Farewell to Richard Gott [1938—2025]

I woke up early yesterday morning. Richard Gott, my oldest friend in this country, had come out of hospital a couple days earlier and wanted to meet up. Vivien Ashley, his long-standing partner, suggested 11am. Max Arvelaiz, a long-time friend (and former Venezuelan Ambassador to the US) was to accompany me, but at 7.30am I received a text from Vivien: ‘Richard died early this morning.’ Though he had been unwell for some years, he had always managed to recover. The ‘unsinkable Richard Gott’ I used to tease him. This time he has gone. However much it is expected, the death of a close friend is always a shock. In a flash everything goes: memories held in common that cover political and personal crises, arguments, the exchange of information and regrets. There was so much left to talk about – the calamitous situation in South America, the threatened US regime-change in Venezuela – and some good news as well, not least the impending collapse of the Starmer Labour Party. Is the Left up to removing every trace of the albatross embedded in its brain and that has stifled it for so long? Richard hoped so. And, of course, a recurring question: Could The Guardian get any worse? His answer was always an emphatic ‘yes!’

Where to begin? The Gotts were prominent in the Yorkshire wool trade in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His mother’s family, the Moons, were doctors and teachers based in Mayfair.  Both Richard’s parents and his maternal Uncle Penderel Moon, whom I met on separate occasions, were liberal, cultured people. The parents adored him and, following his Uncle Pendy, Richard was sent to Winchester, followed by Corpus Christi College, Oxford where he studied and developed a real passion for history that never left him. After he graduated, he wrote The Appeasers with Martin Gilbert, a sharp account of those who wanted to collaborate with the Third Reich. Other books emerged at regular intervals.

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Richard’s family was embedded in the political and economic fabric of British history. Once, discussing the originality of Ernest Mandel’s book on the Second World War, Richard confessed that a paternal uncle, William Gott, had been one of Churchill’s generals and was quietly appointed to take charge of Britain’s ‘Eighth Army’ in Egypt after Auchinleck was sacked for incompetence in 1942. News of the appointment leaked. The Germans targeted the plane carrying General Gott to the desert. The pilot (the 19-year old son of a Welsh miner) managed to land and survived but ‘Strafer’ Gott, as he was known, was killed. Like the Germans (and Churchill), Richard was convinced that Uncle Bill would have been sharper and quicker than Monty [Field-Marshal Montgomery].

Richard, however, departed from his family’s commitment to crown and country to become one of the sharpest reporters of revolutionary Latin America in the twentieth century. Richard was 18 in 1956 when Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt in an attempt to topple the country’s radical leader Gamal Abdel Nasser who had nationalised the Suez Canal. He was twice that age as the war in Vietnam escalated, thus straddling the 1956 and 1968 generations. The first event led to his active involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the second to his support for the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. He was and remained a staunch anti-imperialist for his entire adult life.

His day job, which he enjoyed greatly, was first as the Latin American correspondent of The Guardian and later as its Features and Literary Editor. He used both roles to give voice to radical writers who otherwise never would have appeared in the Guardian, or any other part of the media mainstream of the time for that matter – getting away with it by a maverick eclecticism and unrivalled political range. He visited Cuba in 1963 and was amongst the first Western journalists to meet with and interview Che Guevara. Four years later, covering Che’s ill-fated guerrilla war in Bolivia, he was the only person in the country who had met Che and was thus enlisted to identify the slain leader’s dead body. He did so with tears rolling down his cheeks.

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Richard spoke and read Spanish and French with ease and was familiar with German (partially a result of his love for German classical music). Spanish became dominant after his travels, which never really ended till his illness advanced. He wrote essays on Mexico, a very fine book on Cuba, and a compendium on Guerrillas in Latin America. He spent a year in Chile helping to set up an International Affairs dept at the university, an event that cemented his love for South America. His last three books were written for Verso: a fascinating study – Land Without Evil – on the Jesuits, a masterful history of the British Empire, its cover adorned with the adult toy devised by the Indian anti-imperialist ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, and a study of the triumph of Chavez and Venezuela. He was also among the first Western journalists to visit Venezuela and meet Hugo Chavez. In February 2000, he produced a fascinating piece for the London Review of Books on Chavez and the Venezuelan revolution. In his typical measured, but hopeful style, he wrote:

Writers have always been susceptible to the charms of Latin America’s radical strong men, and I am no exception. Clearly Chávez has a Utopian vision, not uncommon in a continent from which Utopias are believed to spring, and it would be foolish not to imagine that his dreams will eventually be betrayed. Yet he has laid down the framework for a national revival capable, one day perhaps, of resisting the ‘colossus of the North’. On the other hand, many radical projects in Latin America have been left, like corpses on a gibbet, to twist in the wind. The proposals of Comandante Chávez deserve a better fate.

Where, today, does mainstream media produce serious journalists of the calibre of Richard Gott and others from his generation? He passed away today, but he will remain alive for many of us who knew him as a friend, a historian and a journalist. Condolences to his wife, Vivien Ashley whose encouragement on so many different levels kept him going so long and to his son, Inti, his daughter Aracuana, and the many grandchildren that he loved so much.

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