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Francis Beckett | |
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| Born | (1945-05-12)12 May 1945 (age 79) Chenies,Buckinghamshire, England |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist, author and contemporary historian |
| Known for | Biographies ofTony Blair andGordon Brown |
| Website | francisbeckett.co.uk |
Francis Beckett (born 12 May 1945) is an English author, journalist, biographer, playwright and contemporary historian. He has written biographies ofAneurin Bevan,Clement Attlee,Harold Macmillan,Gordon Brown[1] andTony Blair. He has also written on education for theNew Statesman,The Guardian andThe Independentand has been the editor ofThird Age Matters, the national magazine published by theUniversity of the Third Age. Beckett has been described as "an Old Labour romantic" byGuardian associate editorMichael White.[1]
Francis Beckett was born in 1945 inChenies,Buckinghamshire, 21 miles from the centre of London, because his father,John Beckett,[2] just released from wartime internment because of hisfascist past, was under a form ofhouse arrest, unable to live within 20 miles of the capital or to travel more than five miles away from his home.
His mother, Anne Cutmore, was the long-termlife partner of John Beckett; Cutmore and Beckett finally married in 1963 after Beckett's second wife, Kyrle Bellew, granted him a divorce after 18 years of separation.[3]
He was moved from school to school and home to home as his parents' fragile finances ebbed and flowed, eventually spending four years atBeaumont College, aJesuit boarding school nearWindsor, Berkshire, where he claims to have been "force-fed a diet of beating, bullying and religious bigotry.”
He tookA-levels at a London further education college and studied history and philosophy atKeele University. There he was chosen by theEnglish-Speaking Union to be one of the two British student debaters to tour the US in 1969.
He worked as a journalist, a teacher, an adult education lecturer, and West Midlands organiser for the housing charityShelter, before becoming head of the press and publications department at theNational Union of Students. He left to take a similar job in a trade union, was elected president of theNational Union of Journalists in 1980, and worked as aLabour Party press officer during 1983–84. In 1983 he worked for the unsuccessful Labour Party deputy leadership campaign ofJohn Silkin.[4]
Since 1984 he has been a freelance writer. He has written regularly on education forThe Guardian andThe Independent for 15 years and was education correspondent of theNew Statesman for seven. He has also written on politics, industrial relations, business and management, and the theatre, and edited two management publications. HisNew Statesman articles provided the main left wing critique ofNew Labour's education policies, and more recently, he has been a leading critic ofcity academies, putting the argument against in various newspapers[5] and writing his bookThe Great City Academy Fraud.
Beckett has written a biography of his own father,John, a Labour MP from 1925 to 1931 and whip of theIndependent Labour Party group of MPs; later chief propagandist forOswald Mosley'sBritish Union of Fascists and co-founder (withWilliam Joyce) of theNational Socialist League, who was interned during the Second World War for his fascist activities. He returned to the subject of his own background withFascist in the Family (2016) whichMartin Bright inThe Jewish Chronicle described as "part political history, part memoir: an attempt to come to terms with the horror of growing up with a fascist as a father".[6]
He wrote a biography ofClement Attlee. His biography ofTony Blair, written withThe Guardian's Westminster CorrespondentDavid Hencke, is hostile and damaging, and his 2009 book,Marching to the Fault Line, also written with David Hencke, is according toSeumas Milne, "the first attempt since its immediate aftermath to offer a full account of the [miners'] strike."[7] It is, according toNeil Kinnock, "full of vital insights and written with a sense of pace that does justice to the tragic drama." He was general editor of the series of 20 books,Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century. He has written biographies of four prime ministers – Attlee, Macmillan, Blair and Brown – but his biography of Attlee is the most substantial, considered byRoy Jenkins – Attlee's first biographer – to be a landmark work, defining Attlee for a new generation. "Beckett gets near to the essence of Attlee, and does so in an easy, flowing narrative" wrote Jenkins.
Beckett's work gains strong reactions from across the political spectrum. His co-authored 2004 biography of Tony Blair was considered far too hostile byRoy Hattersley,[8] but his portrayal ofArthur Scargill in his co-authored book on the1984-85 miners' strike ledAndrew Murray, in theMorning Star to advise readers not to "feed the jackals".[9] In response, with co-authorDavid Hencke, Beckett insisted that the writers were not jackals but lifelong trade unionists, and asserted that "for Murray to try to make out that you are doing something bad by buying or reading our book is not just censorship, but also the bitterest form of ideological rigidity and sectarianism".[10]
In 2010What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us? was published by Biteback.[11] The book claims that thebaby boomer generation inherited the good years, and pulled the ladder up after them.[12]Blair Inc: The Man Behind The Mask, co-written with David Hencke andNick Kochan, was published in March 2015.[13]
Beckett's plays are published bySamuel French, having been performed on the London fringe or on radio, and his short stories appear in the Young Oxford series published byOxford University Press. In 2024 he wrote a playTom Lehrer is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You, which featuresTom Lehrer's music and was performed with Lehrer's tacit approval at theUpstairs at The Gatehouse theatre inHighgate, London.[14][15]
He has been an editor ofThird Age Matters, the national magazine published by theUniversity of the Third Age.
| Trade union offices | ||
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| Preceded by Jacob Ecclestone | President of theNational Union of Journalists 1980–1981 | Succeeded by |
