Lord Stoddart of Swindon obituary
In his maiden speech in the Commons in 1970, David Stoddart spoke of the “honest, industrious and very canny” citizens of the busy industrial railway town of Swindon who had just elected him as their MP, in what was the only Labour gain of that election.
His characterisation of his electorate was a description that might have been applied to the man himself, although “astute” would perhaps have been more appropriate than “canny”. He was a template for the sort of diligent decency found in the Labour party in his political generation and which sometimes, as in his case, led to a parliamentary career in middle life after many years in public service.
But Stoddart, who has died aged 94, would have been the first to say – and often did, with reference to his 18 years as a Reading councillor – that the politics of local government in his day was often more important and rewarding than the role of any single individual in parliament. Because of his own journey in life he saw politics as a route map to achieve advances in society, rather than as a career choice in itself, and the difficult experiences of his own childhood made him a singularly independent-minded politician.
He was born into a Welsh-speaking family in the Rhondda Valley, the younger child of a miner, Arthur Stoddart, and his wife, Queenie (nee Price), who ran a small shop. Those were difficult days in the valleys and, apparently due to his mother’s kind-heartedness towards those in need, the shop collapsed in bankruptcy and the family lost their home. In 1936 his father had to leave the mines because of an eye condition and found work in construction on the London Underground. Ten-year-old David had never seen a bathroom until the family moved to the capital.
He passed the 11-plus and won a scholarship to St Clement Danes grammar school, then located in Hammersmith, but when he was 12 his mother died. With the outbreak of the second world war, his father and elder sister joined the services and David was evacuated to a farm at Mapledurham, outside Reading, and moved to Henley grammar school. The relative affluence of his new surroundings opened his eyes to the potential of education for changing the lives of impoverished children.
His own circumstances, however, meant that he had to leave school at 16 without taking any examinations and he initially joined Post Office telephones. Two years later he took over running a grocery shop for the mother of one of his schoolfriends and in 1946 spent a further two years as a clerk with British Railways.
He joined the Labour party in Bromley in 1947 and, aged 23, stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for both Bromley council and for Kent county council. He had what he described as a “difficult” first marriage during these years, but credited his first father-in-law for teaching him about politics.
He was unemployed during the hard winter of 1949, then found work as a hospital clerk in south London before returning to the Reading area. In 1951 he became a clerical assistant at the Central Electricity Generating Board power station at Earley and joined what was then the Electrical Trades Union. In the meantime he embarked on a career in local government. He stood first for Reading council in 1953, winning his seat the following year, and during the ensuing 18 years chaired, in succession, the housing, transport and finance committees. He led the Labour group from 1962 to 1970 and was leader of the council from 1967 until he resigned in 1972 after election to Westminster.
He stood as Labour’s candidate in the safe Conservative seat of Newbury in the 1959 and 1964 general elections, and in 1969 was selected as candidate in the byelection in Swindon following the resignation of the Labour MP Francis Noel-Baker. He lost by 478 votes, but comfortably won the seat back for Labour at the general election seven months later. He continued working at the CEGB throughout this time.
As an MP, Stoddart recognised the importance of his constituency. Pubs were only open for two hours on Sunday lunchtimes in the 1970s, but every Sunday the Swindon MP was to be found in a pub in the Old Town, meeting local journalists or constituents with a problem.
At Westminster he pursued his long belief that a country should be governed by its own institutions, which made him a fierce opponent of the then Common Market. He became a parliamentary private secretary to the housing minister, Reg Freeson, when Labour took office in 1974 and joined the government in the whips’ office in 1975. He resigned as a senior whip in 1977 because of his opposition to legislation that would establish direct elections to the European parliament.
In 1983, he lost Swindon as a result of the newly formed Social Democratic party fielding a candidate who split the Labour vote, but was given a seat in the Lords. He was an opposition whip and party spokesman on both energy and industry until 1988, and thereafter sat on the procedure and privileges committee (1989-92) and the European committee (1995-97).
He chaired the cross-party Campaign for an Independent Britain from 1985 to 2007 and the Alliance Against the European Constitution from 1992 to 2007. In 2001 he was suspended from the Labour whip in the Lords and the following year expelled from party membership; he had objected to the former Conservative MP Shaun Woodward being parachuted into the safe Labour seat of St Helens South in the 2001 election, and had given financial support to an independent Socialist Alliance candidate standing against him. He remained an Independent Labour peer.
He is survived by his wife, Jennifer (nee Percival-Alwyn), whom he married in 1961, and their son Matthew (a second son predeceased him), a daughter, Janet, from his first marriage, and five grandchildren.
• David Leonard Stoddart, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, politician, born 4 May 1926; died 14 November 2020
