Journalism without idealism is little more than the daily vomit of convenient facts in the service of power and money. It’s a dreary and pitiful occupation, and that’s how much of the public regards it. At the other end of the trade, however, idealistic journalism or “guerrilla journalism” can easily curdle into self-pleasuring smugness – the romanticism of the floppy-haired lone hero, one foot forever hovering by a nearby barricade. Who was it that said more journalists had been ruined by self-importance than by alcohol?
So, trouble in both directions. The life of Claud Cockburn, here deftly narrated by his son, the exceptional and award-winning foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn, provides the perfect glass through which to squint at this conundrum.
Cockburn senior was a hero to my generation of would-be journalists. He was the living bridge between the political storms of the 1930s and the early satire-boom of Private Eye in the 1960s. He is, if not the no man’s land between intolerable self-righteousness and sucking up, then perhaps an exotic one man’s land.
And he was properly successful: Cockburn’s scoops in his self-published newsletter the Week alleged the existence of a powerful pro-Hitler clique of British aristocrats, politicians, and business leaders he called the “Cliveden set”. It briefly made a young outsider-journalist, who had resigned from a well-paid role at the Times on principle (he was against capitalism, particularly after interviewing Al Capone), one of the most influential reporters in Europe. In those days he was read as avidly in Berlin and Moscow as in London.
Claud Cockburn could only have emerged from the specific conditions of the worst decades of the 20th century. He witnessed the seething despair of Germans under French occupation after the First World War; the crash in Wall Street and the US depression; Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazism; the Spanish Civil War. Like so many others, he became a communist.
But little in the story is quite what it seems. Cockburn’s family was distinguished, a Scottish legal and literary dynasty. His father, Henry, was a rebellious if imperially minded diplomat in China and Korea. Claud enjoyed his private boarding school. His decision later to become a communist was not an overwhelmingly moral-ideological one, but more about how he read his times. His first partner, the American writer Hope Hale, said, “It was the way history was going, he told me, and he wanted to play his part in it. If he had been born a century earlier, he said, he would have been an empire builder.”
If ever there was a period in which scepticism of all sources of authority seemed virtuous, it was the “low, dishonest decade” of appeasement. With journalism dominated by a small number of press moguls and effective government censorship, this was a time made for the pirate journalist.
But such a role needs a cool contempt for authority and a willingness to avoid a comfortable living; traits which a secure background may bolster more effectively than a scrabbling one: see also George Orwell.
In his final paragraph, Patrick Cockburn notes that in seeking to break the media monopoly of the powerful and wealthy “personal courage and resolution count for much, as do a willingness to endure poverty and danger”. Claud had all of these.
During the Spanish Civil War, he behaved at least as bravely as Orwell. Using the nom de plume Frank Pitcairn while writing for the communist Daily Worker, he was very nearly executed by an anarchist column as he tried to get to the front line. Later, as an International Brigader himself, he took part in a suicidal charge against nationalist troops north of Madrid. His physical courage included a willingness to dodge into Nazi Berlin under a false passport, and to return to Hitler’s Germany to help rescue the children of a prominent communist sympathiser.
Among his closest friends were communists later murdered by Stalin, but Cockburn’s instinctive scepticism about all forms of authority, including that of the Comintern, saved him from the spiritual agonies that tormented other communists after the Nazi-Soviet pact. As his friend Malcolm Muggeridge put it: “No God failed him because communism never assumed a God-like shape in his eyes.”
Perhaps because of this ideological distancing, Cockburn found it easy to make friends. Many women found him magnetic. A heavy smoker and drinker, he had serial long-term lovers, including Jean Ross, the basis for Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin – though Ross was a much more political, courageous, ambitious figure than her portrayal by Liza Minnelli as a good-time gamine in Cabaret.
His big journalistic dilemma came when the era of appeasing government was replaced by the clearer moral confrontation of the Second World War itself. Where was the need for pirate journalism then? By the 1940s, writes Patrick Cockburn, “total scepticism about the motives and actions of governments was no longer justified on an almost-daily basis by their misdeeds”.
It took Claud Cockburn a long time to recognise that the world had changed. When he did, he turned to books, freelance journalism from his base in Ireland, and later to the new satirical journalism championed by Private Eye, where he became a mentor for Richard Ingrams. If, as Marx said, history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce, Cockburn found he fitted in rather well to the farcical times of the Profumo scandal and Peter Cook in his prime.
But where, between a time of political lies and the more complex if comfortable world of postwar democracy, did that leave him? His son says that he retained two core beliefs. “The first was scepticism, to the point of unalloyed cynicism, about the doings of all in authority, high and low. But secondly, he also believed that decision-makers were weaker, more incompetent, more divided and more self-destructively corrupt than they like people to understand, and hence more vulnerable to journalistic attack and exposure.”
This remains a journalistic instinct today. The political circumstances, however, are very different, as is the media. “Unalloyed cynicism” about politics has gone mainstream – there is nothing “pirate” about it today. In the disaggregated world of social media, of drones, of ubiquitous filming and recording devices, and of open-source information, governments are less able to keep basic facts to themselves. Instead, at speed, the facts are weaponised, twisted and sharpened for ideological purposes. It isn’t a shortage of scepticism that is the problem with today’s media, rather the swirling, disorientating lack of balance and perspective.
When Cockburn was reporting, the rich and powerful did indeed try very hard to keep their real thoughts out of the public domain: today they boast about them and troll the rest of us with them. How do you practise a journalism of revelation in such a culture of blatancy? What happens when the noble cause of free speech is used as a cover for the demonisation of the least fortunate – when it’s come to mean, in practice, calls for deportation and death? What price guerrilla journalism when the conversation’s gone gorilla?
As Patrick Cockburn notes, the arrival of the internet “has seen no decisive shift towards democracy”. In theory at least, X (formerly Twitter) and the other social media rivals offer space for 10,000 versions of the Week. Patrick Cockburn tells the story of the American journalist Oswald Schuette against the monopoly control of American radio in the 1930s by the Radio Trust, a David and Goliath battle that inspired his father’s journalistic insurgency. He paints a vivid portrait of the Week’s reliance on a mimeograph machine, cheap brown ink and a pathetic number of regular subscribers.
These latter problems at least have been replaced, and highly effectively. The media landscape may have changed, but the fundamental issue facing journalists is the same. By Substack or by typewriter, online or delivered by envelope, the problem is getting noticed. That requires wit and inspiration. The first two times Cockburn wrote about the appeasers, he complained, “the story made about as loud a bang as a crumpet falling on the carpet”. Then he called them the “Cliveden set” and the world took notice.
The number of his subscribers rose from “just seven” to just about everybody who mattered – but Cockburn was only able to keep going because he didn’t care about money. Perhaps that’s the most important message of this fine book. Patrick writes: “Journalists often dream of resigning from their jobs on a point of principle, freeing them to say what they want. However, very few do so, because they fear unemployment and know that alternative employers will be wary of people known to cause trouble.”
Well, that’s aimed at all of us, is it not? Claud Cockburn lived a heroic life because he chose to.
Anyone can. I think of another great journalist, James Cameron: “The spectacle of the conscientious journalist bemoaning the shortcomings of his profession is both pitiable and platitudinous. His condition may be unfortunate but it is hardly irremediable… He can stop taking their money, and get out.”
Andrew Marr’s books include “My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism” (Pan)
Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied
Patrick Cockburn
Verso, 320pp, £30
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[See also: Alexei Navalny’s chronicle of a death foretold]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, American Horror Story