Abstract
I have long been in awe of John Freeman. As a young man I first knew of him as the unseen interviewer on the famous BBC programme Face to Face. Later, when I was a politics student reading about the Attlee government, I discovered Freeman was one of the two ministers who resigned alongside Nye Bevan from that government in 1951.
For anyone on the left, this was always seen as a principled decision by all three to try to protect the principles on which the NHS started. In this book Purcell argues that while Freeman left in protest against a plan to massively increase expenditure on the armed forces, Bevan left in a fit of pique; the third minister to resign – Harold Wilson – did so totally for opportunist reasons. If that's true it worked for Wilson, as 12 years later he became the left's successful candidate to become Labour leader.
I actually met Freeman when I worked at London Weekend Television in the early 80s. As a lowly producer, it wasn't likely that I would come across the much-respected chairman in the company's headquarters on the South Bank, but by complete coincidence we both lived in Barnes in south-west London and had six year olds in the same class at the local primary school.
So I first met John Freeman when he was picking up his daughter from school. He didn't look like the chairman of a company – he wore denim jeans, scruffy clothes and always had a fag hanging out of his mouth – but I plucked up the courage to say Hello and explain that I was one of his employees. He was always courteous without being over-friendly and soon after he retired from LWT, so I never really got to know him.
Roll on nearly 20 years. By then I was Director-General of the BBC and I wrote to Freeman and reminded him of our LWT connections. I asked if he would let the BBC make a documentary about him as one of the few ministers of that post-war Labour government still alive.
He wrote back very politely but told me in no uncertain terms to “Get lost”, which is why I jumped at the chance to review Hugh Purcell's biography.
As Purcell explains, Freeman had an eclectic career. He rose from private to major in the Second World War, was a minister in the Attlee government, then left politics to work for the BBC where he was most famous for presenting Face to Face. He moved on to be editor of the New Statesman, later became British ambassador in India and then the USA, spent another decade first saving and then running LWT and finally became a professor at Davis University in California.
In that time he had four wives and numerous lovers, including Barbara Castle and Edna O'Brien. Freeman died earlier this year having had a remarkable life which he didn't want examined, explained or discussed, which is why he refused to co-operate with Purcell's book and refused any journalist who wanted to know more about him – including me. In many ways that makes him even more interesting.
What the biography does tell us is that Freeman regretted his early politics and would have voted for Thatcher in the 80s. As he explained to one of his students, he had come to believe that following policies of economic collectivism and state-directed policies inevitably led to state-directed governments. He said: “I suddenly realised that was something I did not want… I had already done considerable harm by supporting such ideas.”
It also tells us that having initially dismissed Richard Nixon as “a man of no principle whatsoever” Freeman came to admire him when he was the US ambassador and believed his earlier assessment wrong. He also became a close friend and confidante of Henry Kissinger who admired Freeman greatly and saw him as man with “fine human qualities”.
Freeman was clearly brilliant, but by the normal standards we all live by, also deeply flawed. As one friend says in the book, the key to his character was “he didn't do anything for very long in his life, whether it was marriage or a job”. What the book doesn't give is a satisfactory insight into why not.
Was it his upbringing? He didn't seem to like either his mother or his father. Was it the impact of going to war as a young man? Was it being in the unpleasant world of politics at such a young age? Was it seeing less talented people like Harold Wilson making progress by playing the game? Or, more likely, was he was just one of those people who was easily bored, impatient with others and could easily compartmentalise his life?
To the historian it doesn't matter. For more than 50 years he was in places that mattered, where great events were taking place, whether it be immediate post-war Britain, post-colonialist India or the US at the time of Vietnam and Watergate.
But I am still left wondering what drove John Freeman, what was it that enabled him to wipe out the past and not look back on so many occasions? In short, having read the book I still don't know what made him tick. If he's looking down he'll be pleased; that is what he always intended.
And I am still in awe of the man.