Not everyone starting out as a journalist at the Daily Mail ends up joining the Communist party, but that was the experience of my friend and former colleague John Gritten in the spring of 1939. He had got the job because his father, the Tory MP Howard Gritten, knew Lord Rothermere, the Mail owner. In the newsroom John, who has died aged 95, fell into discussion with another young reporter, a Marxist. Intrigued, he bought a copy of Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? and quickly put aside the question mark.
Born in London, son of Howard and Nelly, John went to a small private preparatory school, Devon House school for boys, then to St Paul's school in Hammersmith. Early on, he had broken with his father's politics. In his memoir Howard and Son, Rebels of a Kind (2012), he recalled how, even though "a little chip off a Victorian Tory block", he had been struck by the contradiction between his father saying in level conversational tones that "all Jews should be dumped in the Atlantic" and the fact that many among his schoolfriends were those his father wanted to drown.