[In the following excerpt, Ingrams reports on the varied assessments of Muggeridge's career that appeared upon news of the writer's death.]

Malcolm's death was reported throughout the world and there were lengthy obituaries in all the British and most of the major American newspapers. They ranged from the affectionate memoirs of his many journalistic friends to the pious platitudes of the Catholic Press. The word ‘irreverent’ was in constant use. The New York Times paid tribute to his ‘impeccable prose style’, a writer in the Guardian called him ‘the most gracefully tongued and limelight-drenched cynic since Diogenes’.

Some years previously Malcolm had asked his old friend A. J. P. Taylor to deliver his funeral address, but it was not to be, as Taylor pre-deceased him. Proving, however, that Malcolm's hunch had been right, Taylor had previously written (while Malcolm was still alive) an obituary for the Guardian which somehow managed to catch the real Muggeridge better than any of Malcolm's co-religionists.

Answering the charge that Malcolm had been, for much of his life an embittered cynic, Taylor replied: ‘Malcolm was a cynic who got great fun out of it.’ To Taylor, the title of Malcolm's early novel In a Valley of this Restless Mind summed him up: ‘I have never known a man so restless’, he wrote, ‘physically and in his thinking. He could not write a leader or a chapter in a book without jumping up half a dozen times to pace around the room or rush out for a walk along the bank of the Mersey. …

‘The greatest change in him was his discovery of God and Jesus Christ. All religion is to me a buzzing in the ears, and I cannot explain or even describe what happened to Malcolm. All I know is that he was utterly sincere.’

The subject of obituaries had always been a favourite one with Malcolm, who had spent so much of his life in and out of newspaper offices. ‘Newspapers’, he wrote in The Thirties, ‘have their obituaries ready filed. We regret or, in the case of important persons, deeply regret to announce the death of so and so, still breathing, ambitious, with money and passion left to expend. These obituaries require periodical revision, he who once deserved a column and a half later only deserving perhaps three-quarters of a column … in ten years reputations greatly fluctuate, and much obituary revision is necessary, apart from the inevitable weeding out—“died on such a date”, scrawled across used obituaries, yet these also kept on a little while in the unlikely event of curiosity about the already dead and buried requiring to be satisfied.’ He returned to the theme in his last novel Affairs of the Heart: ‘Obituaries of the great, indeed, are usually highly composite, several hands participating in the work of preparing them; bits pasted on, cancelled out, pinned together. Like geological strata, they reflect the careers they chronicle—the adulatory age, the period of obscurity, the beginning when a career is young and in the spring, its heyday of all the talents, and its twilight or perhaps Indian summer, or perhaps almost total night.’

In Malcolm's own case any assessment of his reputation was complicated by the enormous fame he had gained late in life and then almost accidentally from appearing on television. For the public, the television personality exists only on television and only at the present time. His past, his future, his achievements outside the studio, are of little concern. Again, it is the nature of television to be ephemeral and very limited in its impact. A programme, even a good one, is largely forgotten by the following morning and once someone ceases to appear on the screen their memory quickly fades away, sometimes in only a matter of months.

Malcolm was no exception to these rules. The viewers, many of whom had little or no knowledge of him as anything other than a TV pundit, quickly forgot about him with the result that even by the time of his death his memory had already begun to fade. To a younger generation growing up in a world which had less and less interest in the past, his name meant nothing.

Obituarists, like biographers, feel a need to sum up, to find a theme running through all the tangled episode of a life, but in Malcolm's case such a task was made difficult by his constant change of tack—from one job, one set of beliefs to another. In his latest manifestation, the one that was freshest in the public's mind, he had been an evangelist nicknamed affectionately St Mugg, a Christian apologist marching side by side with Mrs Whitehouse on anti-abortion demonstrations, denouncing the sex obsessions of the media and very publicly joining the Catholic Church, partly from a wish to ally himself with Pope John Paul II. Was this the real Malcolm Muggeridge, or was it the anarchic figure of the Fifties and Sixties—the Muggeridge of Punch and Tread Softly? Or, going back still further, the youthful Fabian idealist or the man who went to Moscow in search of a heaven on earth?

Malcolm would have replied that it was all of a piece and that his religion had been a constant preoccupation throughout his life. This was true—even if Malcolm was unwilling to recognize the way in which he had deliberately turned his back on it so long as it had suited him to do so and until, in early old age, the strain and unhappiness of a life of hedonism became too great to bear.

If it was true that he had always been in some sense religious, it was equally true that he had always—or at any rate since he heard the call from Arthur Ransome in Cairo—been a journalist. He had had his dreams from boyhood of writing novels, plays and poems, but in the end he had found his vocation in the offices of the Guardian in Manchester and though he may have changed papers, or oscillated between contract and freelance status, he remained for nearly all his life a man with a typewriter pounding out words to meet a deadline in what seemed at times a ceaseless flow. Journalism is a dirty word to some and the journalist is considered an inferior species compared, say, to the writer of novels or history. Yet there is a respected tradition of writers, much of whose work has been done for newspapers and magazines—Hazlitt, Cobbett, Chesterton, Orwell—and it is in this company that Malcolm belongs (though it is too early to say if his writing will survive as theirs has done).

But it would be wrong to regard Malcolm merely as a gifted journalist. In his life, his restlessness, his inconsistency, his obsessions (whether with Marxism or sex) he seems at times like a symbol of twentieth-century man. It is no accident that in his capacity as journalist he should have reported so much of this century, from his early encounter with Gandhi, from the famine in the Ukraine, along the way bumping into—never seeking them out—nearly all the great figures of his time, until in the end he becomes (again by accident) the man who introduces to the world via his despised medium of television an obscure Albanian nun working in the slums of Calcutta.

My personal and strongest impression, whether reading him or listening to him face to face, was of a man who told the truth—not as a result of any special scruples or sense of religious obligation, but because he was blessed with natural powers of insight and occasionally of prophecy which enabled him intuitively to see events and people for what they were. Being himself without worldly ambitions, he exercised this gift indiscriminately, thus getting himself over and over again into hot water, especially when he went in pursuit of sacred cows. ‘Nothing enrages people more’, he once said, ‘than to think they have engaged in unprofitable adulation.’

In the end, for me and for all those who were lucky enough to know him, the memory will remain of his endlessly stimulating friendship, the laughter, the gossip and his unfailing kindness and generosity. It is to try to repay what I owe to him that I have written this book. RIP.