Francis Beckett

My passion for history was ignited by political biography when I was a teenager. You read the life story of a person who – if the writer is any good – captures your attention like the protagonist of a novel; and along the way, almost by chance, you learn about the great events in which

Most days, outside the local courtroom where I live in Finchley Central, a man holds up a placard that says in big black capitals: ALL OUR BRAINS ARE MICROCHIPPED BY THE SECURITY SERVICES. It’s a foolish conspiracy theory, of course, but it’s also a symptom of the fear and loathing of the state which has

Journalists seldom get to the top in politics. They find it hard to trot out the dreary virtue-signalling that political communication often requires. Chris Mullin, I suspect, finds it almost impossible. He was a Bennite, but the Bennites quickly discovered he was unreliable. The Blairites might have welcomed him had they not suspected, rightly, that

‘Our generation owes an apology to the shades of Harold Wilson,’ the polling guru Peter Kellner once told me. Had Wilson not firmly resisted pressure from President Lyndon Johnson to send troops to Vietnam, Kellner and I were both old enough to have fought there. But in 1968 we loftily despised Wilson for twisting and

In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936 — gave aid and comfort to his country’s enemies before and during the second world war. Reading this meticulously researched book, it seems extraordinary that he remained at liberty. A less deferential society would have

It’s easy to dismiss the fascistic ideologues who populate Graham Macklin’s book as reactionary cranks of no significance. It’s also a mistake. Fascists have edged uncomfortably close to the mainstream of British politics ever since the British Union of Fascists was founded in 1932 by Oswald Mosley, who two years earlier had been a government