Tom Driberg

Tom Driberg
Name	Thomas Edward Neil Driberg (22 May, 1905- 12 August, 1976)
Nicknames	Tom (everyone), William 'Bill' Hickey (as a columnist), Lepage (as a KGB agent)
Politics
Party	Labour Communist
Constituency	Barking (1959-1974) Maldon (1942-1955)
Positions	• Chairman of the Labour Party (1957-1958)
Likes	The Times, oral sex, very young men, occultism, the monarchy
Dislikes	Clitorises, paper napkins
Friends	Nye Bevan, Evelyn Waugh, Aleister Crowley, the Kray twins, Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Boothby, Michael Foot, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson
Enemies	Lord Beaverbrook
Relationships
Partners	Numerous flings, Ronnie Kray, "Mad" Teddy Smith Ena Binfield (married 1951, estranged and unconsummated)
Children	None
Personal Attributes
Nationality	English
Religion	Anglo-Catholic
Sexuality	Gay
Height	> 6'
Eye Colour	Brown
Handedness	Right
Accent	Received Pronunciation
Languages	?

Tom Driberg... was a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a clergyman, a liturgist, a homosexual, a friend of Lord Beaverbrook, an enemy of Lord Beaverbrook, a politician of the Left, a member of Parliament, a member of the Labour Party... he looked and talked like a bishop, not least in the bohemian clubs which he frequented. He was the admiration and despair of his friends and acquaintances.~ The Times obituary, 1976

Tom Driberg was a Labour Party politician of the Left, serving as Labour Party Chairman. He is credited for inventing the modern gossip column, and was also well known as a terrible poet, a priest, a socialite, a KGB agent and an utterly indiscreet sexual predator. He had a passion for the bizarre and the edgy, but managed to avoid ever getting in trouble with the law (which was baffling, considering his conduct).

Life and Career

Early Life

Tom was born to John James Street Driberg and Amy Mary Irving Bell in 1905. His father was 65, and resembled Rudyard Kipling. He got along very badly with his distant father. He joined the Communist Party at the age of 15. As a student, he didn't enjoy studying, and was disgraced before his exams when a younger boy reported him for making sexual advances in the dormitory. He was expelled and became depressed, and came close to killing himself by throwing himself off a tower, but didn't have the courage to do so.

He went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he befriended Evelyn Waugh. They got along like a house on fire, though they disagreed politically. He hated working, and was proud of being lazy, boasting about it in his column. He wore "Oxford bags", huge green trousers two foot wide around each ankle. His room was once invaded by the Bullingdon Club and his trousers stolen and hung up around the hall, though he became rather fond of the leader of the gang that debagged him. This event was immortalised as the famous Boller scene in the Waugh novel Decline and Fall. He spent his university years shagging, writing gossip columns for small papers and reading his own poems by megaphone around the university. Examples of his poetry follow:

boom ya yelling ho ho hanks thanks not at all
tonks tanks hangs hands across sea and
a few kind words words words verbal verbal
vernal verbal ah vernal we try vernal we try to (sic x9000)

and even better...

If I forget thee, Sion, Sion
may all members lose their skill.
For there a modest phallus beckons
in blushing starkness from the hill.

His poems were published and due to mentioning Beezlebub and nonsense words that could be interpreted as spells, they got him the attention of Aleister Crowley, a dark magic practitioner who revelled in being described as being "the wickedest man in the world". They smoked and chanted spells together, Tom attracted to Aleister's eccentricity (and possibly other things too, considering Tom).

Pre-political Career

Tom left Oxford without a degree, and began to live in London in a block with specialty prostitutes - women who attracted clients interested in fuller figures. Tom, who normally hated women, described them affectionately as "blubbers", and brought them high-fat food to retain their figures. He complained in his unfinished memoirs Ruling Passions that his bed was too squeaky to fuck men in, and made his way through occasional casual prostitution - once wanking off a businessman in a phone booth for 40 shillings.

Political Career

Coming soon. Watch this space.

Full List of Appointments
• Chairman of the Labour Party (1957-1958)

Sexuality

Tom was infamous for his extreme promiscuity. He described himself as first being disgusted by the female body when a childhood friend called Dorothy wet herself, and his first sexual experience was at the age of "two or three", when he stuck his finger into a hole in his brother's shorts. He was expelled from school because he made advances on a younger boy.

At Oxford, instead of working, he went cottaging regularly, and once slept with a don. He allegedly never went more than a few days without sleeping with a different man. His tastes were for younger men (he claimed not to be attracted to "boys", but was allegedly caught propositioning underage boys at a racing track) that were his intellectual inferiors.

He never kept a long-term relationship, preferring to sleep with people he had only just met. He had a preference for giving oral sex. In his unfinished memoirs Ruling Passions, he describes dozens of sexual encounters, including with policemen, spies, other politicians, soldiers and builders. He said that "sex was only enjoyable with someone you had never met before, and would never meet again." He regularly attended sex parties with Lord Boothby and his "boys", mostly teenaged, uneducated East-end lads who would be seduced by gambling (at the Kray nightclubs) and a few drinks, and who would then be happy to return to hotels with the politicians and handed from man to man. Allegedly, when they refused to comply, Ronnie Kray would threaten them with violence.

Despite his preference for casual sex, he struck up a working relationship with gangster "Mad" Teddy Smith. Tom would give Smith the addresses of his rich friends to burgle, and in return, Smith would give him sexual favours. He is thought to have conducted an affair with Ronnie Kray, the East-London mobster. As he reached his seventies, his libido didn't diminish. He was a self-proclaimed "spermophage", and believed that the semen of (specifically) teenaged boys would extend his life, having a number on call ready to donate their sperm for £10 a go.

He was a misogynist, and couldn't stand being around women for long before he found them irritating. He also loathed "queeny", "camp" or "sissy" homosexual men, describing them as being "as bad as women". As Bill Hickey, he earned himself several female stalkers, including a woman from Taunton who begged him to write to her, and sent him erotic letters describing her fantasies about him, and then, when that didn't work, she wrote to him graphically describing her making love with another woman in an attempt to arouse lust in him. He ignored her. He spoke publicly and contemptuously about clitorises, and his friends commented about how they didn't enjoy long journeys with him, because he would quickly end up talking about his recent conquests.

He treated his wife very badly, never beating her, as he didn't want to so much as touch her, but he verbally humiliated her and was horrified at her intent to sleep with him.

There are claims of varying reliability that he has had (varying degrees of) sexual experiences with Nye Bevan over lunch (fellatio, consensual, from several reports), Jim Callaghan at night (intimate grope, not consensual, source is Jim) and Peter Mandelson, then a teenager (unspecified nature, most likely not consensual, source is Peter). He also showed interest in a young Christopher Hitchens and a young Mick Jagger.

Appearance

Tom, aged 25.

Tom was tall, and very lean as a young man. As he grew older, he was widely described as looking and sounding strongly "like a bishop". He was considered "dark and handsome", and "like the son of a maharajah".

Portrayal

In the Media

Surprisingly, he managed to keep his indescretions out of the press, using his connections from his time at the Express as Bill Hickey. As a gossip columnist, he was very popular, and used his soapbox to preach left-wing politics, which was a source of tension between himself and Lord Beaverbrook.

In Culture

He appears as a leading character in the play Tom and Clem, by Stephen Churchett, a narrative following the relationship between himself and Clement Attlee.

In Fanon

The Meme

Tom features in only one fic, in which he has a sexual encounter with a barely legal Peter Mandelson.