St. Mugg at 100: A Godly man in a Godless age.

Malcolm Muggeridge was the modern equivalent of an Old Testament prophet. Using the English language with extraordinary skill and power, he sought to persuade men and women to turn their backs on the world of materialism, with its cults of money, sex, drugs, self-indulgence, and pleasure-seeking, and to choose instead the numinous, the altruistic, and the eternal.

There was something in him of John Wesley, rather more of Jonathan Edwards, the philosopher-preacher. He took over the modern-style church, the TV studio, and from its pulpit in our living rooms he broadcast a doctrine of renunciation, of austerity and of self- discipline, couched in an irresistible framework of subtle humor, sophisticated literary references, and startling images.

Mugg came from a background of what the English call lower-middle-class religiosity, which was given a global flavor by early experiences in India, where he made eclectic raids on Buddhism and Hindu practices. There was always in him something of the holy man or fakir, a wandering hermit dressed in a loincloth, living off minute offerings and dispensing spiritual wisdom -- indeed, he looked like that.

But it took time for Mugg to emerge from a worldly carapace. Back in England, he became a journalist of outstanding gifts and the latest in a series of accomplished essayists which stretched back to Lamb and Hazlitt. When war came in 1939 he produced an instant book, The Thirties, which gives a scintillating, cynical, and devastating picture of what Auden called "a low, dishonest decade." He had spent some time in Moscow for the Guardian and exposed the cruelty and humbug of the Stalin regime at a time when the New York Times's Walter Duranty ("the biggest liar of any journalist I ever met") was defending it. Mugg's Winter in Moscow was one of the earliest descriptions of what Communism in practice was really like. The experience gave him a lifelong distrust of any doctrine which claimed to transform the human predicament in this life. His cynical approach to government of almost any kind was confirmed by his wartime experience in the Secret Service, which gave him access to the follies and idiocies of high strategy. His one useful contribution, at the end of the war, was to save the life of P. G. Wodehouse, in danger of execution for treasonable broadcasts on Nazi radio.

In the post-war world, Mugg became deputy editor of the London Daily Telegraph, where he imposed its durable and highly successful formula of ingenious and quasi-poetic reaction. He also enlivened things by conducting a tempestuous affair with his proprietor's wife, the beautiful Lady Pamela Berry, daughter of that Edwardian hero of intellectual romance, the first Earl of Birkenhead. Both were superb letter-writers, and their correspondence, if it is ever published, will make scorching reading. For a spell, Mugg became editor of Punch, the moribund Victorian comic magazine which he suddenly turned into a weekly display of uproarious and savage persiflage -- the beginnings of the modern satire movement.

Indeed, Mugg was the founding father of Sixties extravagance. Tiring of Punch, he reverted to essay-writing. I vividly recall the arrival at the New Statesman office of a brilliant piece by Mugg called "Royal Soap Opera," a cunningly phrased rap over the knuckles for the royal family, the first criticism of that institution since the Abdication Crisis of the 1930s. This set a new trend, and formed a curtain-raiser to the mad decade of the Sixties, a time when every institution and moral principle was viciously assaulted.

Mugg himself soon tired of Sixties nihilism and attacked its ...