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out of the room to pee, the other would say: “Take no notice of what he’s saying. He’s just a hopeless reactionary” (or an “irresponsible radical”, as the case may be).’36 Driberg wrote off Dorman-Smith as ‘a blimp of the old school’, an opinion that was not entirely justified. But he was certainly right about the nationalist leadership. He wrote in Reynolds News of Burma’s young leaders: ‘You will hear more of these men.’37 He compared them to the Greek socialists who had fought against the Nazis and applauded Mountbatten for engaging with the AFPFL, whereas in Greece the British had begun to suppress the radicals.

While in Rangoon, Driberg had several private meetings with the AFPFL leadership in which he urged them not to attend the ceremonies welcoming Dorman-Smith back to the country in case they should appear to be angling for jobs with the new administration. He also told them to demand at least equal treatment with India in the matter of constitutional reform. And he assured them that, whatever problems they had with the civil affairs administration, they could believe that Hubert Rance, its effective head, was their friend. Later a copy of a letter from Driberg about his consultations with the AFPFL found its way to Dorman-Smith, who reacted furiously. The acrimonious and ultimately violent developments on the path towards the end of colonialism in Burma over the next two and a half years were in some degree a consequence of the fact that the British, as much as the Burmese, had broken down into contending factions.38

Driberg did not drop Burma on his return home. Through the Orwellian-sounding Union of Democratic Control, a London-based pressure group, he used the many contacts he had made on his trip to link up disgruntled British forces personnel and Asian nationalists with left-wing opinion in Parliament and the press. As conditions neared mutiny in several stations, soldiers from India and South East Asia Command wrote to him denouncing their ‘filthy conditions’ or marvelling that ‘the terrible Jap Rat is quite a good fellow when defending European imperialism’.39 Colonel John Ralston wrote com plaining that the ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’ had built up a huge and unnecessary staff in Singapore.40 This pained Driberg, who had thought Mountbatten ‘genuinely progressive’. Driberg had obviously made himself known widely, if somewhat imperfectly. From Burma a ‘poor cultivator in Sangyaung’ wrote to ‘Mg. Drie Budd, P. M.’ to complain of agricultural distress and the return of a dreaded class of Indian landowner-bankers: ‘I am unable to plough the field now. It is not easy… Lands are in the hands of “Chettyers”.’41

While the nationalists took an increasingly dim view of the machinations of Dorman-Smith, none of them appears personally to have disliked him. It was widely recognized that he was not responsible for the mess that was Burmese administration before the war. At Simla, however, he had got too close to what they regarded as the sleazy old order, particularly Paw Tun, the exiled Burmese prime minister. There was a feeling too that U Saw was lurking in the wings. U Saw had been the dominant politician in Burma in the late 1930s. A big, jovial and ruthless man, he had charmed many British officials. He held great parties, he was forever surrounded by pretty women and, above all, he was nothing like the ice-cold intellectuals of Indian politics whom so many of them disliked. He had seriously blotted his copybook in 1941 after Pearl Harbor when he had contacted the Japanese and offered to help them invade Burma. Reports of his treachery were deciphered by British codebreakers at Allied intelligence and he had been sent off to exile in Uganda.42 Now, he was about to return, with a brand-new German ‘wife’, who was very much the talk of the town as he already had a wife and a clutch of mistresses there. The British seemed to be prepared to forget, or at least forgive, U Saw’s overtures to the Japanese. Besides, everyone knew that Dorman-Smith had a soft spot for him. The AFPFL suspected that the governor would use U