The BBC ‘saint’ who pounced on any woman in reach
As a new book exposes moralist Malcolm Muggeridge as a serial groper, the unholy truth about . . .
THe timing is certainly unfortunate: as loyal devotees of the Malcolm Muggeridge Society prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of Saint Mugg’s death, an official BBC history is published describing him as an ‘incontinent groper’.
For younger readers, Muggeridge, writer, intellectual and latterday Catholic convert, was that charmingly eccentric, whitehaired old man frequently on television with much to say on practically everything, but especially about our ‘sexridden’ society.
For example: ‘The debasing of the sex act is a fundamental cause of our decline.’
Well, few knew better than he. For until he refound his discarded Christianity and then embraced Catholicism at the age of 79, he’d been debasing it himself for decades.
Some of his targets were the wives of friends, as we shall see. Some of them were working at the BBC at the same time as he was, as is made plain by the BBC’s official historian Professor Jean Seaton in her authoritative new book Pinkoes And Traitors, covering the period 19741987.
When Professor Seaton held a seminar for about 40 women talking about life working for the BBC, Muggeridge’s name emerged as a ‘groper’ several times.
‘He’s not remotely in the Jimmy Savile area,’ qualifies Jean Seaton. ‘There isn’t any evidence that I saw that any woman was seriously, heavily or dangerously assaulted by him.
‘Nor was it an abuse of power in the way it was with the pop people, and certainly not a casting couch thing. I wouldn’t have used the word “groper” if it had been that “serious”.’ So what was Muggeridge up to? ‘I think Malcolm was in the habit of just making a grab at any woman who came within grabbing distance,’ says his biographer and friend Richard Ingrams, founder and former editor of Private eye and The Oldie. ‘Sometimes it paid off, most of the time it didn’t.’
Muggeridge’s latelife conversion from groper to puritan gave birth to the waspish, though affectionate, sobriquet Saint Mugg.
even among his many friends and admirers, t he nickname perfectly described t he perceived hypocrisy of a man known by a different nickname among colleagues at the BBC — ‘the Pouncer’. A man of charm and intellectual elegance, he spent most of his 63year marriage to the everpatient, but tortured Kitty as a notorious woman chaser and chancer.
‘I think it was quite justifiable to call him a humbug,’ admits Ingrams. ‘A lot of his friends dropped him when he took to becoming in league with Mrs Whitehouse (the TV standards campaigner) in a moral rearmament type of Christianity. They couldn’t stomach him preaching all about sex and porn.’
One lifelong friend who would have nothing more to do with him was the now dead communist writer Claud Cockburn. The depth of their friendship can be measured in the fact that it had survived a classic Muggeridge ‘grope’ of Cockburn’s wife, Patricia.
As Ingrams relates i n his Muggeridge biography: ‘Patricia . . . compared (Muggeridge) to a Russian peasant, describing an incident when during a dinner party she went upstairs to make a phone call and was pursued by Malcolm, who began to assault her. Outraged, Patricia struck out at him with the telephone, knocked him down and flew into a panic, convinced that she had killed him.’ Loyally, Ingrams ascribes his old friend’s ‘embarrassing and frequently outrageous’ behaviour towards women as being due to Muggeridge’s lifelong insomnia for which he took pills.
But this wasn’t Saint Mugg’s only runin with major’s daughter Patricia Cockburn. One weekend, when the Cockburns were visiting Malcolm and Kitty at their cottage in Sussex, they all went out in the car. Claud, who was driving, was in the front with Kitty, with Malcolm and Patricia in the back.
‘Malcolm had his hand on Patricia’s leg,’ recalls one of their circle. ‘ This was a bad mistake.
‘Patricia was a small but formidable woman and she said to Malcolm: “If you don’t desist, I’ll break your finger.”’
He didn’t, and she did. As Muggeridge whimpered and writhed in pain, his wife Kitty, sensing what was going on, continued to stare stiffly, straight ahead, saying nothing.
Then there was the 1963 dinner party at Boulestin, the famous Covent Garden French restaurant.
Kitty was laid up in St Bartholomew’s hospital and, after visiting her there, Malcolm went on to Boulestin to join up with an old journalistic colleague, postwar foreign correspondent Rene MacColl, who was there with his wife Hermione and their two children.
RICHARD INGRAMS records: ‘Malcolm became very drunk and began fumbling under the table, not only with Mrs MacColl but with her daughter as well,
‘Such behaviour on Malcolm’s part was by no means unusual at the time, but Rene MacColl was outraged, got to his feet, slapped Malcolm’s face and stormed out of the restaurant along with his family.’
Talk of this incident rapidly spread and, to Muggeridge’s great distress, MacColl refused to speak to him ever again.
This was the low point at which Muggeridge decided to give up drink. Never one to do things by half, he also gave up smoking and became a vegetarian. He was 60.
Drink, it must be said, is frequently offered by Saint Mugg’s friends as the reason — some would say the lame excuse — for his habitual groping.
So how different was he after kicking the booze? Had he really given up the habit? Since the evidence uncovered by Professor Seaton at the BBC
ranges over a period some ten to 20 years after the Boulestin affair, one can only conclude that he hadn’t reformed. Yet, simultaneously, the Pouncer had embarked on an extraordinary puritanical crusade.
From the pulpit of St Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh he launched an astonishing attack on the ‘crimeridden, sex-ridden, fear-ridden, neurotic and sensually unstable society’ he claimed Britain had become.
Intriguingly, it came just a year after he had resigned as rector of Edinburgh University in a row with the student body — he refused to allow them free birth pills.
And so his zealous campaign continued: ‘Mini-skirts . . . the mania about sex . . . they’re just degenerate,’ he proclaimed.
Inevitably, he was attacked for his denunciation of t he worldly pleasure of sex, especially by those who knew of his own activities, but Muggeridge adored nothing more than being i n the cross- hairs of controversy.
Some accused him of being an old man who, having enjoyed more than his fair share of sex, now wanted to stop others from enjoying it, too.
The polemicist Christopher Hitchens, a long-time acquaintance, mocked him for being not so much a man who had given up sex, but an ageing man whom sex had given up.
Everyone knew, however, that religion really had a strong hold on the Croydon- born, Cambridgeeducated son of H.T. Muggeridge, a lawyer’s clerk who’d became the Labour MP for Romford, Essex.
Indeed, while at Cambridge the former grammar schoolboy had briefly considered taking Holy Orders, but had become disillusioned with organised religion.
Now, out of his renewed spiritual immersion emerged the television documentary which introduced Mother Teresa to the world and told about her wonderful work among the poor in Calcutta, which he turned into his best- selling book Something Beautiful For God.
ALwAYS a generous and emotional man, he gave all the considerable book royalties to Mother Teresa. During the years when Kitty was living with a congenitally unfaithful husband she displayed remarkable equanimity.
She busied herself with their four children (one son was killed skiing aged 20) and then writing books, in particular, jointly authoring a biography of her Aunt Bo — her mother’s formidable sister Beatrice webb, a leading member of the socialist Fabian Society. But her place in literary folklore probably resides in one pithy observation about the late TV host Sir David Frost — ‘he rose without trace’.
Kitty was blessed with an aura of sanctity which hid a cauldron of pain — she was ‘the real saint in the family’, as one family friend puts it.
The fact that Malcolm was a groper was bad enough, but most painful were the desolate years when she was fully aware of his passionate and, at times, tempestuous affair with Lady Pamela Berry, wife of the late proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, Lord Hartwell.
Muggeridge had worked for the newspaper as foreign correspondent, leader writer and deputy editor.
Several times Malcolm and Kitty decided to part, but it was never for long. In his autobiography, the historian A.J.P. Taylor, a close friend of both, comically described one of the couple’s partings at a Manchester railway station.
He had Malcolm running along the platform keeping up with the departing train cr y i ng out: ‘Goodbye, Kitty, goodbye. I’m sure our paths will one day cross again.’ The following day, they were back together.
‘I’m sure Malcolm felt guilty later in life about his behaviour with women, especially about t he uninvited pursuit of them,’ says Richard Ingrams, clearly choosing his words with great care.
HE ADDS: ‘ The thing Malcolm regretted most of all was the affair with Lady Pamela which went on for a long, long time and about which Kitty was desperate. ‘Basically, you see, he was devoted to Kitty. He always felt very guilty that he would upset her, which he certainly did.’
As for the Malcolm Muggeridge Society, it is taking a very relaxed attitude to Professor Seaton’s r evelations. Its i nternational president is Muggeridge’s adoring niece Sally Muggeri dg e , a businesswoman, Anglican church commissioner and mother. Groping? ‘I don’t have any worries about it,’ she says. ‘I grew up in the Sixties and know about these things.’
Through the society she has just reissued Something Beautiful For God, and is planning further offerings of her uncle’s brilliant writings through to the 25th anniversary of his death in November.
‘His religious writings have been a great spiritual enhancement for me,’ she says. ‘ He and my Aunt Kitty were enormously lovely.
‘I looked through the new BBC book and there’s no suggestion of any paedophilia or anything like that. Malcolm was indeed very “outgoing”, but he was a healthily heterosexual man.’
when Muggeridge was received into the Catholic church in 1982, the loyal Kitty was received into it alongside him.
Their last years were spent simply at their Sussex cottage, reading the Bible and the Psalms together every night, he dying in 1990 and she four years later.
Still, even the most ardent of his admirers will admit the man had feet of clay.
‘My uncle was anything but a saint,’ says Sally. ‘ The society has never tried to paint him other than as a man with great gifts who also had serious flaws.’