Professor Glen Newey
Philosopher and blogger who believed that political deception was inevitable in a liberal democracy
PROFESSOR GLEN NEWEY, who has died in a boating accident aged 56, was a combative political philosopher who took a clear-eyed approach to the limitations of liberal democracy, seeking to understand the processes involved when ideals such as toleration and liberty come up against the realities of conflict, intolerance and power relations.
A former student at Cambridge of Richard Tuck, Newey was in the forefront of a revival of the “realist” school of political philosophy, as developed by Machiavelli and Hobbes, and a forthright critic of fashionable “Rawlsian” liberal political theory. As well as books and numerous academic articles, Newey contributed widely to the political debate through articles in the press and a brilliantly funny, if scabrous, blog for the London Review of Books.
In a post in 2003 entitled “As Useful as a String Condom”, he launched a scattergun attack on the Royal Family, characterising the Queen Mother as a woman who “couldn’t have got much further Rightwards without buying a uniform”, and accusing the Prince of Wales of promoting “a blathering eco-feudalism in which society is an idealised Highgrove”. “During the last big snafu concerning the Windsors, after the death of Diana, the main charge against the Royals was ‘aloofness’,” he observed. “All this really amounted to was that they had shown themselves indifferent to the fate of a drama queen whose early death spared us all a lot of tedium.”
“De mortuis nil nisi veritas,” he wrote. Newey never minded causing offence.
In books such as After Politics: The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy (2000), Newey took aim at the prevailing strain of liberal political thinking, advocated by followers of John Rawls, which he saw as ignoring the real world in which politicians have to operate in favour of a highly moralised and idealised (and thus unrealistic) theory of public life.
In 2003 he earned press coverage with a study of the art of telling political lies, published by the Economic and Social Research Council, in which he drew examples from the British cash-for-questions scandal to Bill Clinton’s claim that he “did not have sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky.
Newey concluded that it was almost impossible for today’s politicians always to tell the truth and that much of the blame for this lay with the drive towards greater openness and accountability which had forced ministers to answer questions on issues their predecessors were often able to gloss over. “Discontent with democratic politics is both the cause and the consequence of political deception,” he wrote. “Deception brings politics into disrepute, while politicians in their efforts to assuage popular disaffection impose on themselves unsustainably demanding standards of truth-telling. Unless we are more honest about this, we are in danger of causing lasting damage to our democracy.”
What was needed, he reasoned, was an acceptance that some political deception is not only inevitable in a democracy but can be legitimate where it is in the public interest (for example where national security is at risk). While he conceded the need for scrutiny bodies to assess politicians’ claims that particular acts of deception are in the public interest, in the end it is the electorate who will decide: “We should accept that where democratic bodies such as the electorate retrospectively sanction deception as being required to secure certain public goods, then that deception is in the public interest. It is in the nature of deception that the legitimacy of some acts of deception cannot be made public at the time since their efficacy depends on keeping the fact of deception out of the public realm.”
Glen Francis Newey was born on May 30 1961 at St Helier, Jersey. The fact that in later life he paid greater attention to the betting odds on elections than to the pollsters owed something to his father’s job as a bookie – as did his doubts about moral philosophers. “In a schoolgate encounter with my mother,” he recalled last year, “a fellow parent, Mr Crapp – a pillar of the local chartered accountants’ guild and man of God – voiced his surprise that she had the brass to show herself in public, given her husband’s job. My doubts about moralism surfaced around this time.”
Newey was educated at Victoria College, Jersey, and at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read History. After graduation he worked for several years as a schoolteacher, later taking an MA and PHD at the University of York under John Horton.
A charismatic, kindly, unconventional teacher, Newey went on to take posts at the universities of Sussex, Strathclyde and York, at Birkbeck College and at Oxford, before his appointment in 2006 as a professor at Keele University. In 2011 he was appointed Professor of Political Theory at the Université libre de Bruxelles and, from 2014, was Professor of Practical Philosophy at Leiden University.
Newey’s own political views were never easy to pin down. Unimpressed by the powerful, he expressed great sympathy with those he described (the day before the EU Referendum, the outcome of which he had correctly predicted) as “the serially shat on”.
Though critical of the EU, he had little time for the most ardent Brexiteers. In a pungent blog written the day after Boris Johnson’s appointment as Foreign Secretary (“heir to the mantle of such as Castlereagh, Palmerston and Halifax. Christ!”), he observed that it had not taken long for Teresa May to “stiletto expectations”. But he concluded the reality was that the appointment was a “brilliant coup. By being booted over to the FO (clue’s in the abbreviation), Johnson has, as they used to say of IRA weapons caches, been ‘put beyond use’. Till the next clusterblooper makes office untenable even by him, he’ll be eking out a twilight existence in business class, fuelled by complimentary peanuts.”
Newey’s published works include Virtue, Reason, and Toleration (1999) and Toleration in Political Conflict (2013), and a guidebook to Hobbes’s Leviathan. He also edited a book on free speech.
In a last blog post, marking the 20th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, he recalled the “Diolatry” that prevailed in 1997: “On a scale unseen since Queen Victoria hoofed the pail, grief totalitarianism raged across the land. News sources reacted much as North Korean state television handles the demise of a Kim, or as Spanish telly did when Franco died.”
Glen Newey is survived by his wife, from whom he was estranged, and by his two children.
Professor Glen Newey, born May 30 1961, died September 30 2017