80 Facts About Tom Driberg

Tom Driberg never held any ministerial office, but rose to senior positions within the Labour Party and was a popular and influential figure in left-wing politics for many years.

The son of a retired colonial officer, Tom Driberg was educated at Lancing and Christ Church, Oxford.

Tom Driberg was later a regular columnist for the Co-operative Group newspaper Reynold's News and for other left-leaning journals.

Tom Driberg wrote several books, including biographies of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook and the Soviet spy Guy Burgess.

Tom Driberg retired from the House of Commons in 1974, and was raised to the peerage as Baron Bradwell, of Bradwell juxta Mare in the County of Essex.

Always in search of bizarre experiences, Tom Driberg befriended at various times the occultist Aleister Crowley and the Kray twins, along with honoured and respected figures in the worlds of literature and politics.

Tom Driberg combined this lifestyle with an unwavering devotion to Anglo-Catholicism.

Tom Driberg was born on 22 May 1905 in Crowborough, a small dormitory town about 40 miles south of London.

Tom Driberg was the youngest of three sons born to John James Street Driberg, a former officer in the Indian Civil Service, and his wife Amy Mary Irving Driberg.

The Tom Driberg family had immigrated from Holland about 200 years previously; the Bells were lowland Scots from Dumfriesshire.

John Tom Driberg had retired in 1896 after 35 years in Assam, latterly as head of the state's police, and was 65 years old when his youngest son was born.

For Tom Driberg, growing up mostly alone with his elderly parents was a stifling experience; he would later describe Crowborough as "a place which I can never revisit, or think of, without a feeling of sick horror".

At the age of eight Tom Driberg began as a day-boy at the Grange school in Crowborough.

In 1918, when he was 13, Tom Driberg left the Grange for Lancing College, the public school near Worthing on the south coast where, after some initial bullying and humiliation, he was befriended by fellow-pupil Evelyn Waugh.

Under Waugh's sponsorship Tom Driberg joined an intellectual society, the Dilettanti, which promoted literary and artistic activities alongside political debate.

Tom Driberg began to write poetry; his aesthetic education was further assisted by J F Roxburgh, "a magnetically brilliant teacher" who later became headmaster of Stowe School.

Back in Crowborough, after several months' application under the guidance of his tutor, the young lawyer Colin Pearson, Tom Driberg won a classics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford.

Tom Driberg was immersed in a world of art, politics, poetry and parties: "There was just no time for any academic work", he wrote later.

Tom Driberg, given a job distributing strike bulletins, was arrested by the police before he could begin and was detained for several hours.

One of Tom Driberg's elaborate hoaxes was a concert called "Homage to Beethoven", which featured megaphones, typewriters and a flushing lavatory.

Tom Driberg accepted an invitation to lunch with Crowley for the first of several meetings between them, at one of which Crowley nominated Tom Driberg as his successor as World Teacher.

Nothing came of the proposal, though the two continued to meet; Tom Driberg received from Crowley manuscripts and books that he later sold for sizeable sums.

Tom Driberg failed his final examinations and, in the summer of 1927, he left Oxford without a degree.

Tom Driberg had maintained his contact with Edith Sitwell, and attended regular literary tea parties at her Bayswater flat.

Tom Driberg's reports were generally abrasive, even mocking in tone, and drew complaints from Buchman's organisation about news bias.

The trial period at the Express was extended, and in July 1928 Tom Driberg filed an exclusive report on a society party at the swimming baths in Buckingham Palace Road, where the guests included Lytton Strachey and Tallulah Bankhead.

Tom Driberg later defended his association with an inconsequential society column by arguing that his approach was satirical, and that he deliberately exaggerated the doings of the idle rich as a way of enraging working-class opinion and helping the Communist Party.

Tom Driberg used the column to introduce readers to up-and-coming socialites and literary figures, Acton, Betjeman, Nancy Mitford and Peter Quennell among them.

Tom Driberg further assisted Waugh in 1932 by giving him space in the column to attack the editor of the Catholic journal The Tablet, after it had described Waugh's Black Mischief as blasphemous.

Tom Driberg grew increasingly frustrated with the trivial nature of his work.

Beaverbrook, who had developed a fondness for Tom Driberg, was amused by the disparity between his columnist's professed left-wing sympathies and bon vivant lifestyle.

Tom Driberg was acquitted, and Beaverbrook's influence ensured that the case went unreported by the press.

Tom Driberg continued to write the Hickey column, not always to his editor's satisfaction; his protestations against indiscriminate bombing of German civilians were particularly frowned on.

When Tom Driberg returned to Britain in March 1942 he found widespread public dissatisfaction with the government's conduct of the war.

Tom Driberg's campaign slogan was "A Candid Friend For Churchill", personally supportive but critical of many of the prime minister's circle.

On 2 July 1942 Tom Driberg cast his first vote in the House of Commons, in support of Churchill against a rebel motion of censure on the government's conduct of the war.

Tom Driberg called for the lifting of the ban on the Communist Party's newspaper, the Daily Worker, which he saw as a potentially valuable weapon of home propaganda.

Tom Driberg continued to write the Hickey column, and used his parliamentary salary to fund a constituency office in Maldon.

In January 1943, while in Edinburgh to campaign in another by-election, Tom Driberg was caught by a policeman while in the act of fellating a Norwegian sailor.

Tom Driberg subsequently signed up with Reynolds News, a Sunday newspaper owned by The Co-operative Group, and undertook a regular parliamentary column for the New Statesman.

Tom Driberg contributed to a weekly BBC European Service broadcast until, in October 1943, he was banned after government pressure.

Tom Driberg reported the post-D-Day allied advances in France and Belgium as a war correspondent for Reynolds News, and as a member of a parliamentary delegation witnessed the aftermath of the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945.

Tom Driberg was thus one of the 393 Labour MPs in the landslide election victory that replaced Churchill as prime minister with Clement Attlee.

Tom Driberg later maintained that, had his offer been taken up, he might have prevented the Vietnam War.

Tom Driberg participated in several night operations, and won respect from many of the soldiers for his courage despite, as one Marine put it "being a bit bent".

Tom Driberg was away from parliament for three months, missing many critical House of Commons divisions, and on his return was severely censured by his fellow Labour MPs for neglecting his duties.

Tom Driberg's general standing in the party was unaffected; he had been re-elected in absentia to the NEC in September 1950.

Tom Driberg was sympathetic to the rebels, though he tried to find a basis for compromise that would avoid resignations.

The former ministers strengthened the small Labour group known as "Keep Left", in which Tom Driberg was prominent; the group would henceforth be known as "Bevanites".

Tom Driberg still enjoyed aspects of his parliamentary life, such as in 1953 when he showed the American singing sensation Johnnie Ray round the House of Commons; his attempts to seduce the singer were politely resisted.

The project extended over several years, by which time Tom Driberg was no longer in parliament; he had announced in March 1954 that he was standing down from Maldon, which at the general election of May 1955 fell, as he had expected, to the Conservatives.

Tom Driberg continued his frequent travels and casual homosexual liaisons, and was hostile to her efforts to control or change any aspect of his life.

Evelyn Waugh, to whom Tom Driberg sent a copy, expressed disappointment that the work was in fact "a honeyed eulogy".

Tom Driberg had known Burgess in the 1940s, and the two shared similar homosexual inclinations; this acquaintance was sufficient to secure the Moscow interview.

On his return home Tom Driberg rapidly wrote a book from the interview material, the serial rights of which were sold to the Daily Mail.

In 1956, Tom Driberg convened a group of Christian socialists that met regularly at the Lamb public house in Bloomsbury to discuss issues such as imperialism, colonialism, immigration and nuclear disarmament.

Tom Driberg travelled widely during his year in office, generally as a Reynolds News correspondent but using the party title to advantage whenever he could.

Tom Driberg had been contemplating for some time a return to the House of Commons, and in February 1959 was adopted as a candidate by the Barking constituency, a safe seat for the Labour Party.

Tom Driberg supported the lowering of the voting age to 18, and the broadcasting of parliamentary debates; he opposed increases to judges' salaries and the extension of Stansted Airport.

Tom Driberg joined with Mikardo and other dissidents to form the "Tribune Group", with the aim of promoting more left-wing policies.

Tom Driberg embraced enthusiastically the climate of the 1960s and the social and cultural freedoms that the decade introduced.

Tom Driberg was impressed with Mick Jagger, to whom he was introduced in 1965, and tried hard over a number of years to persuade the singer to take up active Labour politics.

Tom Driberg began a long association with the satirical magazine Private Eye, supplying it with political gossip and, under the pseudonym "Tiresias", compiling a regular, highly risque prize cryptic crossword puzzle which on one occasion was won by the wife of the future Archbishop of Canterbury.

In 1964, Tom Driberg published a critical study of Moral Re-armament, which brought him attacks from the movement on the basis of his homosexuality and communist past.

Tom Driberg had long considered selling Bradwell Lodge, preferably to the National Trust on a basis that would allow him to continue living there.

Against his will, but with few other sources of income available to him, Tom Driberg fought the June 1970 general election.

Tom Driberg was returned for Barking with a comfortable though reduced majority; nationally, Wilson's government was defeated by Edward Heath's Conservatives.

Tom Driberg's health was failing, though he continued to work on his memoirs.

The former Kremlin archivist Vasili Mitrokhin asserted that the Soviets had blackmailed Tom Driberg into working for the KGB by threatening to expose his homosexuality.

Mitrokhin's "blackmail" story is questioned by historian Jeff Sharlet, on the grounds that by the 1950s and 1960s Tom Driberg's homosexuality had been an open secret in British political circles for many years; he frequently boasted of his "rough trade" conquests to his colleagues.

Wilson quotes Churchill commenting years before that "Tom Driberg is the sort of person who gives sodomy a bad name".

Pincher argued that as homosexual acts were criminal offences in Britain until 1967, Tom Driberg was still vulnerable to blackmail, although he claimed that the MI5 connection secured Tom Driberg a lifelong immunity from prosecution.

Tom Driberg's Labour Party colleague, Leo Abse, offers a more complex explanation: Tom Driberg was an adventurer who loved taking risks and played many parts.

Pride, Irvine maintained, was in Tom Driberg's case mitigated by "the contrary virtue of humility".

Tom Driberg added that if her admiration for him did not extend to their personal life together, that was a private matter.

Tom Driberg prided himself on being an exception to a rule propounded by Cyril Connolly, that the war between the generations is the one war in which everyone changes sides eventually.

Nevertheless, Tom Driberg's incomplete memoir Ruling Passions, when published in June 1977, was a shock to the public and to some of his erstwhile associates, despite advance hints of the book's scandalous content.

Foot added that Tom Driberg "had always been much too ready to look forgivingly on Communist misdeeds, but this attitude was combined with an absolutely genuine devotion to the cause of peace".

In 2015 Simon Danczuk MP claimed that a retired Metropolitan Police detective sergeant had told him that Tom Driberg had been identified as a child abuser by police in 1968, but that no charges were pressed after the Director of Public Prosecutions Norman Skelhorn had been advised that proceeding with the case would not have been in the public interest.

The action takes place during Tom Driberg's brief visit to the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 and deals with the contrast of compromise, represented by the pragmatic Clement Attlee, and post-war idealism, personified by Tom Driberg.