Alfred Sherman

Sir Alfred Sherman (10 November 1919 – 26 August 2006) was an English writer, journalist, and political analyst.

Described by a long-time associate as "a brilliant polymath, a consummate homo politicus, and one of the last true witnesses to the 20th century", he was a Communist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War but later changed his views completely and became an adviser to Margaret Thatcher.

Sherman was born in Hackney, London, to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Jacob Vladimir and Eva Sherman.

His early years were spent in grinding poverty; as a child he suffered from rickets.

He attended Hackney Downs County Secondary School, which was then a grammar school and regarded as a flagship of opportunity.

He went on to Chelsea Polytechnic, where he studied science.

Alfred Sherman joined the Communist Party as a teenager and abandoned his studies at Chelsea Polytechnic at the age of 17, later explaining, "to be a Jew in 1930s Britain was to be alienated. The world proletariat offered us a home."

He then volunteered to fight for the Major Attlee Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, 1937–38, where he was taken prisoner and repatriated to Britain.

After returning home, he worked in a London electrical factory.

Between 1939 and 1945 he served in the Middle East in the Field Security and Occupied Enemy Territory Administration.

After the war, in the summer of 1948 he was expelled from the Communist Party for "Titoist deviationism" and subsequently spent some time in Yugoslavia as a volunteer in a "youth work brigade".

After graduating from the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1950, he returned to Belgrade as a correspondent for The Observer.

Already fluent in the language known as Serbo-Croatian at that time, he acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history, culture and politics of the South Slavs.

He also developed a lifelong affinity for the Serbs, comparable to that of Dame Rebecca West.

During a subsequent protracted stay in Israel in the late 1950s Sherman was a member of the economic advisory staff of the Israeli government and had a close relationship with David Ben-Gurion.

He married Zahava Zazi née Levin in 1958, and they had one son, Gideon.

After returning to London, in 1963, he joined the Jewish Chronicle as a leader writer, later writing for The Daily Telegraph from 1965 (leader writer from 1977).

About 1970 he joined the Conservative Party and the following year was elected as a councillor for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (1971–78).

Sherman was critical of Edward Heath's Conservative government because of its public spending and its failure to implement free market policies.

In 1974 he co-founded the Centre for Policy Studies with Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher.

Sherman was subsequently Director of the CPS and a member of the Conservative Philosophy Group.

The CPS was the real launching pad for Margaret Thatcher, gradually transforming her from the untried party leader of 1974 into a prime-minister-in-waiting.

However he was a loose cannon when it came to the media and an early display of his outspoken racism was when he told the Soviet newspaper Pravda, in 1974: "As for the lumpen proletariat, coloured people and the Irish, let's face it, the only way to hold them in check is to have enough well-armed and properly trained police."

More than any one man, Sherman provided her with the strategy for capturing the leadership of the Party and winning the general election of 1979.

By 1982, the latent strains in his relationship with Mrs Thatcher became fully apparent.

She complained that he was dismissive of the obstacles she was encountering in dismantling the legacy of the post-war consensus, while he berated her for betraying the promise of her early years.

Eventually he upset so many people at the CPS that its Chairman, Hugh Thomas, decided that Sherman was "impossible to work with: he has to go", and expelled him in 1983.

In her memoirs, Thatcher herself paid tribute to Sherman's "brilliance", the "force and clarity of his mind", his "breadth of reading and his skills as a ruthless polemicist".

After his exclusion from her inner circle she nevertheless continued to regard him with "exasperated affection", and rewarded him with a knighthood in 1983.

From about 1986 he and his son Gideon Were members of Western Goals (UK), Gideon serving on the Directorate.

Sir Alfred was one of the signatories to a letter in The Times, along with Lord Sudeley, Professor Antony Flew and Dr. Harvey Ward, on behalf of the Institute, "applauding El Salvador's President Alfredo Cristiani's statesmanship" and calling for his government's success in defeating Cuban and Nicaraguan-backed communist FMLN terrorists.

"'When you get a loss of faith, say if bishops cease to believe in God, they go in for socialism or sodomy. But an economist who's agnostic about economics is unemployable, and therefore they say, 'We know if you do this and if you do that..' And the economists will argue with each other, but none of them will ever question whether economics is as scientific as it claims.'"

In the last 15 years of his life, Sherman was an outspoken critic of western policy in the former Yugoslavia.

That affinity was rekindled in the 1990s, when Sherman became a leading critic of the Western policy in the Balkans.

Yet in the 1990s he said of her, "Lady Thatcher is great theatre as long as someone else is writing her lines; she hasn't got a clue".

After her death from cancer in 1993 he married Lady Angela Sherman in 2001.

In 1994 he co-founded The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies as a research institute.

She credits him with a central role in her achievements, especially as Leader of the Opposition but also after she became Prime Minister: in July 2005 she declared, "We could have never defeated socialism if it hadn't been for Sir Alfred".

But his unwillingness to make compromises with the establishmentarian consensus never enabled him to fit into the clubbable world of British politics.

In July 2005 they were reunited at a reception marking the publication of Sherman's last book with a revealing title, Paradoxes of Power: Reflections on the Thatcher Interlude.