Memories of Malcolm Muggeridge

BY THE TIME I signed up to write my biography
of Malcolm Muggeridge he was already an internationally famous figure. Nowadays, when I tell people I am writing a book about Malcolm Muggeridge, they say "Who's he?"
It is interesting that someone of his fame and celebrity could go, at least as far as young people are concerned, to mean nothing at all.
It is a mark of the way in which TV confers a kind of instant celebrity that people are quickly forgotten when they are no longer on the' screen.
Before his television appearances, Malcolm was not a well-known figure. He was a journalist of repute who had written several books and countless articles. It was almost by accident that he found himself the editor of Punch — where he was at the centre of terrific rows when he attacked Winston Churchill.
By the mid-1950s he started appearing on the BBC and taking to television like a duck to water. He gave up Punch. One of the characteristics which makes his life entertaining from a biographer's point of view is that he never stayed in any job for more than two or three years. He always got bored and fell out with anyone in charge of him.
A common interest in satire brought us together. We met through Claude Cockburn, who had worked with Malcolm on Punch. The two of them had an idea to start a satirical magazine in opposition to Punch.
They were both getting on, however — they were about 60, and I think that when Private Eve arrived they saw it as a continuation of what they had been trying to do at Punch.
Which of course it was, because the founders of Private Eye, particularly Christopher Booker and myself, had been very influenced by the brief period in the '50s when Punch had been quite savagely satirical.
So when I met him, Malcolm became a sort of patron saint of Private Eye and a father figure for me.
He remained so until his death. I used to go and see him regularly at his home in Robertsbridge, in Sussex, where he lived at the bottom of a farm track with his wife Kitty.
I stayed with him so often and talked to him so long that he undoubtedly had more influence on me than any other person I have ever known.
He was an unworldly man with a sharply satirical mind. When I think of Malcolm I always think of the biblical instruction about being as wise as a serpent and as gentle as a dove. He was both wise and gentle.
When Malcolm Lawry was asked to which political party he belonged he replied that he was a Conservative Christian Anarchist. I consider Malcom Muggeridge to be one too. One of the strange things about Malcolm was that he wrote as if he had only discovered Christianity as an old man. This wasn't true at all.
At Cambridge, he became great friends with an Anglican priest called Alec %Idler who later became a famous theologian.
\Tidier belonged to the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, an order with vows of celibacy and poverty. Malcolm fell entirely under his spell and was, at one point, considering becoming ordained.
He had very good insight into the nature of power and political power and politicians generally.
Although it was a simplification on his part to assume, as Auberon Waugh does, that all politicians are to some extent mad, (or as Bran puts
it, "social and emotional cripples"), I think it is basically a healthy attitude to assume that their occasional acts of goodness and altruism are not characteristic and that all forms of power seeking are dangerous.
He was born in 1903. His father, who had a great influence on his early life, was a self-made man, an HG Wells character who had taught himself everything he knew and was a dedicated Fabian Socialist.
I remember seeing Malcolm at the age of 60, sitting in his study with the saintly and beautiful Kitty, niece of Beatrice Webb, and thinking "how wonderful, what an utterly contented way to live."
It was only later that I realised that up to that time the Muggeridges had been living a life of total disorganisation, seldom staying in the same place and only achieving this kind of contented happiness on the threshold of old age.
It was at this stage that Malcolm decided he would give up all the things he knew had bothered him all along: smoking, drinking, women and eating meat.
He made out that he was a vegetarian out of principle, but it wasn't like that at all. He'd always suffered from terrible indigestion which stopped when he gave up meat.
Malcolm's strength as a writer and critic was that he was completely unambitious.
He did not want to sit behind a big editorial desk, he had little interest in possessions of any kind, he had an unworldliness combined with humour and was free of any kind of humbug.
He gave away most of his books, many of which were very valuable, and I cli.;covered later that he gave all the royalties on Something Beautiful for God, his book about Mother Teresa, to her order in Calcutta. It amounted to about L50,000. The above is an edited
extract from a lecture Richard Ingrains delivered last week at The Keys, the Catholic writers' and journalists' guild.