Francis Beckett Journalist Profile

Articles

Starmer’s Stockholm Syndrome over the Daily Mail

Oct 14, 2024 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Francis Beckett

A year ago, I urged greater boldness on a senior Labour politician, a Starmer ally. The politician explained politely and patiently: “If we did that, the Daily Mail would say…”What they said was true. Everything I suggested would have brought ferocious condemnation from the right wing press. I thought of that conversation as I read about Sue Gray being fired. Everyone was saying she had done nothing wrong, she had just become the story.
New play tells how a Jewish girl from London became an 'enemy of the people'

Oct 14, 2024 | jewishnews.co.uk | Francis Beckett |Louisa Walters

When Rose Cohen, a Jewish woman in London, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) soon after the First World War, it was a decision taken in hope and optimism and idealism. And it killed her. Rose was not alone with her ideals. In the 1920s and 30s many British Jews joined the CPBG as a bulwark against fascism and anti-Semitism – only to find that the Soviet Union carried the virus they wanted to exterminate.
Bearing all

Oct 10, 2024 | camdennewjournal.co.uk | Francis Beckett

Jonathan Hansler in Vodka with StalinEVERY so often the West thinks it’s tamed Russia. We keep fondly imagining that the land of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin, the land that Winston Churchill called “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” is suddenly going to turn transparent and cuddly. Many people thought it would happen after the 1917 revolution. Lenin promised to make Russia not only cuddly, but fair as well. It didn’t turn out like that.
Belgium, the land of beer

Oct 1, 2024 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Francis Beckett

It was, honestly, entirely by chance that my recent stay with my son in Brussels turned out to be the same weekend that the city hosted not one but two beer festivals. The bigger of the two was the 24th annual Belgian Beer Weekend, organised by the Belgian Brewers, the Knighthood of the Brewers’ Mash Staff (the brewers’ guild), and the City of Brussels. It’s held in the Grand Place, the magnificent medieval central square, and it offers 400 varieties of beer from more than 50 Belgian breweries.
Vodka with Stalin - a member's play, 16/10/24 to 27/10/24 | The Freelance

Sep 25, 2024 | londonfreelance.org | Francis Beckett

Online only MY PLAY Vodka with Stalin returns to Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village for a limited run - 16 to 27 October - and tickets are now on sale. It tells the true story of Rose Cohen, a British Communist who went with her Russian husband to Moscow, just in time for the start of Slatin’s purges in the 1930s. Can her former lover Harry Pollitt, now Britain’s Communist leader and a drinking chum of Stalin, protect her?
Lee Child's new book has tales with a twist

Sep 12, 2024 | thespectator.com | James Innes-Smith |Bryan Appleyard |Joanna Pocock |Francis Beckett

Lee Child has sold more than 200 million books. He reckons his royalties at about a dollar per book. He doesn’t write short stories to make money. He contributes to anthologies, largely pro bono. “Fabergé eggs they ain’t,” he says, in the introduction to Safe Enough and Other Stories, but they are real gems nonetheless. With no global readership to worry about and no commercial interests involved, Child was free to have fun.
The chameleonic life of Claire Clairmont

Sep 9, 2024 | thespectator.com | Suzi Feay |David Cohen |Julie Burchill |Francis Beckett

Commentary on the young Romantics can be curiously puritanical. Not on saintly John Keats, who died too young to cause any trouble. But Byron and Shelley? Beastly to women, negligent as parents, destructive as friends, oblivious to their own privilege. Feminist observers tend to resemble the English visitors to Geneva in 1816 who borrowed telescopes to spy on the renegade inhabitants of the Villa Diodati across the lake, hoping to be scandalized.
The desperation at the heart of the Harris candidacy

Sep 5, 2024 | thespectator.com | Freddy Gray |Sam Meadows |Francis Beckett |Amber Duke

Barack Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope. The Kamala Harris story of 2024 could be called The Audacity of Desperation. Her brief candidacy has been an awesome display of chutzpah. With just weeks to go before the election, a panicked Democratic Party pushed aside their failing commander-in-chief and replaced him with Harris, the distinctly unpopular vice-president.
Do polls really matter after Labor Day?

Sep 4, 2024 | thespectator.com | Sam Meadows |Jonathan Miller |Francis Beckett |Amber Duke

The political pundits like to tell us that general election polls don’t matter until after Labor Day. That, they say, is when the average American actually starts paying attention to what is happening in the election and so you can get a better understanding of which way the electorate is leaning. The only problem with that traditional wisdom is that it’s hard to put much stock into polls when so many are returning drastically different results.
Want to see RNC chair Lara Trump’s new music video?

Sep 3, 2024 | thespectator.com | Matthew Foldi |Francis Beckett |Amber Duke |Grace Curley

The video begins with sirens, a firetruck and vivid kinetic typography spelling the words “hero.” Then, soulful piano music. Sigh. Cockburn really didn’t want to cry this afternoon. RNC co-chair Lara Trump, daughter-in-law to former president Donald Trump, released an official music video last month with Madeline Jaymes.