Eric Moonman
Labour MP and management expert who personified Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’
ERIC MOONMAN, who has died aged 88, was a Labour MP, an academic and a representative of British Jewry. Among his many interests he chaired the Zionist Federation, Islington Health Authority and Toynbee Hall’s finance committee, was Northern manager of the Daily Mirror, leader of Stepney council and a governor of the British Film Institute, and chaired the London branch of Everton supporters’ club.
Moonman personified Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology”: young, articulate, agreeable, Left-ofcentre, a management expert eager to break with adversarial industrial relations and full of campaigning ideas. Fighting the Tory seat of Chigwell in 1964, Moonman was depicted in his election address – traditionally the most staid of documents – as a bespectacled crescent moon wearing a rosette.
In 1968 he applied to become Labour’s general secretary, proposing to hire well-paid professional managers, but withdrew in protest at Wilson’s attempts to parachute in Anthony Greenwood, a busted flush as Minister of Housing. In the event Labour settled for the trade unionist Harry Nicholas.
Moonman insisted that “I don’t have to be a career politician”. This was partly recognition that he was too independent to toe the party line, but also acknowledged his likely fate after twice winning a highly marginal seat: Billericay in 1966 and (after four years out) Basildon in 1974.
Eric Moonman was born in Liverpool on April 29 1929, the son of Borach Moonman, a dairyman, and his wife Leah. Educated at Rathbone School, Liverpool, and Christ Church, Southport, he became a printer’s apprentice at the Liverpool Echo before National Service with the King’s Regiment.
He read Social Sciences at Liverpool University and took an industrial relations course at Manchester University before joining the British Institute of Management in 1956 as its human relations adviser. Moonman represented the BIM on the Thompson committee on the employment of ex-prisoners, and in 1961 published The Manager and the Organisation, an acclaimed handbook emphasising the need for communication.
In 1962 he became senior lecturer in industrial relations at South-west Essex Technical College, returning to Manchester University as senior Fellow in Management Relations after his defeat at Chigwell.
Moonman advised the Mirror on HR aspects of its activities in Manchester, making contacts which led him as an MP to campaign for checks on press mergers. Yet his political roots were in East London, serving from 1961 as a Stepney councillor and becoming council leader in 1964. When Stepney was absorbed into Tower Hamlets, Moonman won a seat on the new council.
With Wilson in Downing Street and George Brown (whom Moonman greatly admired) preparing his National Plan, he was selected for Billericay, then the first constituency to declare its result on election night, despite having more than 100,000 voters. In 1966 he ousted the Conservative Sir Edward Gardiner by 1,642 votes.
In the House, Moonman became a less enthusiastic cheerleader for the Labour government, and Brown’s approach in particular. Having campaigned for a prices and incomes policy, he concluded that it had turned into a wage freeze. He applied his managerial skills to his new milieu, urging time limits on speeches; he also chaired Labour’s Science and Technology Group and the all-party committee on mental health, in which he took a lifetime interest. During all-night sittings he wrote his MSC thesis.
At the start of 1967 he became PPS to Patrick Gordon-walker, Minister Without Portfolio, moving with him to Education. He still took an independent line, opposing the Common Market and the Vietnam War and criticising the calibre of parliamentary answers (he told Richard Crossman one reply from him was “deplorable”).
When Gordon-walker lost his job late in 1968, Moonman’s involvement with government ended. The next summer he was threatened by the chief whip,
Bob Mellish, for opposing (as a member of the National Graphical Association) penal provisions in Barbara Castle’s abortive trade union reforms.
Moonman had been due to take the safer half of a split Billericay constituency at the 1970 election, but after James Callaghan persuaded Labour MPS to vote down the redistribution, he had to fight the existing seat, which now had 126,000 electors. Despite hiring a personal trainer, he lost by 3,954 votes to the Conservative Robert Mccrindle.
Out of the House he chaired the Centre for Research and Education, tackling “computer fright” among British management. Chairing the Labour Newspaper Group, he campaigned to maintain diversity in Fleet Street, warning that just two national dailies might survive and urging the adoption of new technology subject to safeguards for NGA members.
In February 1974 Moonman took Basildon, again part of his old constituency, by 10,667 votes. His efforts to moderate Tony Benn’s plans for more nationalisation led to his being ousted as chairman of Labour’s Industry Committee.
Chairing the Labour Parliamentary Association, representing candidates, he urged pro- and anti- (Common) Marketeers to keep their cool in the 1975 referendum, and complained that ministerial chauffeurs, with overtime, were paid more than backbenchers. He also launched a fund to fight the government’s Scottish and Welsh devolution proposals.
Moonman did not take a high profile on the Middle East until the early 1970s, when he became chairman of Poale Zion, the Labour Zionist organisation, then in 1975 chairman (later president) of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. He tried to prevent Palestinian representatives receiving visas to enter Britain, and lobbied ministers to protect British business against the Arab boycott of Israel.
Despite his majority, Moonman was swept aside in 1979 as new-town voters rallied to Mrs Thatcher’s “right to buy”; the colourful Harvey Proctor toppled him by 5,180 votes. He joined a think tank investigating football hooliganism, and in 1980 took the chair of Islington Health Authority.
In 1983 Moonman came a poor second to Peter Tatchell for the by-election nomination at Bermondsey, a choice Labour came to rue as the seat was dramatically lost – taking 32 years to recover. The next year he quit the party in protest at “Stalinist” requests from the shadow health secretary Michael Meacher to “spy” on members of his authority. Meacher sued the Observer for libel over its reporting of the episode, losing his case after a high-profile trial.
Despite his exasperation at what he saw as the provocative stance of Israel’s Likud governments, Moonman was twice elected senior vice president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. He pressed for action against desecrators of Jewish graves, and voiced scepticism over claims that Britain housed hundreds of unpunished Nazi war criminals, putting the likely maximum at 15. He also backed the creation of a volunteer force, registered as a charity, to protect Jews against racial attacks.
In 1990 Moonman went to work for the charitable foundation of Gerald Ronson, jailed for his part in the Guinness share-dealing affair. His subsequent appointment as temporary director of the National History Museum’s development trust, after the foundation had given it £500,000, aroused protests from museum staff.
He became chairman of Essex Radio in 1991, visiting Professor of Systems Science at City University in 1992, consultant on Africa to the International Red Cross and chairman of Liverpool’s continuing healthcare review. He edited essays on The Violent Society (1987) and published a memoir, From Berdichev to Basildon (2017).
Eric Moonman married Jane Dillon in 1962; they had two sons and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1991 and in 2001 he married, secondly, Gillian Mayer.
Eric Moonman, born April 29 1929, died December 22 2017