Tom Driberg

A mysterious, influential and often extremely dubious man of affairs, Tom Driberg embodied many of the contradictions and ambiguities of his time. At Oxford, he was the friend of Auden, Betjeman, Hugh Gaitskell and his old school-chum, Evelyn Waugh; working on Beaverbrook's Express in the Thirties, he invented the modern gossip column; a close friend of Burgess and Maclean, he was widely suspected of being a double-agent, working for both British Intelligence and the KGB. As Chairman of the Labour Party, he was closely involved with the Wilson government, and an intimate of Nye Bevan and Richard Crossman; a keen High churchman, he was even better known as a cottaging habitue of London lavatories; a stalwart socialist, on the far left of the Labour Party, he was also an ardent socialite with a Georgian mansion in Essex.