Frank Dobson: Blair’s health secretary who was humiliated by Ken Livingstone in the first London mayoral election

Though best remembered for his humiliating defeat at the hands of Ken Livingstone in the first London mayoral election in 2000, Frank Dobson, the former Labour minister who has died aged 79, was also a forthright and humourous defender of Old Labour values in the early years of the Blair government.

Dobson believed that league tables belonged to the realm of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United; that they had no place in the context of hospitals and schools. He believed in cooperation, not competition, in the public services. During his time as health secretary (1997-99), he presided over a hospital building programme and made a case to get more money out of the Treasury than Great George Street intended to give. Dobson took infinite pains and showed discrimination and good judgement in dealing with general practitioners, and other important components of the health service.

He had a sheer gut loyalty to the Labour Party and it was this that allowed himself to be set up by Tony Blair to go on a mission impossible in 1999 against Ken Livingstone to be the orthodox Labour standard bearer as mayor of London. Anyone less loyal would have declined such a poisoned chalice.

Frank Dobson was born near York in 1940 into a railway family. He went to school at Dunnington Primary, from where he was selected to go to Archbishop Holgate’s Grammar School in York. In later life, he was a champion of comprehensive education, frequently referring to his friends at primary school who were not lucky enough to get into grammar school and whose lives Dobson thought had been unnecessarily blighted.

While studying at the London School of Economics, Dobson joined the Labour Party in 1958, eschewing the frivolities of student debating to become immersed in the affairs of the Holborn and St Pancras South Labour Party. He was elected to Camden Council in 1971, becoming its leader in 1973. He resigned two years later to take up a non-partisan job as assistant secretary of the office of the local ombudsman, a post he held until 1979.

Dobson focused on housing issues, which were always a matter of huge concern in the densely populated areas of central London. He argued strongly for central government to make it easier for local government to provide small parks and play areas to enhance the quality of life of local residents.

In 1979 he was elected MP for Holborn and St Pancras South (redrawn as Holborn and St Pancras four years later). The Callaghan government had fallen and Dobson was to spend his first 18 years in the House of Commons in opposition. As a young MP, his talents were very much geared to opposition: he took on Conservative ministers in a forthright style, which was all Labour could do at the time.

Labour leader Michael Foot soon promoted him to be a deputy spokesman on education (1981-83) and health (1983-85). He was unallied to any faction in the party, and Foot’s successor Neil Kinnock chose him as a senior spokesperson on health (1985-87), shadow leader of the Commons (1987-89), shadow energy secretary (1989-92), shadow employment secretary (1992-93).

Labour’s next leader, John Smith, gave Dobson responsibility for transport, conscious that Dobson was the son of a railwayman and wanting good relations with Jimmy Knapp and the National Union of Railwaymen. When Tony Blair assumed the leadership after Smith’s death in 1994, he gave Dobson responsibility for the environment and London.

Labour came to power in 1997, and Dobson became health secretary. He projected himself as an unspun “Old Labour warhorse” in contrast to New Labour’s somewhat slick image. He was fond of saying that he was to New Labour what Norway was to the European Song Contest – “nul points”.

His trickiest task was to be the delivery of one of New Labour’s five key pledges: that of reducing waiting lists by 100,000. He knew the pledge was a red herring. If you were going to have slogans of this nature, they should have concerned not the numbers on the waiting list but the length of time spent waiting, and the costs of delivery that would be cutting into other priorities of the National Health Service. Dobson was skilful in his handling of the Treasury, and in persuading officials that he was against gimmicks but concerned about solid progress.

After two years in power, Blair set about creating Britain’s first directly elected mayor as part of his recipe for governing London. Downing Street did not think ahead as to who would be the Labour candidate and took it for granted that the obvious candidate, Ken Livingstone – the last person that Blair wanted for the job – would evaporate. Throughout the summer of 1999 Dobson was adamant that he had no interest in the job and tried hard to stay on at health during the cabinet reshuffle.

But shortly afterwards Dobson announced his candidacy. One catastrophe followed another in the campaign. Dobson’s neighbour, the Hampstead and Highgate MP Glenda Jackson, insisted on standing. There were rows about the electoral college. Downing Street didn’t realise that every union affiliated to the London Labour Party except the AEEU were controlled by the left and favourable to Livingstone.

There was mayhem over membership lists. Dobson’s campaign was portrayed as a fix and, although subsequent information from the Data Protection Register confirmed that Dobson and his colleagues had done nothing wrong, huge damage had been done. Eventually Dobson won a pyrrhic victory over Livingstone, by about 3 per cent of the electoral college, to become Labour’s mayoral candidate.

In the election, Livingstone stood as an Independent – Labour voters and activists either voted for him or stayed at home disgusted by the selection process. Dobson was humiliated and lucky to avoid fourth place, coming behind both Livingstone and the Conservative Steve Norris.

After this he was sensitive to the accusation of sour grapes, but he was angered by the government’s direction, believing foundation hospitals, university fees and city academies had no place in the Labour movement. It was an anguish for him to become one of the leaders in parliament in opposition to a Labour government that he had worked so hard throughout his life to achieve. But he was not sour: he had too much of a life outside politics, with real cultural and historical interests as a hinterland, to allow himself to become a disgruntled ex-minister. He stood down as an MP in 2015.

He is survived by his wife Janet and three children.

Frank Gordon Dobson, politician, born 15 March 1940, died 11 November 2019

Former Labour MP Tam Dalyell died in 2017