Niall Ferguson is swiftly learning that it’s best to leave people’s private lives out of attacks on their intellectual ideas. The conservative historian has already had to issue an apology after he implied last week that the economist John Maynard Keynes didn’t care about future generations because he was childless and gay.
Now Keynes’s biographer Nick Wapshott attacks Ferguson’s “sly, sniggering” remarks, comparing him to the anti-Keynesian economist Friedrich Hayek.
In a blog for Reuters, Wapshott observes that even Hayek never stooped to such arguments. “Perhaps he was inhibited by his own morality,” muses Wapshott. “Hayek abandoned his wife and children on the day after Christmas to start a new life with an old flame. He was a cad. Yet I have never heard a Keynesian use Hayek’s lack of personal ethics as an excuse to damn his thinking.”
Hayek “the cad” is one of Ferguson’s heroes and it’s not just an economic outlook they share. In 2010 Ferguson walked out on his wife, Sue Douglas, and their three children, to move to the US with feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet just as Hayek was “too smart and perhaps too well mannered” to try to use Keynes’ sexuality as a slur, Wapshott is too polite to mention this.
Ferguson has some unlikely supporters. “I don’t think he should have given in to media hysteria like this,” tweeted Independent on Sunday columnist John Rentoul. “He apologised for his comments about Keynes being gay.”
