Michael Meadowcroft: A Liberal of Intellectual Rigour and Uncommon Integrity
The death of Michael Meadowcroft on Monday marks the passing of a distinctive voice in British Liberal politics—one that prized serious thinking over comfortable platitudes, and truth over convenient mythology. I first met Michael in 2009, when I was undertaking research on Liberal history. I had expected to meet a former MP with the usual recollections and political anecdotes. What I encountered instead was something rarer: a political thinker who remained genuinely concerned with ideas, and who was determined to dispel the myths that had accumulated around Liberal history like barnacles on a ship's hull. "Intellectual rigour," he told me during that first conversation, was what Liberal politics desperately needed. It was not enough to have good intentions or to mouth progressive platitudes. Liberalism, properly understood, requires serious engagement with political philosophy, with history, with the actual substance of what it meant to be a Liberal rather than simply...
