Phillip Whitehead
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Your support makes all the difference.Tam Dalyell's handsome obituary for Phillip Whitehead [3 January] doesn't quite bring out his subject's extraordinary breadth of knowledge and reference, his terrific humour, at once biting and genial, nor his unexampled giftedness as the teacher any democratic politician should surely be, writes Professor Fred Inglis.
I first met him in 1970 when I followed him as Labour candidate in the certain-to-be-lost West Derbyshire and he was on his way to victory in Derby North. I was green as grass and he not only taught me the brief trade of electioneering in a 60-mile-long constituency, he insisted on leaving his own eve-of-poll meeting to boost me at mine.
Then and thereafter he never declined an invitation to speak, vividly, memorably, and plainly to my students at the universities of Bristol and Sheffield, and always on the grand topics of his major television films - Czechoslovakia, Solidarity, the legacy of Empire, and what he called his "great dictators series": Stalin, Hitler, the Nehru dynasty, Reagan, Mrs Thatcher.
The joke was characteristic. No politician ever made me laugh more. When he was opposition spokesman, he caused in his then leader apoplectic merriment in the House by whispering, as a bibulous Secretary of State rose to speak, "Here's one of the wets drying out." Shortlisted at Chesterfield, he conceded victory to his rival, Tony Benn, as to a "hereditary democrat". When Labour won its overwhelming victory in 1997, he correctly foresaw,
Ageism will have its day. I'm just 60 and I won't accept being kicked upstairs. I'll just have to stick to the old Labour story of missed chances and high-minded obstinacy.
One of the causes close to Phillip Whitehead's heart, writes John Taylor, was the independent trade union Solidarity.
While others in the British Labour movement regarded it with suspicion if not hostility when it swept Poland in 1980, Phillip was always ready to speak in its support. Many people will remember him addressing a snowy mass protest in London after the imposition of martial law in December 1981. Last November he spoke at a conference held by the Polish Solidarity Campaign to mark the union's 25th anniversary - and, with others at the House of Commons, was presented with a special plaque by Lech Walesa.
"A heavyweight figure of principle", yes. But also a remarkably modest man, and for that reason the more effective.
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