NEWS ........

Sir Alfred Sherman, like that other great leader of classical liberal conservatism, Winston Churchill (and indeed like the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher whom Sherman advised) was never comfortable in the Conservative Party establishment.

Perhaps that is why his obituary in The Daily Telegraph described him as having an "instinctive fanaticism". But it was not any "fanaticism" which made him un-clubbable in the political establishment it was his non-elite education, being a contrarian outsider and a creative libertarian thinker - indeed the very characteristics which paradoxically led him to Communism (as the most intellectual source of opposition to Fascism in the 1930s) and then to his rejection of Communism because of the hubris of its State controls ("a self-deception beyond repair"). When Alfred described to me his policy conflicts with Chris Patten at the Conservative Research Department and others in Government in the early 1980s he said this was "partly because I was a Jew and partly because I had ideas".

Sir Alfred's family, being emigres from Tsarist Russia were confronted with the classic paradigm of continental politics (then and now) - a pendulum which swung from one form of totalitarianism to another, expressed in the 20th century as fascism and communism (with each containing strong elements of the other). In Russia there was no Labour party to counter fascism and no Conservative Party to counter communism. Jewish intellectuals, confronted by the Tsar's secret police in Russia, were therefore tempted by Communism and when confronted by Establishment appeasement of Nazism and Fascism in the 1930s, Alfred Sherman turned to Communism.

Having spent much time in the last year or two talking to Alfred, writing an extensive review of his book (*) and recording his thoughts for a radio programme on "The Rise and Fall of Margaret Thatcher" it is clear to me that he was the only senior Government adviser who fully grasped (economically and philosophically) the nature of the task before the Conservative Government in 1979. He was by far the most able thinker close to No 10 and he "got it right" on virtually every point - mass immigration, coal and steel subsidies, monetarism, the Poll Tax, Europe, the ERM and the bureaucratisation of the NHS. He was also responsible for brininging in as an Adviser to the Prime Minister Professor Sir Alan Walters to repair the damage done by Geoffrey Howe's period as Chancellor of the Exchequer and set the points for 1980s prosperity.

In particular Sherman (who even as a youthful Communist supported the more open version of socialism practised by Moscow's enemy Marshall Tito) was absolutely right on the grave crisis in Yugoslavia. It was in Yugoslavia that "German Europe" flexed its new-found powers in order to re-establish those very fascist statelets which the Nazis had created between 1941 and 1945. Sherman saw in the German, British and American propaganda real distortions of historical and ideological truth - and even a grotesque appeal to the horrors of the Jewish holocaust.

"It does us no good to claim a locus standi in every conflict by equating it with the Holocaust," he wrote, "or when third parties in their own interests take the name of our martyrs in vain; Bosnia is not occupied Europe; the Muslims are not the Jews; the Serbs did not begin the civil war, but are predictably responding to a real threat"

Having made the same case myself over the last 15 years and having seen the fascists (Croats and Albanian and Bosnian Muslims) promoted as victims and the historically anti fascist victims (Serbs) as fascist aggressors it was remarkable to find even one leading political figure in Britain who forcefully sought to set the record straight.

On the Yugoslavia and broader European crisis as well as the social and domestic economic issues one can hear the repeated accusations of Sherman's critics that he was "naïve". By that they mean of course that they could not possibly turn his analysis into practical politics. Well, we see the results. Alfred, like the rest of us who produce philosophical and historical analyses of present politics, go through intellectual blood sweat and tears for one purpose only - that new generations do not have to repeat the sins and omissions of their fathers and die in wars.

Alfred always preferred to recommend pain today rather than see the catastrophe tomorrow. He could never understand why Government wanted to hang on to what they did before, even when it had proved catastrophic. But he had, in his own words, "fallen among politicians" whose attention span is minute and whose definition of history is a week in politics. Politicians will never do anything because it is right, only because it gets votes and if the public do not know of a crisis or cannot understand it the last person to enlighten them is the politician. From that perspective the Alfred Shermans are attractive as intellectual furniture but a danger if they influence the public to free themselves from the manipulative control of the political establishment. Equally they are an embarrassing reminder of what politicians could have prevented had they acted on their analyses.

But quality rarely asserts itself other than in the long term and Alfred Sherman's lucid intellectual ideas live on to influence another generation - even another generation of politicians. "Margaret Thatcher was not really a Thatcherite" he told me. He was right, but Alfred Sherman created Thatcherites and it was that powerful combination of classical liberal economics, Conservative morality and property rights and opposition to the corporatist State which gave the Conservative Party 18 years in power and, initially at least, even benefited the Blair regime.

Just before his death Sir Alfred thought that the British political situation had regressed. It was now not "post Thatcherite" but "pre Thatcherite". Shortly after Mr Cameron (who seems to believe in few of the principles which sustained both Churchill and Thatcher) was elected Tory leader Alfred said to me "you should prepare for the post Cameron era".

No true intellectual can produce work of any consequence for humanity without a varied personal odyssey, indeed a wide experience of life and peoples, languages and cultures, ideologies and practical politics. Alfred Sherman encompassed the 20th century in all these ways. He struggled with fascism in the 1930s and with Marxism in the post war period. He went to Spain to fight fascism and to Yugoslavia to support reform communism. During the Second World War he was a security officer in the Middle East and studied Islam. He became President of the Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, the foundation named after the poet who gave his life in the struggle of the Balkans against Islamic rule. He fought the parasitic socialist state in the 60s and 70s and the new Euro-state until his death (he was a patron of the British Declaration of Independence because he recognised Europe had indeed gone "full circle" and if there is one danger Alfred recognised more than any other it was European Fascism!). He was a local councillor, a journalist, a communist student, a Daily Telegraph leader writer and a Prime Ministerial adviser.

Only out of such an intellectual whirlwind of contradiction could - in the right mind - such clarity and power of thought emerge. In his last contribution to The Salisbury Review Sir Alfred displayed in a couple of sentences both the certainty of his ideas and the erudition on which that confidence was based:

In 1936 Spain became briefly the touchstone of world politics; since
then it has become a backwater, a centre of tourism, retirement homes
and cuisine. Per Montesquieu "heureux le pays sans histoire"….
Ortega Y Gasset's designation "invertebrate Spain" remains accurate.

Like all great thinkers of principle who affect the human condition Sir Alfred Sherman struggled financially while the political pygmies of his time amassed wealth from their self-centred betrayals of party, country and their own people. But who will be remembered in future - Blair, Cameron, Kinnock and Heath - or Sherman, Powell and Churchill?

Alfred! your ideas, the fruits of one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century, survive you - while the careers of the politicians who ignored you ended in failure.

May you rest in peace.

* See my review of Sir Alfred Sherman's book "Paradoxes of Power" at www.ukconservatism.freeuk.com/news-2006-02-27.html