Sir Thomas Dalyell of the Binns, 11th Baronet (9 August 1932-26 January 2017)
Tam Dalyell will be remembered with affection and warmth by friends and former colleagues within the Labour movement and beyond. That he will also be remembered in such positive terms by his enemies as well as his allies goes to the heart of the contradictions that defined his public life.
The first contradiction lies in Tam’s privileged background as an aristocrat and heir to a baronetcy and as a distant cousin to US president, Harry S Truman. Yet at Cambridge University he underwent a conversion from Conservatism to socialism, partly caused by Anthony Eden’s catastrophic intervention in Suez in 1956. (Tam’s parents were themselves groundbreakers; his father abandoned his own family name and took that of his wife, Nora Dalyell.)
Winning a hard-fought by-election in West Lothian – home to his ancestral pile, The Binns – Tam entered parliament in 1962, where he served his constituents devotedly for the next 43 years until 2005, when he retired. During his last term in the House of Commons, he was also father of the house.
He was, however, the only father of the house, to have been ejected from the chamber for breaking its rules demanding courtesy to all members. For Tam, who was comfortable being described as on the party’s ‘far-left’, never allowed protocol or tradition to get in the way of his energetic crusades on behalf of the various causes dear to him. This in itself was another contradiction, for on a personal basis, it was hard to come across a more genial, polite and thoughtful member of parliament. Anna Yearley, who served in the parliamentary Labour party offices at Westminster, tells of how he was one of the few MPs who would telephone ‘just to see how we were and to check on everyone’.
Even after leaving the House in 2005, he would occasionally send me a letter – he was one of the last of the great parliamentary letter writers, resisting the lure of email – whenever he heard or saw a media interview I had given; his words were invariably generous and encouraging.
Yet in his public affairs, he seemed to relish being an irritation to the establishment. Many can recall the campaigns of which he was a supporter – the journalist Andrew Brown once referred to him as having ‘an almost ludicrous persistence’, which few of his contemporaries would deny. Yet his obsession with some causes and a refusal to admit when he got it wrong risked tarnishing his reputation as a defender of the underdog against the state. For instance, in demanding answers to questions surrounding the sexual assault and murder of Hilda Murrell in her home near Shrewsbury in 1985, he made repulsive, unsubstantiated allegations against Britain’s security services. After the culprit was caught and convicted – a local criminal with no connections to the security services whatever – no further comment was heard from Tam, and no apology or admission of fault.
Similarly, on what was arguably his most famous cause – the investigation of the sinking of the Argentinian battle ship, the Belgrano, during the Falklands war in 1982, Tam’s claims of warmongering against Margaret Thatcher were later disproved by the enemy ship’s own captain, who admitted publicly that his mission had indeed been to target and sink British vessels.
And, of course, there was the West Lothian Question, named by Enoch Powell but asked, repeatedly, by Tam in his never-ending campaign against Scottish devolution. He was the only Scottish MP who, in 1989, refused to be a signatory to the so-called ‘Claim of Right’, which, as part of the then campaign for a Scottish parliament, asserted the sovereignty of the Scottish people.
But it is Tam’s humour and politeness for which he will be remembered by former colleagues. Labour’s mayoral candidate in the West Midlands, Siôn Simon, will recall a particularly Tam-ish admonition from the great man when, as a relatively new MP following the 2001 general election, Siôn had made some unguarded comments about the then chancellor, Gordon Brown, comments that had found their way into the national media. Accosting his younger colleague during a vote in the Commons, Tam had asked, ‘Are you Siôn Simon?’ And on receiving confirmation of his query, had solemnly shaken his head and said, in his deep, posh voice, ‘Oh, dear, oh dear, oh, dear.’ And then walked off, leaving Siôn suitably chastised.
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Tom Harris is former member of parliament for Glasgow South. He tweets @MrTCHarris
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With two hereditary titles, one of them derived from an ancestor who had been among Charles I’s Royalist generals, this Old Etonian served for 43 years as the Labour MP for the area that contained his stately home with peacocks on the lawn. During that time, he made a glorious nuisance of himself, using his utterly uncompromising upper-class accent to scourge Margaret Thatcher over the miners, Tony Blair over Iraq, and numerous lesser figures over everything under the sun. There’ll never be another.
But now that Tam Dalyell is dead, who will speak for the Chagossians? Jeremy Corbyn, that’s who. He’s been doing it for years. As he has also been speaking for the Rohingya, for the Dalits, and for so many others besides. People criticised Dalyell for what was in fact his very specific objection to an aspect of the Falklands War. But anyone who professes to support the Falkland Islands, yet who does not support the Chagos Islands with equal vigour, ought to be dismissed out of hand as entirely beneath contempt. Oh, and do look up the precise words of Dalyell’s long-serving West Lothian antagonist, Billy Wolfe of the SNP, on the subject of the Falklands War. Scottish Nationalism’s nasty side is very nasty indeed, and Dalyell always saw straight through it.
He and the other Old Etonian Labour MP at the time, Mark Fisher of Stoke Central, both voted against the Iraq War. Fisher was still in Parliament in 2006 to join only 11 other Labour MPs, including Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, in voting for an inquiry into that war. The more famous touring speakers of the Left have no difficulty getting into the major public schools. But the schools run by right-wing Labour Councillors and their spear-carriers are an entirely different matter. Think on.
Sir Thomas Dalyell of the Binns, will always be rememberered for what he was, a fine example of a Labour MP that committed himself to his party, The Labour Party and in so doing has helped make it what it is today.