Vince Cable leapt from obscurity to the front page of the Daily Mail with his quip during Prime Minister’s Questions – when he was acting leader of the Liberals after they mislaid Menzies Campbell – that Gordon Brown had gone from “Stalin to Mr Bean”. It brought the House down – and a regular Mail on Sunday column up. Vince was the embodiment of a suburban bank manager who – if only he’d been in charge – would have kept the spivs and wide boys from running amok in the City and putting every man, woman and child in Britain in hock to the tune of £25,000.
Free Radical is his autobiography. An 11-plus winner from the right side of the tracks, he went to grammar school, then an obscure Cambridge college to study economics, before becoming a civil servant in Kenya after independence as the country waited for trained Africans to take over. They’re still waiting. Then an academic post in Glasgow where John McFadden recruited him into the Labour Party, an unsuccessful run at Glasgow Hillhead in the general election and a seat on the council where he made a name for himself as a pro-European left-winger. He walked away for the Foreign Office, where he cynically watched them sideline left-wing ministers without a murmur, before moving to Overseas Development, early work on climate change and its consequences for countries like the Maldives and, in consequence, he was headhunted by “big oil” (Shell).
His politics followed piece by piece as he successively abandoned the left, Labour and Europe, redesigning himself as a centre-right Eurosceptic with a conscience. He took the Liberals towards conservative fiscal rectitude, budget discipline, better regulation and fairer, rather than higher, taxes – a formula acceptable even to Sir Reg Goodwin. These mundane precepts were turned by the media into economic genius in the fallout from the global financial crisis to such an extent that, if there is a hung parliament after May 6, then Cable – an immodest man with much to be modest about – could be thrust into high office. “Free radical” is a chemical term for an unattached atom; it sums him up perfectly.
In contrast, American Radical is the biography of Izzy Stone, the courageous American leftist and brilliant journalist who played an important role in implementing Roosevelt’s New Deal before being chewed up and spat out by the McCarthyite red scare in the 1950s. Blacklisted, there was no way he could get a job or his articles printed in the mainstream press. So he launched IF Stone’s Weekly with his own money and turned it into the voice of the non-Stalinist left in the US. Initially it was a little voice but over the years it got louder and louder. It was the thread that linked the radicalism of the 1930s with the emerging New Left of the 1960s. Stone, almost singlehanded, kept the flame alive. He spoke on many a campus with his pro-feminist and anti-racist resonances from two generations earlier.
In the era of Barack Obama it is important to remember that McCarthyism outlived its founder. Equality in voting rights for blacks waited until the late 1960s. If by then the lynchings were over the hanging chads of Dade County, Florida, in 2000 showed some were still more equal than others. As late as 1961 people in the US were still being jailed for six years for being communists. Stone, and his work, deserve to be better known on this side of the Atlantic if only for his preservation of letters like the one from Ohio Democrat Stephen Young to a constituent that we have all wanted to write from time to time but never did: “Dear Sir, Some crackpot has written to me and signed your name.”
