Lord Robert Skidelsky

I was saddened to hear of the passing of my former colleague Professor Lord Robert Skidelsky of Tilton Manor. I only met one of his three children but my condolences are extended to them and his wife.

Excellent obituaries have appeared in The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph and that from the Social Market Foundation is particularly informative in terms of his intellectual history.   May I also commend the tribute by Warwick Economics Department including remarks by Professor Marcus Miller: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/news/2026/4/reflections_on_the_life_and_work_of_emeritus_professor_lord_skidelsky/

Robert's early career was marred by controversy over what was seen as too sympathetic a biography of Oswald Mosley.   Inviting Mosley to high table at Nuffield College did not go down well.

Robert joined the Department of International Studies at Warwick in 1976.   Towards the end of the 1980s the University decided that International Studies should be merged with the larger Politics department where I became chair in 1990.   I learnt of this decision when I was in New Zealand.

Robert decided he would be more at home in Economics.   As I recall, not everyone in Economics was happy about this with some members of the department already unhappy that I was co-teaching courses for them, although they found me to be quite a useful external member for their appointing panels.  They eventually conceded that I was literate in Economics and I continued to teach on Economics coded m modules until my final retirement in 2015.   I developed good working relationships with a number of economists such as the late Nick Crafts and Mark Harrison.

Eventually I found myself teaching the third year Making of Economic Policy module with Robert.  He was the most erudite and widely read person I had ever encountered and he treated me and the students with real courtesy.   There was no doubting is intellectual superiority, but there was no condescension on his part.

I read all three volumes of his Keynes biography and I thought that they were brilliant exercises in historical political economy, a view shared by Bill Clinton.   When he came to Warwick to give the last speech of his presidency he sought out Robert for a conversation.

Robert once said that he was too weak to be a leader and too strong to be a follower.   Politically he moved from the Social Democrats to the Conservatives where he was briefly Treasury spokesman in the Lords.  During this period he often had to rush out of the class to deal with faxes.   Sacked by Bill Hague for his views on Kosovo, he ended up as a cross-bencher which suited him better.

I did sometimes pull Robert's leg.   He had taken a lease from a local aristo on Keynes's old home at Tilton (you can see it from the upper floors of the nearby Charleston).  He was trying to raise funds to refurbish an outbuilding Keynes had used, but a condition for any heritage money was that he opened to the public.  I suggested that he could install a large scale model of the Phillips curve in the garden for children to play on.

I was also economical with the actualité on one occasion.   Robert had spent millennium night at some aristocratic country house and asked me where I had been.   My reply was a marina on Southampton Harbour which was true except that I was on the quay not some luxury boat.

It was a privilege to have known him as an intellectual and a person.

Robert Skidelsky's new book

Yesterday I attended an 'in conversation' event in which Robert Skidelksy (Lord Skidelsky of Tilton) presented his latest book, Money and Government: a Challenge to Mainstream Economics. Of course, challenges to mainstream economics have been circulating ever since the financial crisis and there have been new developments in economics such as behavioural economics which draws on the insights of psychology.

In the book, Lord Skidelsky says that he has been chiefly influenced by the insights of Keynes. His biography of him is well known and it was interesting to see Bill Clinton congratulate him when he came to Warwick University to give his last speech as US President. However, Skidelsky also says that he has been influenced by the insights of Polanyi who is certainly 'dans le vent.'

Someone asked me afterwards if I agreed with what he said and I replied, 'Up to a point.' There is no doubt that serious errors were made in the run up to the financial crash in 2008 by both policy-makers and academics. It is also evident that more needs to be done to improve global regulatory supervision of the financial sector, but the willingness for international cooperation is declining, particularly from the United States. What remained of the post-war economic world order is being dismantled.

I think that he was correct in saying that cheap credit became a replacement for the old social contract. Whilst he is critical of the 'fine tuning' Keynesianism of the 1950s and 1960s, he thinks that the collapse of Keynesianism was more the product of a particular conjuncture than systemic. Its collapse may have been hastened by particular events, but from my perspective, neo-corporatism as a political project was flawed (at least in the UK) and could not sustain the weight placed upon it.

He also got in a good dig at The Economist which always proclaims its current line with confidence while insisting that it has been consistent in its faith in liberalism for 175 years. In fact, as he illustrated, the line it takes is inconsistent.

The Conservatives had managed to give austerity a compelling political narrative in 2009. However, the problem was one of private not public debt. He favoured higher levels of public investment, possibly involving a National Investment Bank as advocated by Keynes. In response to a question, he said that there was no magic number for the public debt/GDP ratio, particularly in terms of its effect on growth, although he did mention a figure of 90 per cent.

What would concern me is the proportion of public expenditure devoted to debt servicing, although I can see the case for public expenditure in infrastructure when interest rates are low. However, in my view too many 'grand projets' (Crossrail, HST2) inevitably run over their time and money budgets and fail to deliver a sufficient rate of return.

When I asked him whether there would be another crisis, and, if so, what was the important thing we could do to prevent it, he reasonably enough said that we could not predict the timing or nature of a future crisis, although there could be a series of smaller ones. Earlier he had said that breaking up global banks was unfinished business.

He was more critical of the role of an independent central bank than I would be, although I accept that there has been too much emphasis on the inflation objective. He thinks that interest rates should be decided by politicians and if people don't like what they do, they can throw them out at the next election. This is a rather crude form of control as many factors affect voting decisions.

He argued that politicians were not as bad as many people said, it was essentially an American-based narrative that they were corrupt. I don't think they are corrupt, but they can be influenced by short-term electoral considerations or simply gaining advantage over colleagues. As Alan Watkins, sadly no longer with us, said: 'Politics is a rough old trade.' The evidence on the political budget cycle is mixed to say the least, but that does not mean that the temptation to manipulate economic variables is absent.

He argued that central bankers are accountable to no one, but I think that the Treasury Committee of the House of Commons has subjected the Bank of England to close scrutiny.

It was a polished performance by someone who is widely read, as I know from teaching with him. The political weather is shifting in his direction. I suppose that my fundamental disagreement would be that I think government failure is a more systemic problem than he allows.

Nevertheless, if anything, global political arrangements to curb the excesses of globalisation are slipping away. In particular, what has recently been called 'Moneyland', an unregulated offshore economy continues to go largely unchallenged, allowing global companies to arrange their tax affairs to their advantage. I always saw one of the main benefits of the EU as being its ability to offer some resistance to the worst effects of globalisation, but its political effectiveness and legitimacy is being challenged by populist movements that offer simple solutions to the challenges that people face in their lives.

If you want to watch the event, you can do so here: Institute for Government

What does it mean to be a 'political economist'?

Over the years at Warwick I had the privilege of teaching with many distinguished economists, among them Nick Crafts, Mark Harrison and Ben Lockwood. I also taught with Professor Lord Skidelsky and I attended an 'in conversation' event involving him in London yesterday to celebrate the publication of his latest book. I have a signed copy, but I am yet to read it.

The economists I have taught with over the years have always been polite about political science, but I suspect they were rather sceptical about it. I did once give a presentation at the Agricultural Economics Society (of which I am a member) on what political science had done for the study of agricultural economics which at least historically has been a policy oriented branch of the discipline. One distinguished agricultural economist got up and said 'Nothing!' and one had to admire his honesty (the paper has subsequently been published).

One of my economics colleagues was generous enough to say that I thought that I was literate in economics in the sense that I understood the terminology and had a basic grasp of theory. I would admit that I probably learnt more from them than they did from me.

When I started doing work with life scientists, the impression I got was that at least some of them thought that political science had something new to offer, primarily in terms of how issues are 'framed'. For example, in our work on cattle diseases, they could see how the myth of the 'rogue badger', a deviant badger that was supposedly terrorising the countryside, had influenced policy.

I was able to ask the first question at Lord Skidelsky's presentation yesterday, and he was gracious enough to acknowledge my book on 'the politics of economic policy'. In fact there were three books. The first was written with Shiv Nath which I think was the one that Robert read and he said to me at the time that he wondered how we had managed to write a book together as it was evident that we disagreed so much.

I then wrote a short book on 'The Politics of Economic Policy' which was reliant on a ruthless intellectual pillage of the work of Nick Crafts. Finally, I wrote a book on 'Economic Policy in Britain' which was my attempt at a more mature reflection on the subject matter. It has been overtaken by events such as the crash and Brexit, but still sells some copies and hopefully still has some insights to offer.'

I try to make some claim to be a 'political economist', most recently in some work I have been doing on football (Nick Crafts has actually written about the turf). In essence what I think I am doing is examining the interaction between the market and the state within the context of globalisation, although that has been encountering increasing resistance with the resurgence of nationalism as in 'America First'.

But what theoretical perspective can be deployed to assist this task? Robert Skidelsky would still advance the claims of Keynes, although his reflections on political matters in the General Theory were largely confined to an admittedly interesting appendix. Keynes wrote very extensively, e.g., on football and the shortcomings of Ramsgate (the editor of the Charlton fanzine lives in Ramsgate so I often draw his attention to what Keynes had to say). However, it is possible to read what you want into Keynes and we have been reliant on those who chosen to interpret him, in very different ways over time since his untimely death. This has allowed commentators to present themselves as Keynes's representative on Earth.

Another claim is for Marxist economics. Although I am no Marxist, there are some valuable insights to be derived. I think that crisis is endemic to capitalism, but it can also have valuable purgative effects, admittedly at great cost to individuals (which is where effective government comes in).

There is then public choice which I taught about with Ben Lockwood. This has become indelibly associated with neo-liberalism, but that was really the Virginia School. Ben and I took the view (as did Patrick Dunleavy) that it could be deployed as a neutral toolkit that enabled you to ask some challenging questions. Colin Hay sees it as highly politicised and having a harmful effect.

One would also have to acknowledge the work of Polanyi, which at the very least has been marketed very well in recent years, but also contains some important insights about different types of capital. Last but not least, I would mention the work of Elinor Ostrom which won her a share of a Nobel prize in economics, a rare accolade for a political scientist (Herbert Simon, whose work influenced me, was another example). I think that Ostrom's work is flawed, particularly methodologically, but in an interesting way that allows us to look at problems in a fresh light.

Where this ends up is with an eclecticism that is both a strength and a weakness of political science. One area in which I have attempted to work is the development of a political theory of a firm which I explore with David Coen and Graham Wilson in our Oxford Handbook of Business and Government. I have to admit we didn't get very far beyond sketching out the challenge.

So perhaps what I have been doing is examining the politics of economic policy, although that is something that needs to be done. I will write subsequently about what Robert Skidelksy had to say.

The last of the Keynesians?

Was Wynne Godley, who has died at the age of 83, the last of the Keynesians? I did not know Godley, but once he phoned me up to ask, with great old fashioned courtesy, a series of questions about the Common Agricultural Policy about which he was proposing to write a letter to the FT.

Godley came from an impoverished aristocratic background. His father was an alcoholic and his mother was clearly deranged. He was brought up a violent maiden aunt and attended a particularly unpleasant prep school. No wonder he had an 'disastrous encounter' with psychoanalysis in mid-life.

However, he went on to be an accomplished professional oboist, before abandoning his musical career (he suffered from bad stage fright) to join the Metal Box Company (a major company in its day) as an economist and then the Treasury in 1956 when Keynesianism was the established orthodoxy. It also did one no harm in those days in the Treasury to have a serious interest in music. He later became a director of the Royal Opera House.

He became deputy head of the economics section before departing in 1970 for Keynes's old post at King's College, Cambridge. He then became an advocate of import controls, although he claimed somewhat unconvincingly that he was only trying to reduce the propensity to import. Godley came across to me as a rather old fashioned 'drenching wet' Conservative, but some of his colleagues in the Department of Applied Economics in Sidgwick Avemue were well to the left and signed up to the now largely forgotten Alternative Economic Strategy.

Godley had no time for the Thatcherites once describing their policies as 'gigantic con trick'. As it became evident that he was not 'one of us', he was punished by having the grant for his forecasting group abruptly withdrawn in 1982. He did enjoy a late flowering when he became a member of the Treasury's Panel of Independent Forecasters or 'six wise men' from 1992 to 1995.

The FT obituary described him as a 'Maverick who endured with ideas undimmed'. He certainly did not lack intellectual courage. In a sense Keynesianism is back in fashion again with the torch being carried by the former colleague with whom I taught for some years, Robert Skidelsky (Lord Skidelsky of Tilton). He is undoubtedly a great intellectual, but one political economist aptly described his book on Keynes: the Return of the Master as 'eloquent, but not convincing.'

The notion that we can spend our way out of trouble is misguided: we would simply end up in an even bigger hole rather like the sinkholes that have been appearing all over China.

The stakes are quite large

Henry Kissinger aptly said that academic debates are so vicious because the stakes are so small, but there are some substantive issues being raised by this spat behind all the name calling: The economy

On the subject of ultra Keynesianism, my former colleague Robert Skidelsky has brought out a new book on Keynes which according to Sam Brittan's review in the Financial Times is very good (as I would expect).

Keynes wrote and said so much that one can put whatever content one wants into his views. As he said (I haven't checked the exact wording), 'If the facts change, I change my opinion.'

When I read Robert's three volume biography of Keynes, I must say that it seemed to me at times as if Keynes was being presented as a closet monetarist. But it was a formidable achievement and when Bill Clinton came to Warwick to make his last official speech as president, he picked Robert out of the crowd to congratulate him.