Tom Driberg - Appraisal

Appraisal

In his will Driberg had stipulated that at his funeral his friend Gerald Irvine should deliver an "anti-panegyric" in place of the normal eulogy. Irvine obliged, with a detailed assessment of Driberg against the Seven Deadly Sins, finding him guilty of Gluttony, Lust and Wrath, but relatively free from Avarice and Envy and entirely untouched by Sloth. Pride, Irvine maintained, was in Driberg's case mitigated by "the contrary virtue of humility". Ena did not attend the funeral; she gave a single press interview in which she expressed "huge respect for Tom's journalistic skills, political power and championship of the underdog". She added that if her admiration for him did not extend to their personal life together, that was a private matter.

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. Mervyn Stockwood, in his address at the funeral service, praised Driberg as "a searcher for truth", whose loyalty to the socialist cause was beyond question. This verdict was echoed by Michael Foot, who in a postscript to Driberg's memoir wrote of Driberg's "great services" to the Labour Party in the various offices that he occupied. Foot believed that Driberg's homosexual passion, rather than bringing him fulfilment, had "condemned him to a lifetime of deep loneliness" The Times obituarist described Driberg as "A journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual", the first time, according to journalist Christopher Hitchens, that the newspaper had ever defined a public figure specifically as homosexual. Nevertheless, 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. Driberg's candid revelations of his "cottaging" and his descriptions of casual oral sex were called by one commentator "the biggest outpouring of literary dung a public figure has ever flung into print." The comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore depicted Driberg as a sexual predator, wearing "fine fishnet stockings" and cavorting with a rent boy, in a sketch, "Back of the Cab", which they recorded in 1977. More vituperation followed when Pincher's allegations of Driberg's links with the Russian secret service were published in 1981; Pincher christened him "Lord of the Spies". However, Foot dismissed these accusations as typical of the "fantasies of the secret service world that seem to have taken possession of Pincher's mind". Foot added that 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 his 2004 biographical sketch Davenport-Hines describes Driberg as "a sincere if eccentric Christian socialist who detested racism and colonialism", who at the same time "could be pompous, mannered, wayward, self-indulgent, ungrateful, bullying and indiscreet". As to the apparent contradiction between sincere Christianity and promiscuous homosexuality, Wheen argues that "there had been a recognisable male homosexual subculture in the Anglo-Catholic movement since the late nineteenth century". This theme is explored in a paper by David Hilliard of Flinders University, who maintains that "the conflict between Protestantism and Anglo-Catholicism within the Church of England was ... regularly depicted by Protestant propagandists as a struggle between masculine and feminine styles of religion". Driberg throughout his life was a devout Anglo-Catholic; Wheen suggests that Evelyn Waugh, in Brideshead Revisited, may have had Driberg in mind when the novel's protagonist Charles Ryder is warned on arrival at Oxford to "beware of Anglo-Catholics—they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents."

Driberg was the subject of a play, Tom and Clem, which was staged at London's Aldwych Theatre in April 1997. The action takes place during 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 Driberg. Michael Gambon's portrayal of Driberg, as "a slovenly, paunchy Bacchus with a mouth that can suddenly gape like a painfully-hooked fish", won special praise from The Times critic Benedict Nightingale.