A secret history of power and politics at The Telegraph

Telegraph

17-02-2025

The Daily Telegraph was born in 1855, but its modern character was formed from 1928 until the 1980s by the Berry family. They were a respectable, professional, conservative family who well understood how to reach similar people all over Britain. They made this paper, as it remains today, the quality market leader.
When I joined in 1979, the proprietor and editor-in-chief was Michael Berry, Lord Hartwell. Thoughtful, hard-working, and very shy, he had invented The Sunday Telegraph in 1961. He disliked showing off, in journalism and in life. He liked what was plain and true.
Hartwell arrived at work every morning with his bowler hat but driving his own Mini with its customised electric windows. Bill Deedes, still affectionately remembered by many readers, was the editor, but Hartwell was the boss. We were in awe of him, especially of his silence.
His wife, Pamela, 'Pam', was quite different. Born in 1914, daughter of the brilliant, self-made, drunken F E Smith, great friend of Winston Churchill and eventually Lord Chancellor, she grew up in love with the drama of politics.
By marrying Michael Berry, she linked politics and journalism in a way that was risky for the newspaper which graced so many bourgeois breakfast tables. Luckily, perhaps, its readers knew little of her doings.
Now Pam's daughter, Harriet Cullen, has written her life, Lady Pamela Berry: Passion, Politics and Power. It is a gripping, friendly but quite critical account of the dark-haired, beautiful, angry ('gypsy blood' was spoken of), clever, undereducated and over-privileged woman who had modelled for Chanel her famous 'little black dress'.
Despite her strong family feeling, Pam was not exactly a good mother or wife. Today, her talents might have taken her down a successful if stormy career path. Then, their main outlet was social, with wider ripples.
A Pam Berry dinner party on May 29 1951, in the couple's Westminster house, conveys the atmosphere. At it, the poet John Betjeman was introduced to Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, who then became his lifelong lover. Also present were Isaiah Berlin, the famed Oxonian thinker, and Anthony Blunt, the great art historian. Blunt was supposed to arrive with his fellow homosexual Guy Burgess, a friend of Michael Berry from Eton days who wanted a job at the Telegraph. Blunt turned up late and alone, however, appearing 'sickly, pale and increasingly distraught'. He said Burgess had failed to meet him at the Reform Club beforehand.
It emerged the next day that Burgess had just decamped with Donald Maclean to Moscow to escape arrest, having betrayed British and American secrets to the Soviet Union. It took nearly another 30 years before the press could report that Blunt, too, had been a Soviet spy. Seen with a journalistic eye – a quality which Pam possessed – that evening contained several cracking stories. Pam passed on none of them, but her guests' secrets were not always safe with her. There were even occasions when she fed stories to the rival Express group owned by Lord Beaverbrook, her patron since her teens.
Eden's media crisis
The most important period of Pam politics began in 1956. Early in that year, The Telegraph, though Tory-supporting, accused Anthony Eden's administration of lacking 'the smack of firm government'. The article caused a great stir, though by modern standards the words were mild. It was known that Pam Berry disliked Eden. There were complaints and cartoons in the press about her 'petticoat power'.
As the year continued, Eden steered into crisis. Britain and France tried and, thanks to US disapproval, failed to regain control of the Suez Canal from Egypt's firebrand leader, General Nasser, who had seized it. Suez is seen as the point at which the British Empire truly ended.
Pam attacked Eden partly because she had taken against her former friend, the clever and beautiful Clarissa Churchill, niece of Winston, who had become Eden's second wife two years earlier. At 35, Clarissa was seven years younger than Pam. Winston's son Randolph stirred things up against his cousin, writing of Pam having 'a tongue and pen which are both fluent and vivacious'.
Michael Foot, the future Labour leader, got involved: 'The real snake in the grass is Lady Pamela Berry … She runs a salon in true 18th-century style.' She would be there 'when the moment comes for the kill'.
In the New Statesman, Malcolm Muggeridge, the great Left-wing polemicist and later – but very much not yet – a Christian of saintly asceticism, attacked Eden, writing of 'his ingratiating smile and gestures, the utter nothingness of what he has to say'. In private, Pam's ex-friend, Evelyn Waugh, called her 'a prize booby', though describing her mischief-making as 'the nicest side of her character'.
As Harriet Cullen points out, the Muggeridge intervention was significant because he was, at that time, Pam's lover. Previously deputy editor of the Telegraph, he now edited Punch.
Eden resigned, formally on grounds of ill health, in January 1957. Was her mother Lady Macbeth, asks Harriet Cullen. Clarissa Eden certainly thought so, and Isaiah Berlin described Pam as 'the greatest single opposing factor in the anti-Eden campaign'. Had her 'petticoat power' also enlisted Muggeridge?
The author sidesteps slightly, and says, 'My mother was not a 'political' hostess in the old Tory tradition of brokering compromises ... She was a press hostess, who used her tongue and position to mix press and politicians ...and her first loyalty ... was to the newspaper she had married into.' So perhaps this respectable organ has much to thank her for. Today, the whole thing would play out in furious tweets – much less enjoyably.