Always an outsider: that is why he had such a unique insight
Martin JACQUES
I remember phoning Stuart in, I guess, mid November 1978. I had been editor of Marxism Today for barely a year. I was trying to work out a new direction for the journal: to break with its previous diet of the dull, the obscure and the predictable and focus on what seemed to me a quite new conjuncture in British politics. Who, I mused, could write about the Tory Party and the shift to right? I thought of Stuart. I barely knew him at the time. But I was aware from reading Policing the Crisis that he was thinking deeply about these questions. I phoned and asked him if he would write an article for the January 1978 issue. He immediately agreed. The article duly arrived a week or two later.
Note on the contributor
Martin Jacques edited the London-based magazine Marxism Today from 1977-1991. He is the author of the global best-seller When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, which has sold over 400,000 copies and been translated into fourteen languages. His TED talk on Understanding China has had over 2.2 million views. He is a Senior Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing.