Described by a long-time associate as "a brilliant polymath, a consummate homo politicus, and one of the last true witnesses to the 20th century",[1] he was a Communist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War but later changed his views completely and became an adviser to Margaret Thatcher.
Alfred Sherman joined the Communist Party as a teenager and abandoned his studies at Chelsea Polytechnic at the age of 17, later explaining, "to be a Jew in 1930s Britain was to be alienated.
After the war, in the summer of 1948 he was expelled from the Communist Party for "Titoist deviationism" and subsequently spent some time in Yugoslavia as a volunteer in a "youth work brigade".
During a subsequent protracted stay in Israel in the late 1950s Sherman was a member of the economic advisory staff of the Israeli government and had a close relationship with David Ben-Gurion.
However he was a loose cannon when it came to the media and an early display of his outspoken racism was when he told the Soviet newspaper Pravda, in 1974: "As for the lumpen proletariat, coloured people and the Irish, let's face it, the only way to hold them in check is to have enough well-armed and properly trained police.
[2] In her memoirs, Thatcher herself paid tribute to Sherman's "brilliance", the "force and clarity of his mind", his "breadth of reading and his skills as a ruthless polemicist".
She credits him with a central role in her achievements, especially as Leader of the Opposition but also after she became Prime Minister: in July 2005 she declared, "We could have never defeated socialism if it hadn't been for Sir Alfred".
[9] Sir Alfred was one of the signatories to a letter in The Times, along with Lord Sudeley, Professor Antony Flew and Dr. Harvey Ward, on behalf of the Institute, "applauding El Salvador's President Alfredo Cristiani's statesmanship" and calling for his government's success in defeating Cuban and Nicaraguan-backed communist FMLN terrorists.
"It does us no good to claim a locus standi in every conflict be equating it with the Holocaust", he wrote, "or when third parties in their own interests take the name of our martyrs in vain; Bosnia is not occupied Europe; the Muslims are not the Jews; the Serbs did not begin the civil war, but are predictably responding to a real threat.
But in contrast to the Spanish–American War, he argued, U.S. intervention in the Balkans has no clear strategic aim, but is allegedly a moral crusade on behalf of the "international community": "This begs many questions.
Well before the 11 September attacks and the Iraq War, Sherman argued that Washington had "set up the cornerstone of a European Islamistan in Bosnia and a Greater Albania, thus paving the way for further three-sided conflict between Moslems, Serbs and Croats in a bellum omnium contra omnes.
As he wrote in May 2000, "The power and the prestige of America is in the hands of people who will not resist the temptation to invent new missions, lay down new embargoes, throw new bombs, and fabricate new courts.
Instead of rediscovering the virtues of traditionally defined, enlightened self-interest in the aftermath of its hands down cold war victory, America's foreign policy elites are more intoxicated than ever by their own concoction of benevolent global hegemony and indispensable power.