Sir Tony Lloyd
Veteran Labour MP who campaigned hard for Manchester and was elected police commissioner
SIR TONY LLOYD, the Labour MP for Rochdale, who has died aged 73, had a 36-year Commons career – including two years as a Foreign Office minister under Tony Blair – punctuated by a stint as Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester.
Having represented his home town of Stretford and then Manchester Central, he hoped to become mayor of Greater Manchester when the post was created, but was defeated for the Labour nomination by Andy Burnham and returned to the Commons at the age of 67.
Moderate in most areas of domestic policy, Lloyd became an ally of Gordon Brown. He campaigned hard for his constituency and the North West generally, pressing for the expansion of Manchester Airport and a regional assembly. After his mother died from fumes from burning foam in 1988, he took up the cause of furniture safety.
A committed internationalist, he supported the Palestinian cause throughout his career – but months before his death condemned the “desecration” of Rochdale’s war memorial with pro-palestinian graffiti. He opposed the Trident nuclear missile system and US “adventurism” in Latin America, and voted against the Iraq War.
Anthony Joseph Lloyd was born in Stretford on February 25 1950, the fourth of five children of Sydney Lloyd, a printer, and the former Cecily Boatte. Lloyd’s father died when he was 13, leaving his mother, a staunch Labour supporter, to shape his values. He joined the Labour Party at 16.
From Stretford Grammar School, he took a BSC at Nottingham University, then a diploma in business administration at Manchester Business School. He trained as an accountant before taking up a lectureship at Salford University in 1979.
Lloyd was elected to Trafford council in 1979, and by the time of his selection for Stretford was deputy leader of its Labour group. It had been a safe Tory seat but boundary changes had made it promising for Labour, and at the 1983 election Lloyd took Stretford with a 4,342 majority over the Conservative.
In 1988 Neil Kinnock appointed him an Opposition spokesman on Transport, soon moving him to Employment. He voted for Bryan Gould in the leadership contest that followed Labour’s fourth successive defeat, in 1992, but the victorious John Smith kept him on as an education spokesman. He backed John Prescott against Blair after Smith’s death in 1994, but again stayed on the front bench as an environment spokesman, and from 1995 as one of the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s team.
For the 1997 election in which Blair swept to power, the Stretford constituency was abolished; comfortably elected for Manchester Central, Lloyd joined Cook at the Foreign Office as Minister of State. His time there was foreshortened by the Sandline affair, concerning FCO complicity with the illicit supply of arms to Sierra Leone. An inquiry led to accusations that he had been dishonest or lacked depth, and in July 1999 Blair dropped him from the government.
Having voted against the Iraq war, in December 2006 Lloyd ousted Ann Clwyd, who was seen as too close to Blair on the issue, to become chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, a post he would hold for six years. Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell rated him a key member of Brown’s “team of henchmen on the Labour back benches to oppose Tony”. As PLP chairman, Lloyd wrote to all Labour MPS at the height of the expenses scandal unveiled by The Daily Telegraph in 2009, urging them to publish their claims in full. He subsequently had to apologise for overclaiming £2,210 in rent on his London flat, saying it was “a genuine error”.
Lloyd led the British delegation to the Council of Europe (2002-07) and to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (2007-12). He also chaired the Trade Union Group of Labour MPS (200212). A lifelong supporter of Manchester United, in 2011 he tabled a Commons motion for Ryan Giggs to be knighted.
Lloyd supported the creation of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, but was not convinced there should be an elected mayor. In February 2012 he announced his intention to leave the Commons to stand in the first election for a Police and Crime Commissioner.
He said he was willing to give up his safe seat for the role because in “all the years I have been a MP, one of the abiding issues that people raised with me was fear of crime.” The resulting by-election for Manchester Central – comfortably held by
Labour’s Lucy Powell – was held on the same November polling day.
Lloyd was elected Crime Commissioner with half the votes cast in a five-cornered contest, on a 14 per cent turn-out; the
Manchester Evening News half-jokingly said that made him “the most powerful man in Greater Manchester”. He was one of Labour’s highest-profile commissioners, overseeing one of the largest police services in England and Wales outside Greater London – and on £100,000 a year, the highest paid.
When the Combined Authority took up its powers in May 2015, Lloyd became its acting mayor alongside his policing duties. Despite his past reservations about the job, he decided to seek it full-time but in August 2016 he lost to Burnham by a 2-1 margin in Labour’s primary.
When Theresa May called a snap election for June 2017, Lloyd was chosen to plug an embarrassing gap at Rochdale where the sitting Labour MP, Simon Danczuk, had been disqualified from standing again because of an ongoing party investigation into his personal life. Lloyd took his place, and returned to the Commons with a majority of 14,819.
Jeremy Corbyn promptly appointed him Shadow Housing Minister, and in March 2018 Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary. After Labour’s heavy defeat in December 2019, he also became Shadow Scottish Secretary.
The following spring, Sir Keir Starmer reappointed Lloyd Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary. But almost at once he was admitted to Manchester Royal Infirmary with Covid and was on a ventilator for 10 days. He stood down from the front bench to help his health, but vowed to continue his work as a constituency MP.
He was knighted in 2021.
Early in 2023, Lloyd revealed that he was having chemotherapy for cancer, and just last month he announced that he had untreatable leukaemia.
Tony Lloyd married Judith Tear in 1974. She survives him, with their son and three daughters.