Smash hit

Forty years later it reads tamely, but it did not seem tame to the young MPs who swept into the Commons on Harold Wilson’s coat-tails in 1964 and 1966. It became the bible of would-be reformers in the 1966 Labour intake, in particular. Only later did it become clear that Crick had dodged the fundamental question: what would happen when gradualist parliamentary reform ran up against the buffers of executive power?

By then, however, Crick was getting itchy feet. Born in 1929, he had grown up in a middle-class family in the Surrey suburbs. He had been educated at Whitgift School in Croydon; at University College London, where he was awarded a First; and at the London School of Economics, where he was a research student.

Between 1952 and 1956 he studied and taught at Harvard, McGill and Berkeley, California. In 1957 he was appointed assistant lecturer at LSE, where he stayed as lecturer, and later senior lecturer, for eight years. But the LSE Government Department was headed by the high priest of conservative quietism, the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott; and Crick’s restless spirit ran against the Oakeshottian grain.

In 1965 Crick emigrated from London to a Chair in Political Theory and Institutions at the University of Sheffield. The title of the chair was itself a manifesto: political theory and political institutions were intertwined; neither could be studied fruitfully in isolation from the other.

At Sheffield Crick laid the foundations of what would become one of the leading politics departments in the country; he also won the abiding admiration of some of his junior staff. He was awarded four honorary doctorates altogether, but Sheffield’s, awarded in 1990, gave him most pleasure.

He also taught the young David Blunkett, who became a lifelong friend. But the lure of the metropolis continued to beckon. Crick still made his home in London; and, until he was discovered by the cleaners, he camped out, in some squalor, in his office in the University Arts Tower.

When an indignant Vice-Chancellor asked what would happen if the rest of the teaching staff behaved like that, Crick replied airily that he supposed extra floors would have to be added to the building.

Another move was inevitable; and in 1971 Crick was appointed Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, London. The Orwell biography was the most obvious literary fruit of his time at Birkbeck, but, ever restless, he accumulated many other roles as well. He was joint editor of The Political Quarterly from 1966 to 1980, and later chairman of the editorial board, in which capacity he played the part of the absent-minded professor to outrageous perfection, and waged unremitting war against unnecessary footnotes.

Later still he set up the Orwell Prize to encourage good political writing in journalism and books, in the spirit of Orwell’s hope that it could become an art. He was the first president of the Politics Association, designed to foster politics teaching in schools. He became a vice-president of the British Humanist Association, characteristically shocking the zealots in the movement by conceding that its “ever-ready anti-God” seemed “a little old-fashioned”.

Not surprisingly, the Thatcher-induced chill winds that blew through British universities in the early 1980s led him to take early retirement in 1984. He even spurned the metropolitan lure and settled in Edinburgh, the home of his then partner, Una Maclean. He wrote as voluminously as ever, but hopes that retirement would give him the time to produce another big book were disappointed.

His writings were as quirky and provocative as they had always been, but his thought did not develop. For a while, he was moderately active in Charter 88, the constitutional reform pressure group, but in Charter meetings he often seemed a voice from the past. Yet he was active in the movement for Scottish devolution, and helped, behind the scenes, to broker discussions between the nationalist and loyalist communities in Northern Ireland.

His big moment came in 1997, when Blunkett became Education Secretary in Tony Blair’s first Government. Blunkett appointed him as chairman of a high-powered advisory group on citizenship education. The then Speaker, Betty Boothroyd, was persuaded to give it her blessing, and became its patron. Lord (Kenneth) Baker, Margaret Thatcher’s sometime Education Secretary, became an active and enthusiastic member.

The report resounded with the themes that Crick had made his own for more than 30 years. It cited Aristotle and the Roman Republic, and declared uncompromisingly that the group’s aim was “no less than a change in the political culture of this country”, enabling people “to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to have an influence in public life”.

From it flowed an order making citizenship teaching part of the core curriculum. Later, Crick was charged with devising the naturalisation ceremonies for new British citizens. In 2002, in the teeth of official opposition, Blunkett secured him a knighthood in explicit recognition for his services to citizenship.

At first sight, it was a strange destination for a thinker in the republican tradition. But perhaps it was not as strange as it looked. Crick’s quirkiness concealed an inner insecurity, which was reflected in his rather chaotic private life. He wanted to be an outsider and an insider — a radical and a Whig — at the same time. He wanted to poke the establishment in the midriff, but he also craved its recognition. He was not the first or the last British socialist of whom that could be said.

Crick’s three marriages ended in divorce and he is survived by his partner, Una Maclean, and the two sons of his first marriage.

Sir Bernard Crick, political scientist and writer, was born on December 16, 1929. He died of cancer on December 19, 2008, aged 79