John Freeman was a man of note who chose to erase himself from history

Freeman once told a young man that it was sensible to change one’s life as much as possible every decade, and he lived according to his own advice

Freeman, centre, with Lord Gladwyn, left, and Harold Wilson on the programme The Great Divide in 1963 (Rex )

How quietly, coldly pleased John Freeman would have been by the way his death last week was reported. There were references to “the pioneer of the modern interview”, the “war hero” or, further afield, the “UK envoy”. Most headlines included his age, 99, as if that were an achievement in itself.

“I wish everybody would forget I was still alive,” he said in a rare New Statesman interview with Hugh Purcell last year. The truth is, almost everybody had.

Freeman (pictured below) had a life of spectacular and wide-ranging achievement but, like many of his class and generation, he was also aggressively modest and self-effacing. His name will certainly appear in histories of the 20th century, but perhaps more interesting to us today is whether the passing of that kind of Englishman, representing the old-fashioned virtues of public service, personal diffidence and dispassionate effectiveness, is a matter for regret. Or could it be that, while doffing our caps respectfully, we can give a sigh of relief?

Freeman once told a young man that it was sensible to change one’s life as much as possible every decade, and he lived according to his own advice. During the war, he was decorated for bravery in North Africa and was the officer at Lüneburg Heath who led the German generals to surrender to Montgomery. On becoming a Labour MP in 1945, he gave a speech of such brilliance (“Today we go into action. Today may rightly be regarded as ‘D-Day’ in the Battle of the New Britain”) that it reduced Churchill to tears.

A minister in the Attlee government, he was widely expected to lead the party, but resigned from the cabinet on a matter of principle and, four years later, left Parliament. “Too many MPs cease to look outside,” he wrote at the time, perhaps presciently. “They perceive one another with the vapid intensity of a goldfish.”

He joined the BBC, first on Panorama, then presenting Face to Face, the famously demanding series of interviews, in which only the back of the host was seen. His subjects ranged from Tony Hancock to Carl Jung; the combination of tough questions, the camera trained on the victim and an invisible inquisitor changed the nature of TV interviews. In the words of Kingsley Martin, “he made himself celebrated by turning his arse on the public”.

So the catalogue of achievement continued. He became editor of the New Statesman. He was ambassador to Washington in the Nixon years. On his return, David Frost asked him to rescue the ailing London Weekend Television (LWT).

As the boss of LWT, he was also in charge of the publishers Hutchinson and it was here, as an editor, that I encountered him now and then, usually viewed from a distance at the head of a long boardroom table. He was sleek and weirdly charmless, so glacial and emotionally absent that one felt that, if someone had died in front of him or taken off their clothes, there would have been no flicker of reaction.

Reading Purcell’s fascinating profile, I was reminded, to my surprise, of the writer Willie Donaldson, a man who was, in almost every way, the polar opposite of John Freeman. An outsider as opposed to an establishment man, neither physically brave nor any kind of leader, Willie shared that talent for self-effacement and, as with Freeman, his self-sabotaging version of his own life has been the one that has lived on.

Freeman reduced his Who’s Who entry with every edition, destroyed all correspondence and kept any public interest in him at bay. “He was a role player,” wrote Purcell. “He found it easier to act than be himself, perhaps because, so he once said, he disliked himself as much as he disliked the rest of the world.”

In our age of pointless celebrity, in which TV interviews are, unlike Face to Face, entirely about presenters showing off, some will regret the passing of men like Freeman and the values they represented – courage, integrity, modesty, with a certain personal adventurousness (he had affairs with, among others, Barbara Castle and Edna O’Brien).

I am not so sure. For all the energy and achievements of clever Englishmen of that generation, there is something sad about their disconnectedness, the lack of pleasure in their own or others’ achievements, the modesty that could be construed as a sort of arrogance, the general sense of an unhappy and lonely upper-middle-class child’s progress through adult life.

They have helped shape the world in which we now find ourselves – its politics, press and TV, the way we look at ourselves and our past – but the astonishing, melancholy lives of men of achievement such as John Freeman make one feel startlingly grateful for today’s messier, more human leaders.