Lord Skidelsky obituary

In the summer of 2008, Robert Skidelsky, who has died aged 86, thought he was done with John Maynard Keynes. Having devoted two decades to writing his biography of the foremost British economist of the 20th century, he was turning his attention to other interests.

For Skidelsky, completing the three volumes had been a labour of love. He had moved into Keynes’s Sussex home so that he would pick up the right vibes, configuring the study so that it looked as it had in the 1930s. He wrote at the same desk that Keynes had used.

But by the time Skidelsky had condensed his trilogy into one omnibus edition in 2003, Keynes was seen as yesterday’s man. Free-market economics reigned supreme. Skidelsky’s biography was rightly acclaimed, but Keynes’s remedies for the Great Depression were no longer deemed relevant to the post cold war world.

Then, on 15 September 2008, the collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers plunged the world’s financial system into an existential crisis. Within days, the US was on the brink of a banking collapse that would have brought down the global economy. Fears of a second Great Depression were real. Central bankers and finance ministers dusted down copies of Keynes’s General Theory as they scrabbled around for ideas. Skidelsky, who has died aged 86, felt it was his duty to “return to the fray”.

As he put it at the time, there was almost universal disbelief that the crisis was happening. The entire economic establishment – politicians, bankers, Treasury officials, analysts and pundits – were caught unawares, because according to the free-market orthodoxy there was no chance of such a catastrophe occurring.

It was too good an opportunity to miss. The title of Skidelsky’s 2009 book – Keynes: The Return of the Master – was a sign of how times had changed.

“The public, too, was bewildered and easy prey to moralistic slogans; universal impoverishment was the price people had to pay for universal greed; belt-tightening was the only way back to health. I felt I had to bring Keynes back into the picture.” For the last 18 years of his life that is what Skidelsky did, often expressing his exasperation at the failure of politicians to embrace Keynesian ideas.

For a few months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, policymakers around the world embraced those ideas. They cut interest rates. They printed money. They boosted public spending and cut taxes. They spent and borrowed their way out of a slump. As the leading authority on Keynes, Skidelsky approved of all this.

But Keynes’s rehabilitation was brief. In Britain, Labour lost the 2010 election and George Osborne, the chancellor in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, imposed austerity measures in an attempt to reduce what until then was a record peacetime budget deficit. Skidelsky thought this was wrong-headed and said so, forcefully and repeatedly.

While not alone in his criticism of the over-hasty return to financial orthodoxy, Skidelsky was part of what he called an “embattled minority”. His warnings, though unheeded, proved appropriate. Recovery from the global financial crisis was halted, deficit reduction targets were missed, and the economy struggled. Nearly two decades later, the UK has yet to recover fully from the events of 2008.

Born in Harbin, China, only months before the start of the second world war, Robert was the son of Galia (nee Sapelkin) and Boris Skidelsky, British citizens of Russian ancestry, Christian on his mother’s side, Jewish on his father’s. Boris worked for the family firm, LS Skidelsky, which operated the largest coalmine in Manchuria.

In 1941 the Skidelskys were interned by the Japanese, but were released a few months later as part of a prisoner exchange. The family went to Britain, where they lived in a Kensington mews. Robert’s first memories were of sheltering under the table during the blitz.

When the war ended, the family briefly returned to China, but hopes of reviving the family business were dashed when the communists took control of Manchuria, and the family eventually returned to Britain. Skidelsky was sent to Brighton college, from where he won a place to study history at Jesus College, Oxford. In 1970 he married Augusta Hope, and they had three children, Edward, William and Juliet.

While he was a young academic at Nuffield College, Oxford (1965-68), he produced his first book – Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929-31 (1967) – pointing to a lifelong fascination with the 1930s. A biography of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley in 1975 proved more controversial, and not just because of its subject matter. Skidelsky said that by that point the time had come to be able to view Mosley’s life and the causes he espoused with detachment and sympathy.

If expressed today such comments would almost certainly have seen Skidelsky’s career cancelled, but even then they were enough for Johns Hopkins University to deny him tenure at its School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, where he taught from 1970 to 1976. A return to Oxford was also blocked, but after two years at the Polytechnic of North London, in 1978 he was made professor at Warwick University, where he worked for the next 28 years, becoming emeritus in 2006.

The three volumes in his biography of Keynes were all written during the period before the flaws in the free-market model were exposed by the global financial crisis. Hopes Betrayed 1883-1920 was published in 1983, the year in which Margaret Thatcher won her post-Falklands war landslide. The Economist As Saviour 1920-1937 coincided with a fourth successive Conservative election victory in 1992, while the final volume – Fighting for Britain 1937-1946 – appeared in 2000, when western economies were enjoying a period of strong growth and low inflation.

Skidelsky was by no means as constant in his political affiliations as he was to Keynes. He left Labour to become a founding member of the SDP in 1981, a decade later accepting a life peerage from the Conservatives. Briefly a shadow culture and Treasury minister after the 1997 election, he was sacked by William Hague two years later for opposing Nato’s bombing of Serbia.

In 2001, after realising that he was not cut out for party politics, he became a crossbench peer. His verdict on himself was that he was too weak to be a leader, too strong to be a follower.

In truth, Skidelsky was too much of a maverick to be a successful politician. Like his hero, Keynes, he enjoyed swimming against the tide and challenging the orthodoxy. He expressed support for Jeremy Corbyn when he made his bid for the Labour leadership in 2015. Three years later, he said that Marx was right in holding that existing power structures have the effect of limiting debate. A 2012 book co-authored with his son Edward – How Much Is Enough? – took up green causes with its critique of the pursuit of ever-more growth.

Skidelsky was an active member of the House of Lords, where he made the case for a negotiated peace between Ukraine and Russia. “We in the west cannot stop Ukrainians fighting to the death if they so wish, but to encourage them to do this by holding out the illusory hopes of victory is, to my mind, grossly immoral,” he said.

Responding to Rachel Reeves’s budget last autumn, he said: “To my mind, she is a tragic figure rather than an incompetent one. She is trying to do her best for her people and the country but is in hock not just to the bond markets but to mistaken academic orthodoxy which, via the Office for Budget Responsibility, polices her choices.”

Skidelsky had a lifelong interest in education, his second book being English Progressive Schools (1969). He was chair of governors at Brighton college (2004-17) and was critical of the way economics was taught. A particular bugbear was the tendency of economists to use jargon rather than plain English.

Yet, to the end of his life, Skidelsky’s fascination with Keynes remained undimmed. His last book – Keynes for Our Times – will be published next month.

He is survived by Augusta, his three children and six grandchildren.