Sir Gerald Kaufman

Labour MP and Father of the House Born: June 21, 1930; Died: February 26, 2017 SIR Gerald Kaufman, who has died aged 86, was a Labour parliamentarian, the longest serving member of the House of Commons and a campaigning backbencher known for his killer sound bites. It was Sir Gerald who famously described Labour’s 1983 manifesto, which had a heavy emphasis on hard-left policies, as the longest suicide note in history.

Sir Gerald was also one of the most able, acerbic and articulate frontbenchers during Labour’s lean years in Opposition in the 1980s and 1990s and would certainly have commanded a senior Cabinet post had his party not lost its fourth election in a row in 1992.

But after that defeat and then at the age of 61, Sir Gerald decided not to stand again for the shadow cabinet and returned to the backbenches to pursue an active career there, as well as becoming chairman of the National Heritage Select Committee, later to become the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, with the arrival of Labour in power.

He denied that this voluntary departure from the highest echelons of the party was prompted by despair, saying that it was right to make way for another political generation.

During his period in the shadow cabinet he was easily the most effective and biting tormentor of the Government, a genius also of the “newspaper bite”, delivering the most scarring insults to his political enemies in a bare minimum of ferocious words.

His background in early TV satire, as a political correspondent, and as a Labour Party press officer during Harold Wilson’s governments provided him with an ideal base from which to launch his parliamentary career. It was only the “accident” of prolonged Tory power from 1979 which cheated him of what would surely have been an illustrious career as a Cabinet minister.

Gerald Bernard Kaufman was born on June 21, 1930, the descendant of a family of Polish Jewish immigrants.

The son of a tailor, he was educated at Cowper Street Council School, Leeds, and Leeds Grammar School, where, he says, he was the victim of anti-Semitic bullying. Later he graduated from Queens College, Oxford.

He worked on the political staff of the Daily Mirror and the New Statesman, and also appeared on That Was The Week That Was in the early 1960s, the first satirical anti-establishment programme on TV.

He fought some hopeless seats, including opposing Harold Macmillan at Bromley in 1955, before entering Parliament as MP for Manchester, Ardwick, in 1970. From 1983 onwards he represented Manchester, Gorton.

When Labour regained power from Edward Heath in 1974, Sir Gerald became Under Secretary, Environment and a year later was promoted to Minister of State, Industry, a post he held until Margaret Thatcher swept the party out of office in 1979.

In opposition he served consecutively as housing, home and foreign affairs spokesman, and in whatever portfolio he was engaged he was probably the most consistently incisive and certainly the sharpest-tongued operator on Labour’s front-bench.

He was elected 12 times in succession to the shadow cabinet and was always at, or near, the top of the annual contest, coming first on no fewer than four occasions.

He was the only leading Labour figure who had the courage to tell Michael Foot that he ought to quit as leader in 1983. He had dramatically warned, privately at the time, that Labour’s 1983 election manifesto was suicidal. But his warning – disastrously for Labour – went unheeded.

Throughout his political career, he was also downright disdainful of the hard left in the Labour movement.

Once, at a formal lunch, he found himself sitting next to the left-winger Ken Livingstone. He abruptly moved away to a different table.

In 1983, he withdrew his name as a deputy leader aspirant after Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley entered a pact to support one another for deputy leader if the other became leader.

Because he was not regarded as telegenic – one commentator once described him as looking like the TV Muppet, Kermit the Frog – Sir Gerald was often given a low-profile, backroom role at general elections.

But many of his friends, and others, regarded this as a serious mistake, since Sir Gerald possessed the strongest line in invective of any Labour frontbencher. He called Margaret Thatcher “the thieving magpie”, Michael Heseltine a “commissar” and John Major “the man who came to dither”.

Sir Gerald also became one of the leading Jewish critics of Israel. He once called for economic sanctions and an arms ban against Israel, describing the country as a pariah and its senior politicians war criminals.

He was notable for his jazzy attire, sometimes looking more like a bespectacled gangster than a shadow cabinet minister.

One commentator described him as “that quiet bald figure in the silk jacket and clashing tie”. And once, to his chagrin he was voted by a newspaper as the worst-dressed MP.

Sir Gerald, who was unmarried, was awarded his knighthood in the Birthday Honours 2004. He became the longest-serving MP, taking the title of Father of the House of Commons, in 2015, when Conservative MP Peter Tapsell retired. Sir Gerald’s death means that former chancellor Ken Clarke is now the Father of the House. Mr Clarke was also elected in June 1970 but Sir Gerald held the title as he was sworn in first.

Sir Gerald’s last spoken contribution in the Commons chamber was in a debate paying tribute to the Queen on her 90th birthday on April 21 last year, according to Hansard.