The man the Met can do business with: John Torode meets Tottenham MP Bernie Grant

FOR BERNIE Grant, the Guyana-born MP for Tottenham, the defining moment came at 1pm on Tuesday, 3 August. He was seated across the table from Paul Condon, new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in Mr Condon's office at New Scotland Yard. The commissioner had invited him in within hours of the news that Joy Gardner, a Jamaican illegal immigrant, had died after a police raid on her flat in north London. The two men talked frankly for 45 minutes, and Mr Grant left 'flabbergasted', as he says, because Mr Condon 'did everything right'.

First, the commissioner had invited him to New Scotland Yard for a conversation: 'Ten years ago I wouldn't have been allowed through the door.'

Second, Mr Condon had told him in advance that the police officers involved would be suspended: 'I didn't even have time to ask.'

Moreover, the commissioner gave him a letter of condolence for Joy Gardner's mother, offered to see the family, at their convenience, 'and said he knew that they might not want to see a police uniform for quite a while'.

The commissioner also spoke of the 'terrible blow' it must have been for Mrs Gardner's five-year-old son, Graham, who had witnessed the early-morning raid when six officers handcuffed and gagged his mother.

Mr Grant says that, after these words and actions from Mr Condon, it would have been 'churlish to have turned round and started shouting in an unseemly manner'. He credits Mr Condon for the absence of violence on the streets after Mrs Gardner's death.

Can this be the man the tabloids knew as 'Barmy Bernie' talking? Is it only the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who has changed? Has Bernie himself?

SOME politicians are defined by one damning phrase of their own crafting. Harold Wilson, for example, assured us that the pound in our pocket had not been devalued; Enoch Powell is forever identified with 'rivers of blood'. Until this month, Mr Grant was known mainly as the man who hailed the 'bloody good hiding' received by the police during the Broadwater Farm riot in October 1985, when PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death. What Mr Grant actually said was: 'The youth around here believe the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding.' This was probably a fair account of the attitude of young people on the estate, but overnight Mr Grant, the first Afro-Caribbean leader of an English local authority, became the unacceptable face of black activism.

Douglas Hurd, then Home Secretary, labelled him the 'high priest of racial conflict' and called on Labour to disown him as a prospective parliamentary candidate. Neil Kinnock did not quite dare, and in 1987 Mr Grant became MP for Tottenham.

Once there, he attracted attention mainly as the man who wore dashiki or batakari (a Ghanaian cotton robe) at State Openings of Parliament.

But there is rather more to Bernie Grant than African clothes and an ill-chosen phrase quoted out of context. We met at his home, an immaculate Thirties terrace house in Wood Green, where he lives with his personal assistant, Sharon Lawrence, for whom, six years ago, he left his (black) wife and three children. Ms Lawrence is white and was formerly a college lecturer and hard-left Haringey councillor.

Apart from a few mementoes - a photograph of Mr Grant with Nelson Mandela, a clock carved to resemble the map of Guyana - the house is very conventional, rather like Bernard Alexander Montgomery Grant himself. He talks in stately and old-fashioned tones, which reflect his generation and background.

He was born almost 50 years ago, son of a headmaster and a deputy headmistress. 'We were black middle class - though never isolated from the masses because of the children my parents were teaching and because of their political beliefs.' He was educated at a respected and strict Roman Catholic school in Georgetown. He dropped out after taking his O-levels as a result of 'problems with the Jesuits'.

The family moved to England in the early Sixties. While other immigrant youngsters took unskilled jobs, Bernie - Monty to his parents - was sent to Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh to study mining engineering. Again he dropped out as a result of 'problems' with the authorities: the university offered scholarships to South Africa for students to gain work experience; only whites could go.

Young Monty went to work at the international telephone exchange in London, where he became active in trade union affairs and eventually joined the Socialist Labour League (later the Workers' Revolutionary Party), perhaps the strangest of the Trotskyist sects. 'I'm very fond of them, really,' he says. 'Rascals] They find when you are at your peak in terms of gullibility. We had just had a strike and been sold out by the union. I was very angry. They got to me.'

What was the League like? 'I would get up at five or six in the morning and go out selling papers at the station. It was almost like one of those religious cults, they control you completely.' Another chuckle. 'It was a bit like being a Catholic again. In the Church, if all else failed, you fell back on faith. We had Marxism.'

Is he still a Marxist? 'I think so. I believe in dialectical materialism. Things change into their opposites. There are historic forces and cycles. Yeah, I'd call myself a Marxist.'

THIS long apprenticeship involved traditional trade unionism and working-class politics; it had little to do with black power, black separatism and the other heady American imports that swirled around Notting Hill and Brixton 20 years ago. And when Grant finally joined the Labour Party in the mid-Seventies it was as a result of a decision by his union, which decided that union branches should affiliate to local Labour parties because these parties were in poor shape.

So it was that he found himself in 1974 in the Tottenham Labour Party. He was persuaded to become a Haringey borough councillor in 1978 - 'mainly because I was a genuine trade unionist and they didn't have many'. He took over as council leader in October 1984 when his group seized control from Labour moderates in a dispute over whether to set a rate.

The next target of the hard left was Tottenham's sitting MP, Norman Atkinson. They wanted to replace him with Reg Race, disposessed by a boundary revision from the neighbouring seat of Wood Green.

Although Mr Grant was leader of the council, the faction presented him with its decision as a fait accompli. He rebelled and decided to run himself. The battle was hard and dirty. Mr Grant won - but only after making what he admits were conflicting and secret deals with both opponents.

When he became an MP he was touchy and uncertain, an easy target for what he calls 'Private Eye-style bear-baiting about race by public-school Tory bullies in the Smoking Room.' As one of four non- white MPs, he felt compelled to concentrate on black issues. Paradoxically he thinks that, if there is a satisfactory resolution of the Gardner affair, he might finally be free to turn his attention to other matters.

'I'm different now, of course I'm different,' Mr Grant says. 'The situation has changed. Ten years ago, white people believed the police could do no wrong. It was necessary to make a fuss. Now, after the the Broadwater Three were cleared of PC Blakelock's murder and other miscarriages of justice, white people are sceptical about the police.'

So what might attract Mr Grant's attention next? 'Well, the Labour Party has been hijacked by the middle class. But it is the union leaders who keep the balance in the party. I want to reverse the trend. The relationship will have to change.'

It is a worthy enough aim but, Mr Grant admits, hardly a trumpet call for the Nineties. Perhaps it doesn't matter. At least he has changed his label. Today he is known as the man who, with some courage and dignity, appealed to young people for restraint and non- violence in the wake of Joy Gardner's death.

He has withstood vitriolic taunts from a new generation of black militants and assorted revolutionaries. He may credit Paul Condon for the lack of violence on the streets, but there is little doubt that the Metropolitan Police is also, quietly, crediting him for his share in the same achievement.

(Photograph omitted)