Frank Dobson

• ONE spring day 40 years ago I walked into my kitchen to find a friendly Yorkshireman sitting there.

My then flatmate, out canvassing for the Labour Party in the 1979 general election, had brought the local candidate home for a cup of tea as a respite from pounding the streets.

It was the first time I met Frank Dobson (whose too-early death you reported in the November 14 New Journal), who, of course, went on to enter parliament at that election, and to be our MP for almost four decades.

During those years I often heard him speaking inspiringly in favour of public services and against privatisation, especially with respect to housing; and saw him on picket lines and demonstrations in support of, for example, a local post office.

In fact he was such a decent sort that, despite my anarchist proclivities, I even voted for him now and again! And his constituency work was much appreciated.

He got me out of a couple of scrapes over the years. His loyalty to his principles, quite properly, overrode pressure to promote the party line.

During Camden’s arm’s-length management organisation struggle 15 years ago, when the council acquiesced to a government diktat and tried (ultimately unsuccessfully) to bully tenants into accepting privatisation of its housing management, Frank properly described Tony Blair’s scheme as “blackmail”.

And as a resident of a council block himself he voted for an anti-Almo tenant representative on the Almo “shadow board”.

Being a near neighbour, as well as a constituent, I would often encounter him on the street. He was unfailingly friendly and always stopped to chat.

I remember, when he was elevated to Secretary of State for Health in the Blair government, bumping into him setting off on foot for Westminster (with his overnight red boxes of ministerial papers having been driven off in his official car without him), and him explaining that since he was in charge of health, he needed to set an example and shape up a bit…

Much has been said of his merry – and sometimes risque – sense of humour; all of it absolutely true. While he was still an MP we happened to meet one evening at the 24 bus stop just round the corner from where we both lived. We were both heading Westminster-wards, him returning for an evening House of Commons sitting, having “popped home for his tea”.

He spent the journey, in between, with his usual kindness, asking after the health of a friend of mine, and regaling me with a raucous story of which of his current fellow male MPs was the inhabitant of the Commons office from which emanated the loudest and most frequent sound of the twanging of knicker elastic.

The bus echoed to his laughter. All in all, Frank was certainly one of the good ’uns.

ALBERT BEALE
Little Russell Street, WC1