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Life Span: Born 1905; Died 12th August 1976, London, UK

Education: Driberg was sent to the independent fee-paying boys' preparatory school at Crowborough, Sussex. He then went as a day-boy to a local school called the Grange. It was here at the age of eleven where he began sexual experimentation with other boys. He then went to Lancing where he came to know Evelyn Waugh. While at Lancing he started to take an interest in politics and to develop socialist leanings. During one of the holidays he joined the Brighton branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Two of the other boys at Lancing complained to the housemaster about Tom Driberg's unwelcome advances. He was punished and left Lancing a term early under a cloud. For a few months he worked as a schoolmaster, teaching English at a preparatory school in Bournemouth. He went to Christ Church, Oxford, and began to take part in the decadent lifestyle.

Work: He wanted to become a journalist but could not see a way of achieving it. He moved to London and took a top-floor room in Frith Street. He signed on with Jay theatrical employment agency in Shaftesbury Avenue. One of the jobs he was given was to sit as an extra in the audience of Queen's Hall for a concert in the silent film The Constant Nymph, directed by Basil Dean. However, he soon had no money to pay rent, but was fortunate to find an all-night café in Church Street (later Romily Street) where he was given a job as a waiter from 6 pm to 6 am. He slept upstairs with the two other workers. Above them was a brothel. He found that he was having to deal with a motley bunch of customers and to some extent this cured him of his shyness. This was a happy period for him but when Edith Sitwell got to know of his circumstances she was horrified and arranged for Beverley Baxter, who was managing editor of the Daily Express to consider him for a job, and in January 1928 he was taken on as a reporter. Within a month he had a scoop when he discovered the arrival of the Moral Re-Armament movement. The story was run on for several days starting on the front page on 28th. February, 1928. He continued to take an interest in the movement and in the 1950s was invited to lecture on the subject at Oslo and Göteborg universities. His friend David Ferrer of Secker & Warberg also commissioned a book which came out in 1964 as The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament. 
After a few months Tom Driberg was transferred to help Peter Sewell write his column of social gossip Talk of London. After Peter Sewell retired Tom Driberg took over. In May 1933 the proprietor Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken) decided that the column should be replaced by something in the style used by Time magazine in the USA. The new column was headed These Names Make News. Then Lord Beaverbrook decided that it should be signed pseudonymously as William Hickey after the late eighteenth century diarist. Tom Driberg wrote the column until 1943, but also did much travelling to cover major news stories. 
In about 1941 Tom Driberg was expelled from the Communist Party, although he was never told why. However, this turned out to be useful when he was campaigning to become an MP. In 1942 he was elected as an independent MP for Maldon in Essex. Three years later he held the seat as a Labour MP, and in 1950 he was elected as the Labour MP for Barking. 
He left the Express in June 1943 after being sacked by the editor who thought that his parliamentary activities conflicted with his journalism. He was then given a job by Bill Richardson, the editor of Reynold News, a left-wing Sunday newspaper belonging to the Co-operative movement. He wrote a column under his own name which was more political. The paper became the Sunday Citizen in 1962, but in 1966 Tom Driberg was sacked because the paper could no longer afford his salary. The paper closed in 1967. He subsequently worked freelance and contributed to the "London Diary' of the New Statesman, and wrote book reviews for the monthly Books and Bookman. 
In 1949 the Labour Party conference elected him to the National Executive Committee, and he was re-elected every year from 1950 to 1972. In January 1954 he visited Rupert Croft-Cooke who was in Brixton prison after a conviction for gross indecency. 
In 1956 Tom Driberg was temporarily out of Parliament and was working more or less full-time as a journalist. He travelled to Moscow to see the spy Guy Burgess to get the story of his disappearance from London with Donald Maclean. The story appeared in Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background.
Tom Driberg was chair of the Labour Party in 1957-58 and in 1965 he was appointed as a Privy Counsellor. He had been an MP for thirty years when he retired in February 1974. In the early 1970s he anonymously compiled the crossword puzzles for Private Eye. In 1975 he was made a life peer and became Lord Bradwel

tom_driberg_mystery_moral_rearmament.html

Knitting Circle Driberg Page .html

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRdribergT.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/446305.s

New Driberg biog Page .html
this page has new biog of him and book review
from Tribune Magazine UK 1964

JP Thornton-duesbery wrote a famous MRA rebuttal to Dribergs book

sept 18 2012 yahoo aa history lovers (where I am banned and censored)

john I am the author of the page bill last sent you
about the book in question.
I am also the editor of the aa history website
www.aabibliography.com
I am banned from the yahoo aa history lovers by glenn c
see main page of site

there was a pro moral rearmament book written in response to
dribergs book (I have yet to obtain copy I would like pdf copy)
it is by thornton duesberry whose father was big in the church of england. Julian P Duesberry

The Open Secret of MRA (An Examination of Mr. Driberg's 'Critical Examination' of Moral Re-Armament-(see Dribert book listed below) by J. P. Thornton-Duesbery, M. A. (Master of St. Peter's College, Oxford), copyright 1964,142 pages. The author tells what MRA is, how it works, who finances it, and what it is out to do in the world.

he also wrote a sharing pamphlet which is very hard to find
Sharing by JP Thornton-Duesberry Oxford Group Pamphlet $110 -$150

I write this kind of jokingly but
in the mra book you have driberg almost called (outed) buchman as a homosexual several times. strange a queen outing a queen (buchman was very effeminiate in manners but I have never seen proof he was gay)

from the ken ragge book critical of aa
In the latter part of the 30s, it became important to AA to disassociate itself, at least in the public eye, from the Oxford Group because of the growing distrust and contempt the American public held for the Group. In August 1936, Frank Buchman was quoted by a major New York newspaper:

I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism.... Of course, I don't condone everything the Nazis do. Anti-Semitism? Bad, naturally. I suppose Hitler sees a Karl Marx in every Jew. But think what it would mean if Hitler surrendered to the control of God.... The world needs a dictatorship of the living spirit of God.... Human problems aren't economic. They're moral, and they can't be solved by immoral measures. They could be solved within a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy, and they could be solved through a God-control-led Fascist dictatorship.(56)*

* In The Open Secret of MRA, a defense of Buchman and Buchmanism, the complete text of the New York World-Telegram article is included. It is interesting to note the differences in the original from 1936 and AA's abbreviated version published in 1984 on pages 170-171 of Pass It On. AA quoted in a fashion that put Buchman in a much better light than even the Buchmanites had attempted to. Most of what is quoted here was left out of the AA version. Perhaps most interesting is that, in the AA version, "the control of" is dropped out of mid-sentence, changing "surrender to the control of God" to "surrender to God." Apparently Oxford Group language was still considered too hot to print in AA literature, even when quoting Oxford Group's leader, fifty years later.
These and other charges of Nazi sympathies,* didn't sit well with the American people. Frank Buchman and his organization's guidance were in serious question.

* The Buchmanites claimed complete innocence. After the war, they announced the matter settled with what they said was a copy of a document found by the Allies after the fall of Nazi Germany. Time magazine, with all its resources at its disposal, made a search for and, apparently, never could find any such document in the Allied records. Tom Driberg, in his The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament, quotes a story that was found in the Nazi secret police records that an ex-AA member might find amusing. A Swedish woman who had been angrily denouncing the Nazis, after attending an Oxford Group meeting, felt guilty and proceeded to "make amends," writing a letter of apology to the Nazi leader. Buchman's statements served notice on the American people how misguided and dangerous it can be to believe one's own thoughts are the Word of God.

Though they pale against the charges of Nazi sympathies, other criticisms were leveled against the Oxford Group. Most involved arrogance due to Oxford Group's belief that they alone were sane and getting direct messages from God and that others, even members of Christian churches, were lost sheep. These charges included blindness to thinking, undercutting churches, hypocrisy, self-congratulatory sanctimoniousness and an inability to tolerate criticism.

end kenn ragge quote

The charges are proved

25th September 1964 from the Tribune Magazine Archive

Moral Re-armament, Oxford Group, Tom Driberg, Baron Bradwell, Rearmament, Blame, Frank N. D. Buchman, Religion / Belief

The Mystery of Moral Rearmament Torn Driherg (Seeker & Warburg, 35s.) The Open Secret of MRA J. P. Thornton-Duesbery (Blandford Press, 12s. 6d.) IN ATTEMPTING to review Tom Driberg's book on Moral Rearmament, P ought at the outset to declare an interest. It is an interest in the Christian Church, Catholic and apostolic. To me the Oxford Group, both in its earlier manifestation, or under the later banner of Moral Rearmament, is a deviation from the true ends of historic Christianity, or to put it even more simply it is a substitute for the real thing. Therefore, whatever respect I may have, and do have, for some of its adherents and sponsors, in principle I am agin it.

It does not surprise me that the defenders of Dr. Buchman and Mr.

Peter Howard etc, have persuaded themselves that such an attitude springs from envy, or malice, or blameworthy ignorance, or communistic leanings, or a mixture of the lot.

For example the Master of St. Peter's College, Oxford, in his book The Open Secret of MRA which should be read as a reply to Tom Driberg's, spends his time in the attempt to demonstrate that The Mystery of Moral Rearmament is an exercise in bad faith.

This ragbag of quotations only served to strengthen my conviction that on the contrary it is a scrupulously fair exercise in sound scholarship.

My own objections to Moral Rearmament are on the following counts. Philosophically, or if you like ideologically, it is, to use Tom Driberg's word, an incantation rather than an argument. Sociologically it has most of the marks of escapist pietism, with a most unhealthy mixture of fascist attitudes. Morally, though heaven knows I am no paragon of virtue, I find a persistent dishonesty about Moral Rearmament which makes it acutely distasteful.

Now these reactions to any movement are grave charges, and this makes it all the more important (particularly if they are shared by many people, as I have every reason to know they are so shared) that the evidence to support, or to refute,• them should be examined comprehensively as well as competently. In this regard some sort of book like that under review had to be written. Does Tom Driberg's book meet that imperative need? It does. It is factual, amply documented and written alike with real scholarship and a most agreeable styta.

More important however to me, and many like me, does it provide conclusive evidence about the many charges against Moral Rearmament which I have mentioned? Again — it does. With continuous thoroughness the intellectual value of the so-called ideology of Moral Rearmament is examined on page after page. When that ideology pretends to be precise it is shown to be negligible, "Guidance".

"life changing", sharing "the four absolutes" may have emotional values and bestow personal blessings, but as an expression of the Christian faith once delivered to the saints they are trivial and often perverse.

Where does Moral Rearmament stand sociologically? Here Tom Driberg is at his devastating best. When the record is not dubious : it is the story, so often repeated in modern times, of the Establishment masquerading as revolutionaries and engaging in skirmishes against fringe evils to disguise their fundamental unwillingness to meet the real enemy.

Worse still Moral Rearmament is part of the conspiracy to persuade. Christians that the first tamet for the Christian to shoot at rommunism, and the main objective of Christian advocacy and enterprise is its overthrow.

Finally as to honesty, the author goes to the greatest pains, and sometimes I think to the point of superinterrogation, to examine the claims that Moral Rearmament so vociferously makes, and the bona fides of its literature of propaganda. With what result? As so many of us have been forced to believe, "absolute honesty" may appear on the cover of the Oxford Movement, it is very infrequently recorded in the story itself. All Buchman's geese are swank and the pathetic parade of so-called, and often self-styled, "leaders" of the world in support of MRA's claim to have settled dock strikes here, and pacified whole countries elsewhere is just ludicrous if it were not morally mischievous. ,; If I had to put intava sentence my hostility to MRA aitif_nly genuine gratitude to Tom Drib erg for writing this book it would be , Isornething like this. Organised Christianjty ,is having quite enough trouble . today in making its true witness to, -a critical world without the grate itl - ous addition of problems created by niowements like MRA.

DONALD SOPER