Before Claud Cockburn first entered the Times of London premises in 1929, he had contributed to its Berlin bureau, which gave him some idea of what to expect. But even so, he thought it rather much that the first conversation he overheard was one editor translating Plato’s Phaedo into Chinese, while his colleague recited the relevant passages in Greek from memory. Times editors, he recalled, were typically ensconced behind fat bookstacks, “engaged in writing historical works of their own.”

It was at the desks of Britain’s paper of record that C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated Proust, with the rest of the staff leaving their typewriters to help him find the right phrases — I guess it beat thumping out notices on municipal matters in, say, Cornwall. That’s to say, the Times’ editors were rather more interesting than their typical readers, who, like Ian Fleming’s James Bond, were so soundly conformist they wouldn’t read other papers but the Times.

The best oppositional writers have often started their careers in establishment strongholds. As the legendary Times correspondent Willmott Lewis once told Claud, “Every government will do as much harm as it can and as much good as it must.” That saying became one of Claud’s mantras. It captured both his unsentimental view of politics and his sense of ironic humour — it’s that combination that makes him, one of Britian’s finest investigative reporters, worth revisiting a century later.

Cockburn was no cynic. He believed that the press, if it were tough enough, could force the government to correct course. The seasoned foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn writes in his biography of his father, Claud, Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied, that he believed political leaders without “fixity of purpose” were “sensitive to pinprick criticism,” so that with the right kind of pressure, they’d “prove more malleable than they pretended.”

Surveying the field today, the Cockburn thesis hasn’t exactly been conspicuously confirmed. The political leaders in the United States persist in backing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, no matter what “pinpricks” they receive. Though President Joe Biden, of course, has nothing if not “fixity of purpose” when it comes to the killing of Palestinians. As he once put it to Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, it wouldn’t matter “if all the civilians get killed.” Patrick Cockburn notes in the introduction that pictures of bombed children in Gaza can now be instantly communicated to the rest of the world, but the established press itself is no less conformist than in Claud’s time — it largely relies on official information even as it prides itself on being a “crusading profession.”

Seeing the Times from the inside forever cured Claud of that self-congratulatory notion. When he took over from Lewis in Washington, DC, Lewis proposed to the Times that he report on London with the same irreverent vigour that had made his American despatches so popular. That proposal, Claud noted, was rather coldly received. The mainline press, in other words, prefers consensus to confrontation. It is perhaps most evident by the intramural prizes, bestowed between colleagues who’ve learned to compromise their principles — or still better, never had any. As Claud recalled, perhaps the worst thing that could happen to a Times employee was that they “developed ‘views’ on something or other — and in the Times language ‘viewy’ was a dreadfully damaging epithet.” Not much more than two years after joining the Times, Claud, in the words of its brass, went “red on us.”

Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied takes its title from a Fleet Street saying that Claud popularized, having heard a senior representative of JP Morgan, on the day of the Great Crash of 1929, say everything would be fine in spite of “a little distress selling on the stock exchange.” Claud had a knack for being in the right place with the right people: he traveled to the occupied Ruhr with his schoolmate Graham Greene; he went to Oxford with his cousin Evelyn Waugh but spent his time outside term in-between Budapest and Berlin, where he learned politics rather more radical than that of the panelled rooms of Keble College; he met Al Capone in Chicago; he fled Hitler’s thugs in Germany, but then returned to rescue the children of a comrade; and he fought Franco’s forces in Spain, where he hung out with Arthur Koestler, met Ernest Hemingway, and helped W. H. Auden, who had traipsed through the countryside on a mule, reach Valencia by car.

Biographers typically spend several hundred pages on their subject’s childhood — sedulously listing obscure relatives — with even more on their senescence. It’s thrilling stuff if you’re the sort of person whose idea of a fun Saturday evening is to curl up in bed with a copy of the Maastricht Treaty. But Patrick Cockburn has pleasingly focused on the interwar period — the peak of Claud’s contra-establishment campaign of “guerilla journalism.” Claud left the Times in 1933, owing to how it suppressed news it thought overly hostile towards Hitler, to start his scrappy oppositional newsletter the Week. To resign on a point of principle, Patrick Cockburn observes, isn’t precisely common; though colleagues praised him for it, “few followed his example.”

Claud launched the Week with minimal funds, relying on a humble mimeograph in an even humbler Victoria flat, in the hallway through which bustled lawyers threatening libel with police informants trying to uncover Claud’s sources. British intelligence compiled a fat file on him, but it invariably concluded that suing would be too embarrassing. Perhaps they learned from Labour’s first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who brandished a copy of the Week to the gathered correspondents at the London Economic Conference of 1933, claiming that no one should believe its pessimistic pronouncements. This alarmism was made hysterical by the fact that prior to the PM’s intervention, the Week had only seven subscribers. Following it, as Claud noted, everyone from King Edward VIII to Charlie Chaplin read it, while Joachim von Ribbentrop “on two separate occasions demanded its suppression on the ground that it was the source of all anti-Nazi evil.”

Foreign correspondents that Claud had befriended in Central Europe supplied the Week with information they couldn’t get into their own papers. They’d meet at London’s Café Royal to share news, while Nazi spies competed with British intelligence for tables within earshot. Norman Ebbutt, Claud’s erstwhile mentor, sent cables from Berlin on the Nazis that the Times wouldn’t print; it meant the Week became Britain’s perhaps most well-informed paper on Hitler’s regime.

Claud himself was uniquely placed to expose the so-called “Cliveden Set,” the pro-appeasement clique that numbered the owner as well as the editor of the Times. Claud set himself in opposition to both Whitehall and Fleet Street. But that situation couldn’t last forever. When Britain eventually sided with the Soviet Union, he realized that the moment the Week had exploited so fully had passed. He found himself on the side of official policy.

Even though Claud belonged to the Communist Party, he was friends with several High Tories, like the novelist Anthony Powell and the satirist Malcolm Muggeridge. It might, I suppose, have helped that he came from the right kind of family; but still, he had none of the political puritanism one sometimes encounters on the Left: he knew how to be serious without being solemn. His friends sometimes inquired how he remained on such close terms with so many of the establishment Right. He’d reply that he measured people not by reassuringly conventional categories but by his own “Dreyfus test.” As Patrick Cockburn puts it,

Claud asked himself: If, hypothetically, a person had been in France during the affair, would they have protested in person and in print in favour of Dreyfus and against his persecutors? In other words, was their opposition to injustice an overriding feature of their character which took precedence over their other political sympathies?

A sound enough test, to be sure, but perhaps Claud left himself open to the charge of hypocrisy. He had, one should recall, stuck with the Communist Party through the Stalinist show trials, even though in 1952 his friend Otto Katz went to the gallows in Prague, having confessed to being in the pay of the well-known British spy, Claud Cockburn.

Shortly following his return from America, Claud began writing for the Daily Worker, which sent him to report on the war in Spain. Patrick Cockburn is perhaps a shade too complimentary regarding Claud’s Spanish pieces. Claud brilliantly illustrated the courage of the troops that battled Franco’s far superior forces, but he evinced every mark of trying rather too hard to “inspire” — praising the frontline loyalists for their “epic heroism,” relaying the official line a little too faithfully to be truly convincing. In fact, George Orwell launched a minor polemic against “Frank Pitcairn,” Claud’s nom de plume for the Daily Worker, claiming he had slandered the vaguely Trotsky-inflected POUM to which Orwell belonged.

It can’t be said that Orwell was wrong. Historian Paul Preston rates him one of the least reliable foreign correspondents in Spain. But it’s not just that he shaded the truth in his cables, they have none of his characteristic irony or stylistic verve. His book, Reporter in Spain, written on the orders of the British Communist Party, is far better than one might suppose, given that it was completed in one or two weeks’ time; but nonetheless, some passages read like hammed-up lines from a mob play: “very swell,” he has a waiter say of a Francoist “big shot.” Patrick Cockburn says of the spat with Orwell that it ultimately mattered little. Orwell himself said that the “real issue” was the class war while the rest was mere “froth.” For his part, Claud later remarked that he found it “irksome to be endlessly proclaiming the imminence of victories which do not, in fact, occur.”

Still, he thought the Times’ talk of being “impartial” was sheer pablum.

It seemed to me that a newspaper is always a weapon in somebody’s hands, and I never could see why it should be shocking that the weapon should be used in what its owner conceived to be his best interest. The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business — advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government.

That, too, is sound enough — provided one emphasizes that supporting a cause isn’t exactly the same as supporting a government. Besides, Claud thought it rather rich that the same types who pulled themselves up to their fullest stature to lecture him for penning propaganda themselves later boasted of having worked for the British wartime information services. A fair point, but it invites the rejoinder that much of what he wrote for the Daily Worker, like most official propaganda, isn’t really worth reading today — except, of course, if one’s reviewing it.

But if it’s safe to give the Spanish pieces a miss, his memoir, I, Claud, can still be read from cover to cover. By his personal example, he showed that oppositional journalism needn’t be boring or sombre. But he showed, too, that there’s a price: he was chased by debt collectors most of his life. Dissent isn’t free. “Personal courage and resolution count for much,” Patrick Cockburn concludes, “as do a willingness to endure poverty and danger.”