[2] Freeman was born in a house in the Regent's Park neighbourhood of London on 19 February 1915, the son of a barrister.

He joined the Labour Party whilst a student at Westminster School in the early 1930s, and later obtained his degree at Brasenose College, Oxford.

He enlisted in the Coldstream Guards, was commissioned in the Rifle Brigade in 1940[3] and served in Britain's 7th Armoured Division (the "Desert Rats").

[5] Freeman was originally on the Bevanite left-wing of the party, although also supported by Hugh Dalton, who liked to go 'talent-spotting' among young MPs.

[citation needed] He rose quickly through the ministerial ranks, but resigned along with Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson in 1951 over National Health Service charges.

Later in the pages of the New Statesman he portrayed Nixon[7] as "a discredited and outmoded purveyor of the irrational and inactive" whose 1964 defeat would be a "victory for decency.

Wilson refused to fire Freeman or remove him from the guest list for a dinner at Downing Street during Nixon's first official visit in 1969.

During this period, he wrote an article in 1981 which criticised what he saw as the heavy-handed, interventionist broadcasting policy of the British government, expressed in the ethos of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, and expressed views that would soon come to be closely associated with Margaret Thatcher and the deregulatory, laissez-faire new school of Conservative Party politics.