Farewell Frank Field: An awkward, one-off, bloody-minded outsider until the end

Modern politics could use more men like the former Labour minister and poverty campaigner who became my friend, writes Andrew Grice

Former Labour minister and cross-bench peer Frank Field has died at the age of 81 (PA)

I’m still here – I didn’t expect to be,” Frank Field told me with a smile, just before Christmas, when I asked him how he was.

Even when he was dying of cancer, he could joke about it. The private man was very different from the dour, ascetic public exterior of the former Labour minister and lifelong campaigner on poverty and welfare reform, who has died aged 81.

To say that Field wasn’t a conventional politician is an understatement. During his 60 years in the Labour Party, he was an honorary independent, never afraid to speak his mind. Tony Blair labelled him “a bit awkward” but that was the whole point of him. David Blunkett, the former Labour cabinet minister, got it right today, calling him a “loveable maverick, a one-off”.

I got to know Field when I became the Westminster-based political correspondent of the Liverpool Echo in 1984. He was MP for Birkenhead for 40 years. I charted his battles in his constituency party with the Trotskyite Militant tendency and we have been friends since.

Field announced he was terminally ill in October 2021, since then, I visited him several times in his book-lined Westminster flat, which feels like the office of a one-man think tank.

The House of Lords, where he sat as a cross-bencher, was told he was in a hospice. But his drug regime was changed, and he unexpectedly carried on. He was totally engaged in politics and up to speed with the latest developments, still firing off letters to The Times. He would get tired after an hour – but not before typically putting the world to rights.

For a Labour MP, he had an intriguing relationship with Margaret Thatcher. I was gobsmacked when she turned up at a party to mark his 30 years in parliament in 2009

In a wheelchair, he attended the Lords last year to swear the oath of allegiance to the King. Remarkably, he completed a memoir by dictating it. He called it his “death mask”. In it, he confronted an issue he had long avoided – how his Christianity had shaped his political beliefs. Until then, he had kept the two biggest things in his life apart, believing a politician who talked about their religion was doomed to be branded a “crank” and that his views had held back his career.

“My vision has been dominated by my views on human nature,” Field wrote. “We are all fallen creatures, but open to be redeemed.” (His father, a working-class Tory, bullied him, but his mother taught him about redemption). His beliefs determined his approach to welfare reform, his mission since becoming director of the Child Poverty Action Group in 1969.

He believed in what he called “self-interested altruism” – that welfare should be based on the original national insurance system with a contributory principle. Field diverged from Labour, which he accused of believing in “pure altruism” which meant that until recently it was reluctant to tackle fraudulent benefit claims. He opposed the extension of means-testing, arguing it discourages honesty because people lose benefits when they declare extra income. He did not think the streamlined universal credit system introduced by Iain Duncan Smith would survive in the long term.

Field’s many campaigns brought successes, including on child benefit and the national minimum wage. But when he had the chance to be a minister, in charge of welfare reform, he failed, lasting just over a year after Labour’s 1997 election victory. One cabinet minister told me later: “Tony [Blair] asked him to think the unthinkable, but he came up with the unworkable. His green paper was little more than one side of A4.”

My own view is that Blair was partly to blame, by creating a structure that was never going to work. He had, in effect, two secretaries of state for welfare – Harriet Harman, the social security secretary, and Field – and Gordon Brown, with whom Field clashed, was the overlord of domestic policy and always going to call the shots.

Field continued his work as chair of the Commons select committee monitoring welfare policy. Never suited to a party box, he worked well with MPs across the spectrum, running a campaign for tougher controls on immigration with the Tory grandee Nicholas Soames. Field backed Brexit because he opposed free movement.

For a Labour MP, he had an intriguing relationship with the woman he called “Mrs T” – Margaret Thatcher. He visited her in Downing Street the night before she resigned in 1990. I was gobsmacked when she turned up at a party to mark his 30 years in parliament in 2009.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Field’s long relationship with the Labour Party would end badly. In the 1980s, the leader Neil Kinnock backed him when he threatened to resign and force a by-election. The Militants were seen off. But some of the same people returned to haunt Field after Jeremy Corbyn became leader. The irony was that Field, although seen as a Labour right-winger, helped Corbyn run for the leadership, nominating him because he believed the party needed a proper debate. He told Corbyn: “I won’t be voting for you.” Corbyn replied: “I never expected you would.”

Corbyn didn’t return the favour when left-wingers battled with Field in his constituency party in 2018. He resigned the Labour whip, claiming bullying and antisemitism. But this time the leadership did not come to his aid. He became an independent MP and stood unsuccessfully as the Social Justice candidate in Birkenhead in 2019, before then entering the Lords.

I asked Field a few times whether he would return to the Labour fold now Keir Starmer had drawn a line under the Corbyn era. I had a feeling he might want to die a Labour man, but I was wrong. “They kicked me out,” he said.

A stubborn streak to the end. Although people like Field fit uneasily into our highly disciplined party system, politics needs more of those who are “a bit awkward”.