Lady Pamela Berry: Harriet Cullen’s passion, politics and power (unicorn £ 25, 224pp)
It is exceptional that recently as in the mid-1950s, misogynist expression ‘underpants’ was still in use in the UK.
It referred to the soft power used by politicians and newspaper magnates, giving dinner parties, in which they influenced the political results through Snide discussion and witty gossip.
It sounds like something from the 19th century: high society’s wives change the course of politics by stamping or exposing an ankle.
But the Lady Pamela Berry above was accused of Petticoat’s power in the completion of the Suez crisis in 1956, when a newspaper owned by his husband Michael Berry (future Lord Hartwell) stated that PM Anthony Eden was missing from the “Board of Directors”. Pamela was suspected of being ‘agent provocatrice’ behind the song.
At one of his previous lunch celebrations, he declared Eden to be “too sick to never be the Prime Minister”. It made him fall with Eden’s wife Clarissa. There was a bitter exchange of letters between two women, leading to the American Press to enjoy what they called “panties”.
In a left -wing new statesman, Malcolm Muggeridge also dismantled Eden by describing “his disgusting smile and gesture and complete emptiness he had to say.”
So it happened that Muggeridge was Pamela’s lover. Did he also affect him? They were in love in 1953 when he was 39 years old and was 49. Both were married.
Recently Marriage: Lady Pamela Smith’s wedding to Michael Berry
Pamela was insanely jealous of Muggeridge’s wife to Kitty, obsessed with the idea that they slept in the same bed and regret themselves as a “other woman”. From Pamela, Muggeridge wrote in his diary, “He’s not smart, not beautiful, not nice … a significant person.”
Their relationship continued for at least ten years. At the 1963 Workers’ Conference, Pamela was observed on her shoulders, covered with leaves and hay after a “walking distance” with Muggeridge.
Lady Pamela’s biography is this lively if the strongly name Droppy writer is his daughter Harriet Cullen. Obviously not a nice mother, Pamela was typically uneven, hands, snobic, mother of the mid-20th century.
The children were packed in the ground and they only saw their parents on weekends. When Harriet’s sister, Eleanor, had to go to the hospital for an appeal to electric shock treatment, Pamela went on vacation in southern France.
Born in 1914, Pamela was the daughter of Fe Smith, Lord Birkenhead, Lord High Fanslor. He ruined him rotten and died at the age of 16. Much later, his great friend, whose journalist Paul Johnson, said from him that “he really wanted to be a politician, but felt like he was instability of his gender.” He robbed the way in which his father had “restricted the formal education of his intelligent daughter while encouraging and unusual social variation and world.”
It was a recipe for problems. Pamela could not resist being at the center of political and cultural lines. His lunch and dinner parties were never boring.
Mistress of Society: Lady Pamela Berry (left) with Michael Todd and Elizabeth Taylor
At one dinner party at their house in Westminster in 1951, John Betjeman first met Elizabeth Cavendish, who had a lifelong love relationship, and Guy Burgess failed, even though Anthony Blunt did.
Later, it turned out that Burgess had gone to Russia urgently knowing that he was arrested for the deception of atoms of the United States. It was not until 1979 that Blunt himself was revealed as a spy.
One of the few advice Pamela gave to her daughters was “bloody, brave and determined”. Pamela himself was indeed a kind of lunch party “Lady Macbeth” his left -wing lover and entry into his national conservative paper.