A founding member of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1907, he resigned from his job at The Daily News in 1909 when it supported the force-feeding of suffragettes on hunger strike.

The son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, Brailsford was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire and educated at the High School of Dundee in Scotland.

[citation needed] Brailsford abandoned an academic career to become a journalist, rising to prominence in the 1890s as a foreign correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, specialising in the Balkans, France and Egypt.

[6] Brailsford joined the Independent Labour Party in 1907 and resigned from The Daily News in 1909 when it supported force-feeding of suffragette prisoners.

[9] He was a prominent member of the Union of Democratic Control during the First World War and stood unsuccessfully as a Labour Party candidate in the 1918 general election.

He subsequently toured central Europe and his graphic accounts of life in the defeated countries appeared in his books Across the Blockade (1919) and After the Peace (1920).

In the late 1930s, he was one of the few writers associated with the Left Book Club, the New Statesman and Tribune who was consistently critical of the Soviet show trials.

His wife died in 1937 after years of drinking,[14] and whereas this removed any legal obstacle to the couple being married, Brailsford, consumed by guilt, suffered an emotional breakdown, effectively destroying his relationship with Leighton who left for the US in 1939.