A Very Private Celebrity (21 page)

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:

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:

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 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
.'
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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 Wyatt, 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:

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.'
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