Benjamin John Pimlott Federal Bar Association, known as Ben Pimlott, was a British historian of the post-war period in Britain.
Education
Educated at Rokeby School, at the time in Wimbledon, Marlborough College and Worcester College, Oxford, where he took a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and a Bachelor of Philosophy in politics. In 1970, he was appointed as a lecturer in the politics department of the University of Newcastle, where he also took his Doctor of Philosophy.
Career
He made a substantial contribution to the literary genre of political biography. In the February 1974 General Election, Pimlott contested Arundel on behalf of the Labour Party, and Cleveland and Whitby the following October. Having lost on both occasions, he also contested the 1979 election, after which he left the North East to take up a research post at the London School of Economics, moving to a lectureship at Birkbeck College, London in 1981.
Many of Pimlott"s theses have stood the test of time, even if they were marginally controversial when originally published.
His studies of the 1930s Labour left, the life of Harold Wilson and the constitutional effect of the monarchy in post-war Britain are said to have made his reputation as a biographer and even bestowed some additional credibility upon the subjects, all of which have received critical accounts under the pen of others Pimlott sincerely believed and argued consistently that the post-war consensus in British politics was a veritable red-herring.
At the time of his death from leukemia in 2004, he was Warden of Goldsmiths, University of London (since 1998). In 2005 the college named a major new Will Alsop-designed building on its New Cross site in his honour and also the same year the Fabian Society and The Guardian inaugurated the first annual Ben Pimlott Prize for Political.
Politics
His other books include Labour And The Left In The 1930s (1977), The Trade Unions In British Politics (with Chris Cook, 1982), Fabian Essays In Socialist Thought (1984), The Alternative (with Tony Wright and Tony Flower, 1990), Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks (1994) and Governing London (with Nirmala Rao, 2002).