A born defector

Spectator, The, Apr 26, 2003 by Vestey, Michael

Radio

Since Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the most famous and illustrious journalists of the last century, died in 1990 little has been heard of his prolific sayings, writings and numerous television programmes. I understand, though, his 1930s novel Winter In Moscow is in paperback, an important book exposing the evils of Soviet communism. Richard Ingrams wrote his biography but, as Muggeridge himself would have acknowledged, television success is as ephemeral as many other occupations.

Last Saturday, though, some of this was redressed by Radio Four when Miles Kington presented an hour-long programme about his life and work in The Archive Hour - St Mugg, a reference to the nickname he acquired during his final religious phase. Kington described him as the `best-known gadfly of journalism ... the court jester of the media. the smiling face that pointed out the emperor had no clothes on'. He played the famous exchange between Muggeridge and the critic Alan Brien in which the latter observed, `What does worry me about you is that, I think, you are a born defector. I won't say that you mess on your own doorstep, not at least until you've moved, and once you've moved you go around and throw stones though the window and set fire to the basement.'

Brien cited his period on the Manchester Guardian and his later abuse of the paper, his time in the 1930s Soviet Union and his disillusionment with communism, his 'outstanding' editorship of Punch, which he thereafter hated, his fame as a television journalist and `now you say it's an idiot's lantern', his varied and active sex life and the later denunciation of sex as appalling and ludicrous. Disarmingly, Muggeridge, with those unforgettable stretched vowels. replied, 'I think it's extraordinarily true. Alan thinks it's a kicking in the teeth but it isn't that, it's a deep sense of dissatisfaction with everything one's done and everything one's been associated with.' Re added, `Alan puts it very flatteringly as a matter of fact because it's not true that I was a particularly good editor of Punch.'

Brien had concluded by saying, `Now what I would like to see at the age of 71 is that you should join the Roman Catholic Church and prophesy ten years later you would leave it in a blaze of publicity.' Although Muggeridge said that he loved the Catholic Church he wouldn't join it, partly because of the truth of what Brien had said. In fact, though, he did but died before he could defect from that, assuming, of course, that he might have done if the pattern of his life was anything to go by. Born in Croydon to a socialist father who became a Labour MP for a time, Muggeridge, after studying chemistry at Cambridge which he hadn't liked, eventually joined the Manchester Guardian as it then was, and was posted to Moscow with his wife Kitty.

At that time he regarded capitalism, as Marx had foretold, as irretrievably moribund and doomed, offering its captive workers no hope. As Kington put it, he soon saw through the charade and realised that Stalin was introducing a tyranny not a utopia, starving people to death not feeding them. He tried to warn his readers but the Left were blinded by wishful thinking and refused to believe him. He published Winter In Moscow, the novel's hero based on himself.

His contempt for visiting socialists grew. `For the most part,' he said in a later television programme, `they were intellectuals of the Left, privy councillors to be, contributors to the New Statesman, the flower of our Western civilisation ... I can hear them now in the eager high-pitched voices explaining away privations they'd never have to endure, an oppression that would never reach them. The most publicised and certainly the most fatuous of all the visitors was, alas, Bernard Shaw.' He turned on his friends, the rather ridiculous socialist thinkers, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, whose book, Soviet Communism, A New Civilisation, had been, they proudly told him, thoroughly checked by the Soviet ambassador to London.

Although irreverent, a natural satirist and iconoclast, he was clearly searching for something which turned out to be, towards the end, religious faith. Was he really a hypocrite, people wondered, with his earlier womanising and then rejection of sex, his support for Mary Whitehouse and Cliff Richard in the Festival of Light which was opposed to what it called moral pollution, and his admiration for and promotion of Mother Teresa. Having sent up most aspects of modern life he became the target of satire, particularly in a sketch by Peter Cook, previously not broadcast, in which Muggeridge and a theologian friend set off in the steps of St George in Willesden, a parody of a programme Muggeridge had made about St Paul. No, I think Alan Brien got it right: he was a born defector and a vastly wise and entertaining one at that.

Copyright Spectator Apr 26, 2003