John Beckett was a parliamentary star. The MP for Gateshead was tipped for high office but two decades later, disillusioned and downbeat, he became a fascist and his career lay in ruins. Author Francis Beckett explains what happened and says his father's calamitous decision is a lesson we still have not learnt

WHEN my father John Beckett was elected as MP for Gateshead in 1924, a third of its men were either unemployed or under-employed, and he was their passionate, fluent champion. He was also the youngest Labour MP, widely tipped for a brilliant parliamentary future.

By the time I was born, just 21 years later, he had burned up his passion and his career. He left Parliament in 1931, joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1933, quarrelled with Mosley in 1937 and collaborated with William Joyce (later Lord Haw Haw) to found the National Socialist League. Arrested in 1940, he spent nearly four years in prison, under a wartime regulation which allowed the Churchill government to imprison without trial people they considered a danger to the war effort.

The Northern Echo:

John Beckett as MP for Gateshead

What happened to him? He was rightly proud of taking Gateshead from the Liberals, but he was soon in despair. He wrote later: “Each time I spoke in Gateshead I saw huge audiences of expectant and suffering faces; my own friends who had walked in broken shoes and thin coats through the cold and rain of the election period were unable to find sufficient food and comfort for their families.

"During the war they had managed to accumulate the necessities of life and a few small luxuries. For the first time they had known what it was to have just that little margin which they could use for pleasure and comfort.

"From 1918 to 1923 this was steadily stripped from them until by 1924 they had sold or pawned the purchases of the war years and were in a worse condition than that they had first known. I felt intensely my powerlessness to help."

After the defeat of the 1926 General Strike, victorious mine owners were able to pick and choose whom they took back, and the most prominent strikers were left, with their families, to starve. “In my own Gateshead mining villages, at Low Fell and Wrekenton, I watched the slow disintegration, through hardship and hunger, of a fine and courageous community” he wrote.

The Soviet Union offered money, and in return, John, and Darlington MP Arthur Shepherd, undertook a fact-finding mission to Poland on behalf of the Communist Party.

In Parliament, he made an angry speech about the Gateshead ex-soldier who had sent him his medals with a letter saying they were useless – the pawn shops were full of them; and when he finished speaking, he flung the medals on to the Government front bench.

In the 1929 General Election, he changed constituencies, fighting Peckham in London instead of Gateshead. He won Peckham in 1929 but lost it in the massive Labour defeat of 1931.

Two years later he joined Mosley, and toured the North-East again, this time as a fascist – and to a much more hostile reception than he had ever known there.

He was greeted with cries of “Traitor Beckett” in Gateshead. In Newcastle, he was the key figure in what was probably the biggest pitched battle the fascists ever fought.

Fascists had taken to speaking weekly at Cowan’s Monument, and anti-fascists were determined to stop them. “The crowd was particularly incensed against Beckett and were determined not to allow him to speak”, states the police report. John was pushed off his platform, which was smashed to pieces, and the police ordered him to close the meeting. Then the fascists fought their way, inch by inch, through the streets of the city to their own headquarters.

Just a decade earlier, cheering crowds had carried him shoulder high through the streets of the same city to share a platform with its other Labour candidates. Almost certainly some of those who cheered him then were in the angry crowds now, ready to tear him to pieces.

People felt betrayed. Of course they did. What on earth was he thinking?

He was thinking that democratic politics had let them down – poverty and unemployment in the North-East was getting worse, not better. He wanted to turn his back on conventional politics, to put a bomb under the system.

It’s understandable, and immensely dangerous. For it’s exactly what American voters felt when they elected President Trump: that conventional democratic politics had failed, and it was time to try something else. And unless you have thought very carefully about exactly what it is you want to try, you end up supporting a demagogue like Mosley. Or Trump. Or even Nigel Farage.

Francis Beckett’s book about his father, Fascist in the Family, is published by Routledge.