Evelyn John St Loe Strachey (21 October 1901 – 15 July 1963) was a British Labour politician and writer.

During the Second World War, Strachey served as a Royal Air Force officer in planning and public relations roles.

Throughout his career, Strachey was a prolific writer of books and articles from a communist perspective in the 1930s and as a social democrat after the Second World War.

[1] By this time Strachey's marriage had failed, and he renewed an old relationship with Celia Simpson (1900–79), the daughter of a clergyman.

[1] In the October 1931 election, Strachey defended his seat at Aston as an independent pro-communist workers' candidate, but was defeated.

[1] Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) organised a large rally at the Olympia Hall in London in June 1934.

When the BUF staged another demonstration of 3,000 Fascists in Hyde Park, London, on 9 September 1934, Strachey's committee organised a major counter-demonstration by 20,000 anti-Fascists.

[6] Strachey assisted the publisher Victor Gollancz and Harold Laski in founding the Left Book Club in 1936.

[1] As the author of The Coming Struggle for Power (1932), and a series of other significant works, Strachey was one of the most prolific and widely read British Marxist–Leninist theorists of the 1930s.

[7] He wrote what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) calls "the most influential popularisations of Marxism that were ever published in English".

[1] Strachey became increasingly unhappy with the Communist movement following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet Invasion of Finland.

[1] His obituary in The Glasgow Herald noted he had introduced bread rationing almost as soon as he took up his new office and that although he defended the policy as being "forced on him by world shortage", this was deeply unpopular; from then on he and his junior minister Dr Edith Summerskill were faced with "constant criticism which would have tried spirits more patient than those of Strachey".

[1] The same obituarist opined that Strachey's defence of the "ill-fated groundnuts scheme" was "more notable for loyalty than discretion".

His Glasgow Herald obituary commented that the move to the War Office "was, therefore, no surprise" after his unpopularity at the Food Ministry.

[15] Strachey was subjected to press attack after the Klaus Fuchs Affair (March 1950) as he was known to have been a communist sympathiser.

He supported Hugh Gaitskell as successor to Clement Attlee as Labour Party leader in the 1955 leadership election.

[1] In the 1950s Strachey devoted much of his time to writing studies of British society from a social democratic viewpoint.

In 1963 he supported George Brown for the party leadership; the victorious candidate, Harold Wilson, appointed him Shadow Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs.