AND ANOTHER THING
Attlee and Driberg, the good and bad sides of the Old Labour coin
PAUL JOHNSON
Perhaps unwittingly, Tom and Clem, the fashionable play about Attlee and Driberg is an elegy for Old Labour. Neither, for differ- ent reasons, would have been at home in Tony Blair's party. Each in his own way epit- omised why Old Labour failed. The notion that Clem Attlee ran a 'great' government is absurd. It began with high hopes but col- lapsed in economic impotence in 1947; thereafter it was downhill all the way. Attlee was a good man and he knew how to run a Cabinet — he ran the wartime coalition much better than Churchill when the old boy was away — but he had a blinkered vision. His views were formed in the years just before 1914 when the state was seen as the only doctor for all the ills of society. His belief in the state was strengthened when he helped to direct its successful wartime efforts, 1940-45. When he led a homoge- neous peacetime government he clung to this vision of the omnicompetent and benevolent state. He not only insisted on retaining virtu- ally all the wartime controls but hugely expanded the public sector. It was Attlee who really thought 'the gentleman in White- hall knows best'. He thus burdened post-war Britain with the millstones of the nation- alised industries and with a built-in hostility to private enterprise which only the massive willpower of Mrs Thatcher finally destroyed.
This is why it is an error to compare Blair to Attlee. Blair is post-Thatcher and sees the state as, at best, an occasionally neces- sary evil. What Blair shares with Attlee is temperament. Attlee, as Morley said of Gladstone, was 'a conservative in every- thing except essentials'. So is Blair indeed, he is conservative in essentials too. Like Attlee, he distrusts grandiose theories and the intellectuals who expound and believe in them. Attlee had a particular contempt for Dick Crossman, whom he had known as a nasty, boastful little boy. Simi- larly, Blair will not be dismayed to hear that people like Bernard Crick, David Mar- quand, Martin Jacques and Ben Pimlott distrust him. He has no time for them either. He likes and admires constructive people, who do things, provide jobs, create wealth and invent new benefits and ser- vices. Attlee got on best with decent trade unionists, generals, sportsmen, headmas- ters — that sort of person. Unlike Blair, he was taciturn, even monosyllabic. I once had great difficulty persuading him to inscribe my copy of one of his books. Eventually he agreed to write, 'Attlee'. But he then regaled me with a tuneful selection of Boer War and Flanders marching-songs. The only person he feared was his dreadful wife, notorious for being 'the worst driver in the Home Counties'. If Attlee disliked Cross- man he loathed and pitied Tom Driberg, whose sins he blamed on Lancing, the high church school: 'All that incense and dress- ing-up.' When Gladstone was drawing up his third Cabinet, he wrote against the name of Charles (`Three-in-a-bed) Mike: `Unavailable'. Attlee was even more dismis- sive of Driberg: 'Unemployable'.
If Attlee stood for the statist weakness of Old Labour, Driberg represented its hum- bug. Sodomy, which dominated his life, made him antinomian, and hence a social- ist. But he had no sympathy for the lower orders, as he called them, except in the role of bum-boys, rough trade to be picked up on one of his 'cottaging' trawls or to be bought outside the barrack-gate. Driberg's religion was largely pose. He was always nagging me to write a book about gnosti- cism, but when I cross-questioned him on the subject I found him ignorant. The only time I ever saw him in church was at his wedding, a mysterious episode in his life which he engineered to allay suspicion. The ceremony was punctuated by the com- plaints of Colonel Wigg MP who, like Attlee, objected to the bells and smells as forbidden by the rubrics. Wigg's loud stage whispers, 'It's all illegal, you know — ille- gal!' enlivened the gruesome service.
Driberg's disabling weakness was that he could never restrain his appetites. Whatev- er it was he wanted, he had to have it immediately. Hence he was bunked by Lancing, extruded from Oxford and even- tually got the push even from his patron, Lord Beaverbrook, who long had a soft spot for him. When A.J.P. Taylor was run- ning the ill-fated Beaverbrook Library, he showed me a shelf of files labelled Driberg' which contained all the sordid details of Beaverbrook's usually successful efforts to keep Driberg out of police cus- tody. Driberg was always in debt, he had a fine house he could not afford and sexual tastes he indulged regardless of cost. He told me (in 1958), 'My advice to you, Paul, is always to keep £100 in notes in your breast pocket, in case you get into trouble. No use trying to give a policeman a fiver. The bribe must dazzle him — then he's yours.' When we hired Driberg as the New Statesman's television critic, we not only refused to allow him expenses, knowing his ways, but went to some lengths to prevent him using the paper's name to obtain credit. Even so, the arrangement ended in tears. It was Driberg's insatiable need for quick cash which led him, at various times, to extract money from both MI5 and the KGB. These arrangements ended in tears too.
Old Labour intellectuals like Driberg rose to eminence, though not in his case power, on the backs of a working class they laughed at. He had a huge appetite for liquor and an even bigger one for food, about which he was both fussy and impatient. I have never known anyone so persistently and cruelly rude to waiters. I once did a Saturday stint for Reynold's News, in which he wrote a col- umn. In the then desolate area around King's Cross, there was only one restaurant which served good food. Driberg got all of us banned from it because of his beastly behaviour. How we hated the sod! He also made a beast of himself at a dinner given by Lady Pamela Berry at the Brighton Metropole during a Labour party confer- ence. I said, 'Pam, unless you make Tom apologise to that waiter I am going to leave and explain to everyone why.' That was the only time I saw Driberg perform a mea culpa to an underling. Some of his extreme-left political views may have been sincere, but the only topic which roused him to passion was punctuation. When he was a member of Labour's National Executive, he spent hours fiddling with commas and semi-colons in the endless ukases that lamentable body issued in the days of its glory. Otherwise he never did a damn thing for the working class he theoretically worshipped. His misspent and selfish life was finally rewarded by a peerage, a scandal even by the abysmal standards of our depraved honours system. Mephistophe- les claimed him shortly afterwards. I have never known such a deeply unhappy man. One consolation is that there is no place for such monsters in New Labour.
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