Francis Beckett
Francis Beckett | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 12 May 1945 |
| Occupation | Journalist, author and contemporary historian |
| Known for | Biographies of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown |
| Website | [1] |
Francis Beckett (born 12 May 1945) is an English author, journalist, biographer, and contemporary historian.
His writing is just as likely to produce condemnation or criticism from the left as it is from the right.
He is the son of the controversial politician John Beckett, an associate of Oswald Mosley.
Early life
Francis Beckett was born in 1945 in Chenies, exactly 21 miles from the centre of London, because his father, John Beckett, a Nazi sympathiser, was under a form of house arrest, unable to live within 20 miles of the capital or to travel more than five miles away from his home.
He was constantly moved from school to school and home to home as his parents’ fragile finances ebbed and flowed, eventually spending four years at Beaumont College, a Jesuit boarding school near Windsor, Berkshire, where he claims to have been “force-fed a diet of beating, bullying and religious bigotry.”
He took A-levels at a London further education college and studied history and philosophy at Keele University. There he was chosen by the English Speaking Union to be one of the two British student debaters to tour the USA in 1969.
Career
He worked as a journalist, a teacher, an adult education lecturer, and West Midlands organiser for the Housing charity Shelter, before becoming head of the press and publications department at the National Union of Students. He left to take a similar job in a trade union, was elected president of the National Union of Journalists in 1980, and worked as a Labour Party press officer during 1983-84.
Since 1984 he has been a freelance writer. He has written regularly on education for The Guardian and The Independent for 15 years and was education correspondent of the New Statesman for seven. He has also written on politics, industrial relations, business and management, and the theatre, and edited two important management publications. His influential New Statesman articles provided the main left wing critique of New Labour’s education policies, and more recently, he has been a leading critic of city academies, putting the argument against in various newspapers[1] and writing his book The Greaty City Academy Swindle.
He has written a biography of his own father, John Beckett, a Labour MP from 1925 to 1931 and whip of the Independent Labour Party group of MPs; later chief propagandist for Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and co-founder (with William Joyce) of the National Socialist League, who was interned during the second world war for his fascist activities.
His biography of Clement Attlee changed the public perception of the Prime Minister who created the welfare state, reinstating him as one of the great changemakers. His biography of Tony Blair, written with The Guardian's Westminster Correspondent David Hencke, is easily the most hostile and damaging book ever written about Blair, and his 2009 book, Marching to the Fault Line, also written with David Hencke, is a history available of the 1984-5 miners’ strike. He was general editor of the series of 20 books, Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century.
Beckett's work gains strong reactions from across the political spectrum. His 2004 biography of Tony Blair was considered far too hostile by the right, but his portrayal of Arthur Scargill in his co-authored book on the 1984-5 miners’ strike led Andrew Murray, in the Morning Star to advise readers not to "feed the jackals".[2] In response, with co-author David 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".[3]
His plays are published by Samuel French, having been performed on the London fringe or on radio, and his short stories appear in the Young Oxford series published by OUP.
References
- ^ Francis Beckett "Academies aren't the answer to failing schools", Comment is free, 20 June 2008
- ^ Andrew Murray "Miners' strike hatchet job", Morning Star, 13 March 2009
- ^ Francis Beckett and David Hencke "We are not jackals", Morning Star, 18 March 2009
Books
- Biographies
- The Rebel Who Lost His Cause: The Tragedy of John Beckett, MP, Allison and Busby, 1999
- Nye Bevan, (co-author Clare Beckett) Haus Publishing, 2004
- The Survivor: Tony Blair in peace and war (co-author David Hencke) Aurum Press, 2005 (in paperback as The Survivor)
- Gordon Brown, Haus Publishing, June 2007.
- Clem Attlee, Politicos, re-issued March 2007
- Laurence Olivier,Haus Publishing, 2005
- Harold Macmillan, Haus Publishing, 2006.)
- Contemporary history
- Stalin's British Victims, Sutton Publishing, 2004
- Enemy Within - The Rise and Fall of British Communism", John Murray (hb), 1995; Merlin Press (pb), 1998
- Marching to the Fault Line – the miners’ strike 1984-5 (co-author David Hencke), Constable and Robinson, 2009
- Education
- The Great City Academy Fraud, Continuum, March 2007.
- Plays
- Money makes you Happy, Samuel French, 2008
- The Right Honourable Lady, Samuel French, 2009