Fascist in the Family: The Tragedy of John Beckett MP
FRANCIS BECKETT

Brilliant, enigmatic John Beckett, a rising Labour star in the 1930s who turned to Oswald Mosley’s Fascists, was a hero from literature “looking for a Father Brown and eventually finding him”.

That, at least, is the verdict (among others) of his son Francis, a prolific journalist and biographer who has inherited much of his father’s exhausting  curiosity. The basic facts are simply told. John Beckett was born in Hammersmith, London, in 1894, the son of a draper, though he boasted of being of “Cheshire yeomen stock”. His mother was Jewish, and so therefore was he: a fact he denied throughout his life, along with practically everything else.

Elected Labour MP for Gateshead in 1924, and subsequently Peckham, Beckett was a close political associate of Clem Attlee, and noted for his parliamentary passion, pre-­dating Michael Heseltine by half a century in seizing the mace in the House of Commons. After losing his seat in 1931, Beckett became disillusioned with the Left and threw in his lot with the British Union of Fascists.