Francis Beckett (born 12 May 1945) is an English author, journalist, biographer, and contemporary historian. He has written biographies of Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. He has also written on education for the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Independent. Beckett has been described as "an Old Labour romantic" by Guardian associate editor Michael White.
Francis Beckett was born in 1945 in Chenies, exactly 21 miles from the centre of London, because his father, John Beckett, just released from wartime internment because of his fascist past, 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 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.
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. In 1983 he worked for the unsuccessful Labour Party leadership campaign of John Silkin.
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 and writing his book The Great City Academy Fraud.
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 hostile and damaging, and his 2009 book, Marching to the Fault Line, also written with David Hencke, is "the first attempt since its immediate aftermath to offer a full account of the strike". It is, according to Neil 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.
Beckett's work gains strong reactions from across the political spectrum. His co-authored 2004 biography of Tony Blair was considered far too hostile by Roy Hattersley, 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". 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".
In 2010 What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us was published by Biteback. The book claims that the baby boomer generation inherited the good years, and pulled the ladder up after them.
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.
