John Strachey (politician)

Background and education

Strachey was born in Guildford, Surrey on 21 October 1901, the youngest of three sons of John St Loe Strachey (1860-1927), editor of The Spectator.

He was educated at Eton College (1915-19).

He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford in 1920. At Oxford he was editor, with his close friend Robert Boothby, of the Tory-leaning Oxford Fortnightly Review. Strachey's Oxford career was interrupted by ill-health – peritonitis – and he left after two years in 1922 without taking a degree.

He joined The Spectator in 1922.

Disciple of Mosley

In 1923 Strachey began writing for the ILP New Leader.

Strachey joined the Labour Party in 1923 and in 1924 he was the unsuccessful Labour candidate for Aston division. He became a close ally of Oswald Mosley, then an up-and-coming Labour politician who had contested Birmingham Ladywood.

In 1925 Mosley and Strachey published the “Birmingham Proposals”, calling for more action on unemployment. In 1925 Strachey published “Revolution by Reason”, calling for money-printing, redistribution and state planning. In 1926, during the General Strike, he became editor of the ILP’s Socialist Review and of The Miner. He was sympathetic to Marxist analysis, but disliked class warfare. In 1928 he visited the USSR, then a virtual international pariah state. On 24 April 1929 he married Esther Murphy (c1899-1962), the daughter of a New York department store owner. Mosley was his best man.

In 1929 he was elected MP for Birmingham Aston. He became Parliamentary Private Secretary to Mosley. In May 1930 Mosley and Strachey resigned over the government’s unemployment policies. In 1930 he visited the USSR for a second time. In February 1931 Strachey supported Mosley in founding the New Party, but he resigned in July 1931 when Mosley rejected socialism and close links with the USSR. Mosley subsequently turned to fascism.

By this time Strachey’s marriage had failed, and he renewed an old relationship with Celia Simpson (1900-79), the daughter of a clergyman. She had been sacked from The Spectator for being too left wing and had joined the Communist Party.

In October 1931 Strachey defended his seat at Aston as an independent pro-communist workers’ candidate, but was defeated. He applied to join the Communist Party but was rejected in the summer of 1932 as an unreliable intellectual. He suffered a nervous breakdown and underwent three years of psychoanalysis. After obtaining a divorce from his first wife he married Celia on 13 October 1933. They had a son, Charles, in 1934 and a daughter Elizabeth in 1936.

Communist

Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) organized a large rally at the Olympia hall in London in June 1934. A counter-demonstration was organized, and the rally turned into a fight in which many were injured. A Committee for Coordinating Anti-Fascist Activities was formed, with Strachey as secretary, sponsored by the World Committee Against War and Fascism (Amsterdam-Pleyel). When the BUF staged another demonstration of 3,000 Fascists in Hyde Park, London on 9 September 1934, Strachey's committee organized a major counter-demonstration by 20,000 anti-Fascists.

Strachey assisted the publisher Victor Gollancz and Harold Laski in founding the Left Book Club in 1936. As the author of The Coming Struggle for Power (1932), and a series of other significant works, Strachey was one of the most prolific and widely read British Marxist-Leninist theorists of the 1930s. He wrote what the ODNB calls “the most influential popularisations of Marxism that were ever published in English”. He criticised the economics of John Maynard Keynes from a Marxist perspective before himself becoming a Keynesian. He often wrote for the monthly bulletin Left News.

Strachey helped launch the Popular Front in December 1936.

Second World War

By 1938 Strachey was persuaded by Keynesianism and the US New Deal. In 1940 he published “A Programme for Progress”. Strachey became increasing unhappy with the Communist movement following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet Invasion of Finland. In a letter to the New Statesman Strachey claimed the Communists "are prepared, for the sake of the ... Soviet Union, to give way to Hitler to any extent, and they are utterly irresponsible as to the consequences to the British people of such unlimited giving away. So long as that remains the case I ... can have nothing to do with them." He broke with the CPGB in April 1940.

Early in the war Strachey served as a volunteer Air Raid Warden. Towards the end of 1940 he joined the Royal Air Force in which he served as a Squadron Leader with a temporary commission. He served first as an adjutant with a fighter squadron then as the PR officer with a bomber group. He was posted to the Air Ministry as a public relations officer in the Directorate of Bombing Operations and made a reputation as an air commentator for the BBC, making official broadcasts about the men of RAF Bomber Command.

Attlee Government and after

Returning to the Labour Party, he was chosen to be the Labour candidate for Dundee early in 1943.

He was again elected to Parliament, in 1945. He was immediately appointed Under-Secretary of State for Air and is widely credited as having been responsible for ignoring Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and, by implication, Bomber Command from the Victory Honours List. This may have been retaliation for Harris' request to have Strachey removed from his wartime post within the Directorate of Bombing Operations due to Strachey's changeable political persuasions, a request that was not successful as Strachey remained in the post until the end of the war.

He was appointed Minister of Food in May 1946 and became a Privy Counsellor that same year. His appointment owed much to his reputation as a confidently facile speaker and for being ultra-efficient. However, his time in office was beset with problems about food rationing and the Tanganyika groundnut scheme.

On the division of the Dundee constituency, he was elected as Labour MP for Dundee West in February 1950, holding the seat until his death in 1963. He succeeded Manny Shinwell as Secretary of State for War, 1950–51. Strachey was subjected to press attack after the Klaus Fuchs Affair (March 1950) as he was known to have been a communist sympathiser. He then denounced the Schuman Plan, which did not help his reputation. He had doubts about the Korean War but unlike Aneurin Bevan did not resign in April 1951.

During the Labour Party’s civil war of the early 1950s he tried to be an “insider”, neither Bevanite nor Gaitskellite. He supported Hugh Gaitskell as successor to Clement Attlee as Labour Party leader in 1955. In the 1950s Strachey devoted much of his time to writing studies of British society from a social democratic viewpoint. Strachey was an opponent of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In 1963 he supported George Brown for the party leadership; the victorious candidate, Harold Wilson, appointed him Shadow Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs.

Death

Strachey died in Marylebone, London, on 15 July 1963, after a spinal operation, aged 61.

His death caused a by-election in his Dundee West constituency, won by Labour's Peter Doig.

His wealth at death was £50,157 and 1s (over £900,000 at 2016 prices).