Lord Skidelsky, a former Brighton College boarder who became chair of the board of governors there, has died at the age of 86.
Robert Skidelsky went up from the school to read history at Jesus College, Oxford, before a career as an academic, author and politician that was at times controversial.
The biggest controversy followed publication of a sympathetic biography of the former Labour MP and British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley in 1975.
Skidelsky later wrote a three-volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes, having gone so far as to move into Keynes’s former home, Tilton House, in Firle, near Lewes, in 1986 – and writing at Keynes’s desk.
When he became a member of the House of Lords in 1991, he was ennobled as Lord Skidelsky of Tilton.
He became the first chair of the Social Market Foundation think-tank, aiming to find a third way between those advocating free market politics and those concerned with social justice.
The think-tank influenced a number of those involved in the project that led to “New Labour” and the election of Tony Blair as Prime Minister in 1997.
Skidelsky’s own political career appeared somewhat peripatetic. He quit a squabbling Labour Party in the early 1980s when his longstanding friend David Owen became one of the “Gang of Four” who founded the Social Democratic Party.
When the SDP merged with the Liberal party to form the Lib Dems, he stayed with the Continuing SDP until it dissolved. He then joined the Conservatives.
He was sacked from their shadow frontbench team in the Lords during William Hague’s tenure as Tory leader and later left the party to sit as a crossbench – or independent – peer.
Skidelsky once said: “Fellow peers used to stop me in the corridor and ask: ‘Which party are you in today, Robert?’”
His academic career included a research fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford, and teaching posts at Johns Hopkins University, North London Polytechnic and Warwick University.
He was passionate about education, advising governments and founding the History Curriculum Association.
He returned to his old school in Brighton as a governor before going on to chair the board of governors there for many years until 2017.
Robert Skidelsky was born on Tuesday 25 April 1939, in Harbin, in Japanese occupied Manchuria, in China. He died from a brain infection on Wednesday 15 April 2026 at the age of 86.
