Malcolm Muggeridge
Malcolm Muggeridge reported the Ukrainian famine when the Moscow press corps was denying it, edited Punch, became the most recognisable face on British television, and in 1969 made the film that turned Mother Teresa into a figure, which is why her page names him. He was born in Croydon in 1903, the son of a Labour councillor, went to Cambridge, taught in India and Egypt, and married Kitty, a niece of Beatrice Webb, which took the young socialist couple to Moscow in 1932 for the Manchester Guardian to see the future. He saw the collectivisation instead. He went unescorted to the North Caucasus and Ukraine in the spring of 1933, found villages with the grain taken and the people dying, and smuggled the dispatches out in the diplomatic bag; the Guardian cut them, Walter Duranty of the New York Times called them lies, and Muggeridge left both the paper and the left. The novel he wrote about it, Winter in Moscow, has a Duranty in it. He worked in intelligence in the war, in Mozambique and in Paris at the liberation, was the Daily Telegraph's man in Washington, and edited Punch from 1953 to 1957, where an article on the monarchy that called the royal family a soap opera got him banned from the BBC for a while. Television made him: the eyebrows, the drawl, the interviews in which he despised whatever the interviewee represented. He went to Calcutta for the BBC in 1969 and came back with Something Beautiful for God, a film and then a book, and with the claim that the light in the dark house of the dying had been a miracle on the film stock, which the cameraman said was the new Kodak. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1982 with his wife, at seventy-nine, after decades of preaching a Christianity he did not formally hold and denouncing the permissive society on every channel. The debate with the Monty Python team over Life of Brian in 1979 was the last time most people saw him. He died in Sussex in November 1990.
- Lived: 1903 CE – 1990 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: journalist, broadcaster
