The trials of St Mugg

remembered either occasion. He was quite good at not remembering things.

My first and second impressions of the famous media personality were of

an affected, self-obsessed hypocrite. Nothing in this biography by

Richard Ingrams changes that opinion.

Our first encounter was at the Edinburgh University rectorial election

of 1966, over sherry in the senior common room of Holland House, a hall

of residence which in those days had pretensions to the social

organisation of an Oxbridge college.

As a junior member of his victorious campaign team (I had designed the

''Betta Getta Muggerector'' poster) I managed to corner the great man

for five minutes. He was the first famous person I had ever met, after

all, although I had once been within two yards of the Queen Mum when she

visited my school in England. But she spoke to the boy next to me.

As an opener after the pleasantries, I suggested to the scourge of the

Establishment that it might be nice if our new rector could take the

chair of the university court -- of which he was now the elected

president -- and put forward the case for students to have some small

role in the administration of our university.

I thought I was saying the right thing. Not a bit of it. The old

buzzard ranted that students were there to study and running the

university was none of their business. Without waiting for a reply, he

swung on his heel and plunged into conversation with a senior academic.

It was clear that, after all, we were not going to have a ''working''

rector. That would have to wait until 1972, when Gordon Brown became the

second student rector after my own brief, stormy, and not very effective

tenure of the post.

Our second meeting was on the day of Muggeridge's infamous sermon in

St Giles Cathedral, when he denounced us all for our slobbering

addiction to sex and pot, resigned the rectorship from the pulpit and

boosted his faltering career through the resulting publicity.

I was selling copies of the Student newspaper outside the university

staff club in Chambers Street that morning. As news editor of the paper

I always carried a fag packet as a notebook. As Muggeridge strode up, I

whipped it out and respectfuly asked our Lord Rector if he had any

comment on the editorial of that day's edition.

I expected him to criticise the demand by my editor, Anna Coote, that

he should act as advocate for the democratically elected Students

Representative Council in their campaign to have contraceptive advice

freely available at the student health centre or resign. He was supposed

to advocate, if not to agree.

He did not mention the irreconcilable crisis of personal conscience

which this caused him, and about which he was to pontificate in St Giles

a few hours later. Instead, he jabbed a quivering finger at the

back-page cartoon by Phil Bevis, a maths student and cartoonist of

Scarfeian potential whom I last heard of living in obscurity on the

wrong side of Hampstead. It showed Muggeridge as a screaming skull. With

hindsight, it seems remarkably prescient.

''If I had published something like this, I would go to my grave

ashamed!'' he roared, and walked out of my life.

Shame, and expiating it, was what St Mugg was all about. By the time

he did go to his grave he had done extensive, well-publicised penance

for his indulgence in women (he walked out on his poor wife a few times,

as well as on me), whisky, tobacco, barbiturates and savage, unprovoked

attacks on people and causes he had once espoused.

Ingrams, Muggeridge's protege, gives us more detail than Ian Hunter's

1980 biography.

Although this is to some extent an authorised biography, it does not

dodge sensationally embarrassing facts. Ingrams doggedly catalogues the

peccadilloes of a serial philanderer, absentee father, quarrelsome

drunk, sometime radical, failed novelist, spy, professional dilettante,

and rather nasty (if amusing) snob. It makes a thoroughly good read.

The Edinburgh University incident rates only a page in Ingrams's book

but the furore did catapault Muggeridge to fame as a repenting sinner

and born-again media Christian. The last of his many careers, religious

broadcasting, was launched on that chilly Edinburgh evening.

Ingrams relies exclusively on the Muggeridge version of events,

describing Anna Coote and the rest of us as ''a small and

unrepresentative band of Marxists''. I don't think Anna was a Marxist,

then or now. Nor was I. Besides, we were all democratically elected,

some of us with bigger majorities than Muggeridge.

As for our ''political posturings'', the Students' Representative

Council did not condone or have a policy on promiscuity. The demand for

better contraceptive advice for students was the result of sober,

factual debate about the increasing problem of unwanted pregnancies.

Muggeridge, with his extensive personal knowledge of the leg-over

business, might have been expected to support it.

Yes, we liked our nookie, although even the most dissolute could not

rival the rector's track record in sexual athletics. Many of us had

smoked a joint or two but beer was our favoured intoxicant and very few

took LSD more than once (I have yet to try it). You could not function

in student politics or journalism if you were a dopehead, not least

because you needed your wits about you when dinosaurs like Muggeridge

were stalking the swamp.

As so often happened, Muggeridge reached for ready-to-wear prejudices

rather than facts when he composed his diatribe against ''permissive''

students. Ingrams notes repeatedly that once he had an idea in his head

it was impossible to shift it, whatever the evidence to the contrary.

The biographer's own failure properly to investigate that 27-year-old

storm in a teacup at Edinburgh University makes me wonder how good his

research is on other, more important topics.

Muggeridge was a pain in the backside all his life. He took a sadistic

pleasure in sneering at former mentors such as C P Scott of the

Manchester Guardian. His accent was false and he was often false to his

friends. A fickle biter of hands that fed him, he got away with it

because he could be such scintillating good company -- and because he

would defend his betrayals as necessities in the pursuit of ''truth''.

In a hundred years he will be remembered for only two achievements

among the ''Chronicles of Wasted Time'' described so selectively in his

1972 autobiography: the brilliant Manchester Guardian reports from the

Soviet Union in March 1933, when he was the first to expose Stalin's

genocide of the Kulaks; and his (at first unwitting) creation of Mother

Teresa of Calcutta as a reluctant media superstar.

In the end, he made his peace with his maker. It was a pity, but not a

surprise, that returning to the fold involved using his considerable

talents for some very dubious causes on the new religious right.

It was even more of a pity that, having revealed the extent of the

Bolshevik-engineered famine in the Ukraine and the blind hypocrisy of

Communist fellow-travellers in the West, he turned viciously against the

civilised, compassionate traditions of British democratic socialism and

rejected the faith of his father, Croydon Labour councillor Harry

Muggeridge.

Muggeridge Senior emerges from Ingrams's book as a better man, in

almost every respect, than his tormented third son.