My quest for Robert, Lord Skidelsky to write an essay for The American Conservative started in earnest after a Duke of Marlborough (James Spencer-Churchill) tweet (it was still called that then), wherein Marlborough wrote that Winston Churchill, his great uncle, would be appalled at the use of the wartime prime minister’s name to continue the needless loss of life in Ukraine in preference to a negotiated compromise. The tweet he was responding to was from Lord Ashcroft, who described Volodymyr Zelensky as a modern Churchill. I wrote an email to ask whether Skidelsky would be interested in writing an op-ed or an open letter for an American audience about the few conservative realist British voices opposed to further foreign interventions.
In 2025 and ’26 Skidelsky wrote three articles in total, ranging from the prudential to somewhat impressionistic, for the premier and often the only conservative American publication consistently opposed to foreign wars and interventionism. Skidelsky was one of the handful of British voices who called for a negotiated peace between Ukraine and Russia: “All nations have their own story to tell. The clash of their stories can cause or inflame wars. It is the traditional task of diplomacy to reconcile conflicting stories so that like can live in peace with unlike.” In a modern version of Lord Lansdowne’s 1917 letter, he wrote that British maximalism has nothing to do with achieving Ukraine’s independence, but rather, a very rational urge to exsanguinate Russia: “Most of us in the West simply cannot recognize in NATO the ‘encircling claws’ of Borodin’s Prince Igor, or the ‘insidious enemy’ of Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace.”
Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky was born in Harbin, China, to a Jewish father and a Christian mother who fled Russia during the revolution. During the Second World War, his family was interned by the Japanese, and were eventually exchanged to Britain. After the war, they went back to China to recover stolen property, only to face the revolution. Giving up on the Orient, the Skidelskys settled in post-imperial Britain, where the young Robert attended Oxford for his baccalaureate and doctoral studies. After his schooling, he wrote a “silly and romantic” biography of Oswald Mosely, the British fascist leader, and was denied tenure at Johns Hopkins as a result. He proceeded to then write the most authoritative biography of John Maynard Keynes, the third volume of which won the Duff Cooper Prize in 2000.
Skidelsky was ennobled in 1991 as Baron Skidelsky of Tilton, and was subsequently a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Similar to his ideological forebear, Lansdowne, he shifted his party allegiances but stayed true to his personal instinct of great-power equilibrium. He was never a believer in permanent allegiances in domestic politics. Opposing NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, he was removed from the Tory benches to be a crossbench peer; he went on tacitly to defend Jeremy Corbyn for his economic posture. This intellectual independence was not appreciated in all quarters; two days after his death, he was slandered as a Russian shill by the assistant director of Royal United Services Institute.
Though a social conservative who converted to Catholicism in his final months, Skidelsky was not a cheerleader for the fads of his fellow travelers. “It is important to distinguish between maintaining the European population and maintaining the population of Europe. The immigration solution, which aims at the second, is purely secular: Its goal is to keep up numbers in Europe, not keep up the numbers of Europeans,” he wrote in a piece on European birth rates for TAC.
Cultural nationalism comes with a cost. Since returning to power in 2010, Orbán’s government has rolled out tax cuts, housing grants, low-interest loans, and even vehicle subsidies to encourage larger families. Hungary now spends around 5 percent of its GDP on pro-family subsidies, far more than most countries spend on family support (or on defense)…. So far Orbán’s lavish incentives have had only a modest effect. Hungary’s total fertility rate (TFR) hit a historic low around 1.23 children per woman in 2011. As of 2024, after nearly 14 years of pro-natalist policies, it has risen to roughly 1.56.
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His final essay for TAC warned of a world drifting to war and the taint of politics in sports. He didn’t live to see the Trump administration trying to screen the social media of tourists for the World Cup.
His last email to me, was commending me on a “perceptive” essay on the rise of the ethnonationalism in England that might lead to the dissolution of the United Kingdom. “Bonar Law said in 1921 ‘Britain cannot be the policeman of the world.’ No, but America could, and through the special relationship, Britain could continue to enjoy the vicarious pleasures of empire,” he wrote.
His enormous gift was stripping any political calculus of romanticism. Whether that was a Russian or British trait, remains debatable, but it was very much what one might expect of an elderly nobleman speaking to an attentive student. I duly and courteously addressed him by his title, as I was brought up and trained to do. He signed off with his first name, as an old acquaintance.
