeman's own view was that ‘at first [Wilson's resignation] seemed public-spirited, but later I thought that it was his best chance of getting to the top: if Wilson backed Bevan, and Bevan won, then the succession was his'.

In retrospect, Freeman was right to oppose re-armament. The huge programme changed the £307 million surplus balance of payments in 1950 to a deficit of £369 million in 1951 – a dramatic turnaround. Lord Croham, who was in the Treasury then and became head of the civil service, wrote after his retirement: ‘It may be too much to claim that, but for the headlong rush into defence in 1950, the UK would have enjoyed an economic miracle, but there would certainly have been much less stop-go and a much better balanced economy.'

Did Freeman have other reasons for throwing in the towel? He was ‘browned off', as Dalton wrote. Tony Crosland said John Freeman resigned because he was ‘a
New Statesman
leftist, happiest in opposition'. In fact, during those same weeks, he was offered a job with the
New Statesman
.

These views are all speculation though, for Freeman never discussed in a public forum why he resigned. At the general election in October, he did not follow his advice to Bevan to make the huge cost of re-armament, with its welfare implications, a matter of principle. This extraordinary reluctance to defend his resignation (which
had cost him his career) disappointed his fellow Bevanites. Barbara Castle wrote:

She gave a partial reason for this, and, as she was soon to become his lover, she ought to have known: ‘After years of studying his complex personality I decided he was afraid of giving himself too fully to anything or anyone. I once told him his motto ought to be:
Je me sauve
[I protect myself ].'
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This brings to mind what other friends have said, including Paul Johnson (‘He is exceptionally hard of access') and Norman MacKenzie (‘John has the capacity to put up the shutters that is excelled by nobody except a shopkeeper during riots'). Freeman was very private, self-protective and coldly distant when he wanted to be, but the question that remains unanswered is why?

It is clear that Freeman actually disliked power. He said so himself, in no uncertain terms: ‘I personally find the pursuit and exercise of power arid, unsatisfying and distasteful.' What is more, according to John Birt, who worked under Freeman in the 1970s at London Weekend Television, he also disliked proselytising: ‘He did not want to impose himself on the world, and that was the theme of his career. He did not want to stand on a platform and parade his views or ask to be loved. He was not self-regarding and he was without ambition.'

So why was Freeman's career a case of moving from one powerful
job to another? He gave a convincing answer to William Hardcastle in an interview for Radio 4 in 1968:

To which the next question must be why did Freeman go into politics in the first place? What, in particular, was his approach to socialism? Anthony Howard worked with Freeman closely at the
New Statesman
and wrote an insightful portrait of him in 1961:

Politics without a gut feeling, without tears and wounds, must be rooted in shallow soil. Freeman's ‘Keep Left' and then Bevanite politics (‘almost Trotskyite' was a verdict at the time) were superficial compared to those of the working-class Bevanites he knew or the eastern European intellectuals he was about to meet on his next seminal journey. It was their lives that were at issue, whereas for Freeman it was only a matter of lifestyle. The gap between poor and rich was so wide, so socially unjust, that the poor seemed to belong to another world.

This is how Freeman put it in 1964:

This being the case, any sacrifice to Freeman's own lifestyle would be as irrelevant as it would be unexpected. Freeman could live comfortably in a democratic state, secure behind a set of rational assumptions that he considered self-evident.

This was just as well because, as Tony Howard wrote, ‘The most common, concerted criticism of John Freeman, made by his friends and enemies alike, is that he is the greatest establishment figure of them all.'

‘I have the faults of an English gentleman,' Freeman once said, although Tony Benn (who entered Parliament in the 1950 election), put it another way.
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Freeman, he said in his diary, is as ‘pompous, smug and urbane as ever'.

When Catherine Dove met Freeman a few years later, she did not find someone with strong political convictions so much as someone who was above politics. She quoted Walter Landor: ‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.'

Marghanita Laski, who had been at Oxford with Freeman and also wrote for
Cherwell
, said much the same thing: ‘John is incorruptible because he is too grand to be ambitious. He cannot be bought.'

Richard Crossman, however, who had clashed with Freeman in journalism and politics, took a more cynical view, simply saying: ‘John is a complete nihilist.'

However, in April 1951, Freeman had no intention of leaving politics. He had resigned from government but not from Parliament. He was shortly to fight, and win, Watford for the third time, in a bruising election. He would stay in Parliament for another four years.

On 30 June 1951, Tom Driberg married Ena Binfield at St Mary's Church near Sloane Square, London. John Freeman had arranged the marriage, was best man and, it was rumoured, a former lover of the bride. Lizi has no doubts that her stepfather married off his rampantly homosexual friend on purpose: ‘He engineered the wedding, of course. She was a friend of ours, a lovely widowed Jewish lady. It was a cover-up to conceal Tom's sexuality. I don't know why she agreed to it.'

Freeman provides an answer to that:

There was little sign that this happened. In some ways, however, the couple was well matched. She was gregarious, witty, and popular in left-wing Labour circles. In fact, they met at a party hosted by George Strauss. She needed companionship, too, and, according to her son by a previous spouse, accepted that the marriage would probably not be consummated.

The wedding was a charade. A large number of Tom's constituents came up by charabanc and arrived early so that, according to Roy Jenkins (one of the ushers), they packed into the front pews leaving the ‘po-faced diplomats' and ‘high literary society' (such as John
Betjeman, Constant Lambert, Osbert Lancaster and Osbert Sitwell) standing at the back. Alongside them were the leaders of the Bevanites, including Nye himself, his wife Jennie Lee, and the editor of the
New Statesman
, Kingsley Martin. Most of them were secularists, so the high nuptial mass that lasted over an hour was a trial. According to Driberg, Kingsley Martin sat looking ‘quite shocked', Bevan growled that his ‘Calvinist blood was roused' and the communist scientist J. B. S. Haldane filled his pipe to register his disapproval. Driberg wrote afterwards in his diary that all this had given him ‘a twinge of naughty amusement'.