Sir Gerald Kaufman
Labour MP who was a tough select committee inquisitor and a master of the waspish intervention
SIR GERALD KAUFMAN, Father of the House of Commons, who has died aged 86, enjoyed a controversial career as a Labour MP spanning 46 years, but held his most senior posts in opposition during the party’s wilderness years.
From being Harold Wilson’s media “fixer” he became Industry Minister under James Callaghan, a pungent campaigner against the Bennite Left and, on Labour’s return to power, an iconoclastic chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee.
The waspish Kaufman loved music and was an authority on the cinema, his favourite film being Singin’ in the Rain. He was a gifted critic and polemicist, a writer of elegant letters to the Telegraph, a contributor of sketches for That Was The Week That Was, a Booker Prize judge, a keen reviewer of crime fiction, and an author of quality.
My Life In The Silver Screen earned him a season at the National Film Theatre; How To Be a Minister was memorable for his description of Paul Channon’s office at Environment as recalling “the wilder extravagances of Mad King Ludwig”.
This book also betrayed Kaufman’s political technique: “When being interviewed on TV, do not allow yourself to be disturbed by such irrelevancies as the actual question asked.” He would have broadcast more had he not earned the sobriquet of “difficult” from producers and refused to appear for less than £150.
In 2009 he blamed “self-diagnosed” obsessive compulsive disorder after The Daily Telegraph revealed that, among other extravagant expenses claims, he had attempted to charge £8,865 for a 40in Bang & Olufsen television to the public purse.
Privately sensitive, Kaufman was not an easy man to like. Labour colleagues noted his capacity for vendettas, his ruthless control of his Manchester constituency party and the savagery of his clashes with the Conservative Home Secretary Leon Brittan.
Kaufman was the master of the deadly intervention. In 1990 he reduced the chamber to pandemonium, saying: “As she should!” when Mrs Thatcher was asked how she would feel if, like Nelson Mandela, she had spent 27 years in prison. One sketchwriter compared the animated Kaufman to “an egg being tossed about in boiling water”.
Equally deadly was his description of the encyclopedic Left-wing manifesto on which the Bennites forced Michael Foot to fight the 1983 election as “the longest suicide note in history”.
He denounced cricketers who toured South Africa for “bloodstained Krugerrands”, and excoriated Rightwing Israeli politicians for betraying the humane ideals of the Jewish state. Proud of his Judaism though not religious, he believed in rights for every inhabitant of the Middle East.
Gerald Bernard Kaufman was born in Leeds on June 21 1930, the youngest of seven children of a tailor who had fled Tsarist Russia. He won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School, which he hated; Gerald blamed antiSemitism, but one classmate identified a more basic reason, terming him “thoroughly obnoxious”. He went up to Queen’s College, Oxford, then taught briefly before becoming assistant secretary of the Fabian Society.
In 1955 he joined the Daily Mirror, researching Richard Crossman’s column; he fought Bromley that year and Gillingham in 1959. He moved to the New Statesman in 1964, and on Labour’s victory was hired by Wilson as press officer for the Parliamentary Labour Party, earning the suspicion of the Lobby and the scorn of Private Eye.
Kaufman later observed: “Some prime ministers warm to the genuine and dedicated sycophant.” As one of Wilson’s “Kitchen Cabinet” he was soon writing his speeches and having tearful rows with Marcia Williams, later Lady Falkender; these did not prevent their becoming firm friends.
Elected for Ardwick in 1970, the ambitious Kaufman took time to settle; colleagues were suspicious of his closeness to Wilson. When Wilson returned to power in March 1974 he became a junior Environment minister.
After 15 months he moved to the Department of Industry in the reshuffle triggered by Wilson’s decision to switch Tony Benn to Energy before his industrial policies did terminal damage. Kaufman rejoined Eric Varley, the incoming Secretary of State, with whom he had worked at No 10; they became close political associates and for many years shared a flat in St John’s Wood.
Kaufman piloted through a neutered version of Benn’s Bill establishing a National Enterprise Board, and did much of the spadework for the controversial rescue of Chrysler’s car plants. Promoted to minister of state, he argued before a Congressional committee in Washington for Concorde to have landing rights in the United States, then flew home to justify Labour’s Bill to nationalise aerospace and shipbuilding.
He and Varley had to shore up an obsolete manufacturing base amid growing union militancy. With Varley and the British Steel chairman Sir Charles Villiers, he was censured by the select committee on nationalised industries for BSC’s lamentable performance. Yet he impressed as a minister, and in 1978 his importance to the government, now headed by Callaghan, was reflected in his appointment to the Privy Council.
Kaufman was on the verge of the Cabinet when Labour was ousted in 1979. Callaghan appointed him Roy Hattersley’s deputy on the Environment; after Foot’s election as leader, moderates voted him on to the Shadow Cabinet and he took the portfolio in his own right.
Shadowing Michael Heseltine, Kaufman savaged the Conservative administration’s handling of local government and housing with gusto. But his efforts were increasingly directed to resisting the Bennites.
For the 1983 election, boundary changes gave him the even safer seat of Gorton. From mid-1981 he warned that Labour was heading for disaster, and with the contest imminent he urged Foot to quit. When Foot did go, after Labour’s rout, Kaufman preferred Hattersley to Neil Kinnock; though canvassed himself as a potential deputy, he supported the Kinnock/Hattersley “dream ticket”.
Kaufman fancied becoming Shadow Chancellor, but was pleased to be Shadow Home Secretary. Almost his first action was to condemn 16 Metropolitan Police officers on television for involvement in the beating of five schoolboys; he got the wrong men and, with the BBC, had to pay £175,000 damages.
He earned the respect of many Tories – if not their affection – with trenchant condemnation of the IRA’s attempt to assassinate the Cabinet at Brighton. He was equally firm over the need for compassion to immigrants, declaring that if his parents had been barred from Britain: “I would have ended up in a gas chamber.” But he opposed the admission of Hong Kong Chinese after the 1997 handover, finding vocal support from Norman Tebbit an embarrassment.
During the 1984-5 miners’ strike, he trod carefully between upholding the rule of law and alleging police excesses on the picket line.
By the 1987 election, Kaufman had got Labour on to the front foot by scorning bungled ministerial attempts at censorship like the Zircon affair and attacking “Mrs Thatcher’s criminal record” – the rise in crime under the Tories. He was one of the team overseeing the campaign.
Condemned to a third term of opposition, Kaufman succeeded Healey as Shadow Foreign Secretary. He foreshadowed Labour’s break with unilateralism, arguing that keeping Trident might “help” arms talks. He was relentless in attacking Mrs Thatcher’s opposition to sanctions on South Africa, branding her the “handmaiden of apartheid”.
It was Kaufman’s misfortune to hold this portfolio as Communism collapsed; he was stymied by Mrs Thatcher’s wholehearted championing of freedom when Labour had been uncomfortably close to Moscow’s puppets.
When she replaced Howe with John Major, Kaufman dismissed the new appointee as a “dim Thatcherite stooge”. After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait he defied a rebellion by 55 Labour MPs to support the assembly of the Coalition force for its recapture.
After Mrs Thatcher’s downfall, he accused the more conciliatory Major of having no strategy as the Maastricht treaty was negotiated; and on the domestic front, it was Kaufman who first branded Major a “ditherer”.
In 1991 he was elected to Labour’s national executive. Yet he was not liked in the country, and during the 1992 election Major mined a rich vein with Kaufman jokes.
On Labour’s defeat, Kaufman took the chair of the Heritage Select Committee. Sharpening his teeth on Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the Sun, he became a vigorous inquisitor. He grilled record companies over the price of CDs, provoked the BBC’s Sir Christopher Bland to call him “rude and difficult”, and castigated the British Museum for closing its Reading Room when the British Library opened.
Kaufman rejoiced in Tony Blair’s election as Labour leader, and had some hopes of a return to office. But when Blair swept to power in 1997 he bowed to the inevitable, carrying on chairing his committee and producing a devastating indictment of mismanagement at the Royal Opera House. He rated Labour’s Culture Secretary Chris Smith as lightweight, and the briefness of Kate Hoey’s career as Sports Minister owed much to a withering Kaufman report on how the rebuilding of Wembley Stadium had been handled.
In 2004 his relative mellowing brought him a knighthood, and he stood down as select committee chairman in 2005, pouring his energies into chairing the all-party dance group.
In the Queen’s Speech debate after the 2010 election, he accused his Lib Dem opponent of running “a personally anti-Semitic election campaign”. He became Father of the House in 2015.
Gerald Kaufman was unmarried.