From Crowborough to Soho
This is the story of a man born and raised in Crowborough who went on to become a leading journalist and politician in the swinging sixties, but he also had a shadier side to him and was well known on the london sex party scene and was also suspected of being a Russian spy. This is the story of Tom Driberg.
Thomas Edward Neil Driberg was born on 22nd May 1905. He was the youngest of 3 sons. His father John worked for the Indian Civil Service.
Tom went to a fee paying prep school in the area before moving onto Lancing college. At Lancing he started to take an interest in politics and became interested in socialism. He joined the Brighton branch of the UK communist party at the age of 15 and one of his first tasks was to try and sell the socialist paper on the streets of Crowborough during the school holidays – a thankless task even in those days.
While at Lancing he also continued with his other passion – that of sexual exploration with other boys. After receiving complaints from other students about unwelcomed advances Tom left college a term early and went to work as a schoolmaster in Bournemouth.
In 1924 he went to Christ College Oxford to study classics but he failed to graduate preferring to take part in political activities and the party life rather than concentrating on the studies.
During the general strike worked at the communist party headquarters and began writing for the communist paper – the Sunday Worker.
In 1928 he joined the Daily Express as a gossip columnist. He impressed the owner, Lord Beaverbrook, so much that he was given his own column – These Names Makes News which he wrote as the papers first William Hickey.
During the Spanish civil war in 1939, Driberg was anti-British government over there non-intervention policy. He visited Spain as a journalist during the war and also helped to take food supplies to Republican army.
Driberg was recruited by MI5 as an agent. His appointment led to him being suspended by the communist party in 1941. MI5 suspected that this must be part of an infiltration by the KGB, but it was only after the war that it became known that the person who had identified Driberg was none other than Anthony Blunt.
Meanwhile, Driberg had started out on his political career and was elected to the House of Commons as an Independent candidate for the Maldon constituency.
In 1943 he was dismissed by the Daily Express and joined Reynolds News. He later went on to write for the Daily Mail and the New Statesman.
During the second world war Driberg joined the Labour party. He retained his seat in Parliament in the 1945 election and elected to the party’s National Executive in 1949.
In 1950 the part severely censured him for gross neglect of parliamentary duty when he took 3 months off to cover the Korean war.
In his book, Spycatcher (1987), Peter Wright, who had previously worked for MI5 claimed: “Since the 1960s a wealth of material about the penetration of the latter two bodies had been flowing into MI5’s files, principally from two Czechoslovakian defectors named Frolik and August. They named a series of Labour Party politicians and trade union leaders as Eastern Bloc agents… Tom Driberg was another MP named by the Czech defectors. I went to see Driberg myself, and he finally admitted that he was providing material to a Czech controller for money. For a while we ran Driberg on, but apart from picking up a mass of salacious detail about Labour Party peccadilloes, he had nothing of interest for us.”
During the 40’s Driberg had become friends with Guy Burgess and he was commissioned to write a book on the Soviet Spy. Both were known homosexuals and it was rumoured that had a sexual relationship while in the Soviet Union. According to the Mitrokihn Archive (The Mitrokhin Archive is a collection of notes made secretly by KGB Major Vasili Mitrokhin during his thirty years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. When he defected to Great Britain, he brought the Archive with him. Two books, Sword and the Shield and The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, based on the Archive and hundreds other sources were published in 1992 and 2005, which gives details about much of the Soviet Union’s clandestine intelligence operations around the world. The books were written by British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew. Their publication provoked parliamentary inquiries in the U.K., India, and Italy.) Driberg had been photographed in a homosexual encounter as part of a trap to force him to spy for the KGB.
Driberg served as chairmen of the Labour Party executive in1957-58. He lost his seat in Maldonin 1958 and then moved to Barking where he regained his place in parliament in 1959.
In the early 60’s Driberg was a well-known frequenter on the London homosexual scene with the Tory peer Lord Boothby. Driberg was once quoted as saying the only enjoyable sex was with someone you didn’t know and wouldn’t likely meet again. Winston Churchill described Driberg as ‘a man who gave sodamy a bad name’. It was at one of these parties that Lord Boothby met the gangster Ronnie Kray, an affair which was to lead to a major embarrassment for the Conservative party. In July 1964, the Sunday Mirror led with a story under the headline: “Peer and a gangster: Yard probe.” The newspaper claimed police were investigating an alleged homosexual relationship between a “prominent peer and a leading thug in the London underworld”, who is alleged to be involved in a West End protection racket.
The following week the newspaper revealed that it had a picture of the peer and the gangster sitting on a sofa. Rumours soon began circulating that the peer was Lord Boothby and the gangster was Ronnie Kray. Stories were also circulating that Harold Wilson and Cecil King, the chairman of the International Publishing Corporation were conspiring in an attempt to overthrow the Conservative government led by Alec Douglas -Home.
Colin Coote, one of Boothby’s friends, used his contacts in the media to discover what was going on. As journalist John Pearson pointed out: “By doing nothing he (Boothby) would tacitly accept the Sunday Mirror’s accusations. On the other hand, to sue for libel would mean facing lengthy and expensive court proceedings which could ruin him financially - apart from whatever revelations the Sunday Mirror could produce to support its story.” Boothby was then approached by two leading Labour Party figures, Gerald Gardiner, QC and solicitor Arnold Goodman. They offered to represent Lord Boothby in any libel case against the newspaper. Goodman was Wilson’s “Mr Fixit” and Gardiner was later that year to become the new prime-minister’s Lord Chancellor.
John Pearson has argued that Driberg was behind this cover-up: “As an important member of the Labour executive, Driberg had a lot of influence, particularly over Harold Wilson, and he would certainly have used it to encourage Arnold Goodman’s rescue operation which would save Boothby and himself. All of which undoubtedly explains why, after the settlement, there was not a squeak in parliament about the case - and why instead there seemed an overwhelming cross-bench willingness to let sleeping dogs, however dirty, lie - and go on lying.”
Driberg left the House of Commons in 1974 and a year later became Baron Bradwell.
He died of a heart attack on 12th August 1976.
His autobiography Ruling Passions was published posthumously in 1977.
Sources:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRdribergT.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Driberg,_Baron_Bradwell