Obituary - Tam Dalyell, politician and framer of the West Lothian Question

Died: January 26, 2017

TAM Dalyell, who has died aged 84, was a Labour politician and parliamentarian and the first to pose the still-tricky West Lothian Question about Scottish representation at Westminster.

A vocal opponent of Scottish devolution, Mr Dalyell contrasted the town of Blackburn in his own constituency, and Blackburn in Lancashire.

“For how long,” he asked during a debate on devolution for Scotland and Wales in 1977, “will English constituencies and English Honourable Members tolerate at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important and often decisive effect on English politics?”

It was Enoch Powell who coined the term West Lothian Question, in his response to Mr Dalyell’s speech.

He was famous for being no respecter of rank or power and regarded everyone with the same scepticism. He called Mrs Thatcher a liar over the Westland helicopter scandal of 1986, for example, and withdrew from the Commons rather than withdraw the remark.

He was born in Edinburgh and was educated at Edinburgh Academy and Eton before studying at King’s College, Cambridge. He was president of the Cambridge University Conservative Association in 1954 before joining Labour in 1956 (outraged by Suez).

He fought Roxburgh in 1959 and entered Parliament aged 29, at the West Lothian by-election of 1962. He had a long-standing interest in science, some of it on the pragmatic right-wing side, and supported vivisection, nuclear reactors and organ transplants.

But the scientific bent was allied to a naturalist’s passion for the creatures and vegetation that might survive on small islands. Proposals abounded in the 1960s for island bases from which we might help the Americans police less civilised peoples.

Mr Dalyell had unsuccessfully opposed in 1966 the transfer of Diego Garcia to the Americans. He began the island war on Denis Healey which made his name. The idea was to lay an airstrip on Aldabra in the western Indian ocean off Mozambique whose Portuguese colonists made no difficulties.

Mr Dalyell investigated the island’s rare resources, securing valuable expert guidance from Ashley Miles, Professor of Pathology at London University. Mr Dalyell asked parliamentary question after parliamentary question about the pink-footed booby, the flightless rail and the giant tortoise, all threatened species best surviving on Aldabra.

The Commons, mindful of trouble and fun, joined in. In a single day additional questions about the island’s ecology were put by two Tory MPs and Jeremy Thorpe for the Liberals while the Labour member for Oxford demanded a debate.

Mr Healey, least bureaucratic of politicians, was thrown back onto grim departmentalese. The islands would not be bases but might “increase the flexibility of the deployment of our air forces by creating facilities in various parts of that ocean”.

But Mr Dalyell was not through. Lobbying in the United States, he found an ally in Bill Carey, who ran the science programme in the Bureau of the Budget and made important people available to him before speaking to the vice-president, Hubert Humphrey. Such lobbying eventually bore down upon Robert MacNamara, secretary of defence, who came back in an anxious circle to prime minister Harold Wilson.

Mr Healey was probably the ablest man in the Government but he was stretching limited resources to give Britain a back-up role to the US when anxiety about South Asia was understandable. But even before financial crisis and a cabinet shoot-out with the chancellor had killed off the F111 (the aircraft which was to have used Aldabra), the flightless rail and giant tortoise had had their realm made safe.

In late 1967 Airstrip Aldabra was dropped. Mr Dalyell described the ministerial response succinctly: “Denis was f****** furious.”

No other cause would have quite such a brilliant success, but Dalyell trouble was real trouble, decently researched, bent upon influential allies, and, agreeably in a diminishingly parliamentary polity, using the Commons to ask ever and again insistent and objectionable questions. The mere words on the order paper, “Mr Tam Dalyell (West Lothian) to ask the Secretary of State ... “ depressed ministerial morale.

On Scottish devolution he had the art to coin a phrase that stuck and was put repeatedly by people in other parties. Scottish Nationalism came and went in cycles across decades. Labour and the Tories under Ted Heath were tempted toward concession of devolution against the grief of independence.

Mr Dalyell’s term of art, the West Lothian Question, invoked against that notion all the ambiguities of answerability and obligation for a Scottish constituency MP under a bifocal Scotland. Ironically, it became a favourite point of reference for Margaret Thatcher, later, in respect of the Falklands War and the warship, General Belgrano, Mr Dalyell’s principal object of assault.

Nothing could stop devolution once it was the settled wish of a Scottish majority, but Mr Dalyell tried. Assiduous in debate, he was one of the rebels who put through George Cunningham’s referendum-clogging requirement that any majority for devolution should constitute 40 per cent of votes cast.

Later failure to meet this figure would provoke Scottish Nationalist MPs to the withdrawal of support which brought the Callaghan government down in March 1979.

The flowering of Sir Thomas Dalyell of the Binns, 11th baronet and 31st laird (he inherited the baronetcy through his mother), against patriotic and military interests would come over the Falklands War. He had detested the undertaking from the outset and was dropped by the surprisingly bellicose Michael Foot for a vote against in 1982 from the only quasi-office he ever held (shadow minister for science from 1980). He spoke of the whole campaign as “a chronicle of deception”.

However his great issue was The General Belgrano, an elderly Argentinian warship sunk with 700 dead while seemingly making away from the total exclusion zone set by the British. “Shot,” as someone unkindly remarked, “while trying to escape.”

Evidence has been suggested that this may have been a ship’s manoeuvre with a return to the fight intended, but Mr Dalyell was outraged at the glib assurances and light talk of “war being war” surrounding a ruthless kill and his assaults upon the prime minister Thatcher were prolonged and unsparingly bitter.

He had, generally, a low opinion of her truthfulness, something not diminished by the Westland affair when he charged her with inspiring the Solicitor General’s letter attacking her bete noir, Michael Heseltine, when most people accused her only of engineering its release.

Mr Dalyell’s parliamentary style was a combination of elaborate and courtly politeness highlighted by blasts of hard, percussive words. Over Westland, he accused her of “deception”.

He would also raise the question of her government employing an American computer firm that had lied to the immigration service but that chivalrously employed her son.

Mr Dalyell had worked loosely with the Left of the Labour party, having started parliamentary life as PPS to the brilliant but vainglorious Richard Crossman. But he had no more sense of esprit de corps there than with Labour party or establishment.

Disliking the bullying conduct of the Militant Tendency in a Merseyside constituency, he forfeited hard-left support in 1986 by supporting imposition of a non-conspiratorial candidate, and the next year he resigned from the left-wing Campaign group, of which it had been memorably said that he was the only member to own white peacocks.

It was not that he drifted to the Right; his private opinion of Tony Blair and Blairism was early and consistently contemptuous.

In March 2003, regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Mr Dalyell accused Mr Blair of being a war criminal. He stated that “since Mr Blair is going ahead with his support for a US attack without unambiguous UN authorisation, he should be branded as a war criminal and sent to The Hague”. In 2003, he was elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh. It was announced in January, 2004 that he would stand down from Parliament at the next election, and he left the House of Commons in April 2005 after 43 years as a member of the Commons. He had been Scotland’s longest-serving MP since the resignation of Bruce Millan in 1988.

There are MPs called “characters” who are no more than boorish and attention-seeking. There are others, like Dennis Skinner, with integrity and some wit, but no taste for injurious detail.

Mr Dalyell had neither verbal felicity nor gift for mockery (he could see a joke but not make one). He was, as Matthew Arnold’s niece would have wished, always entirely serious, a dangerous thing.

He expected honest dealing. Where he did not find it, he pursued the truth with questions. He was a bad, because dedicated and well-informed, enemy. No government in a healthy constitutional state should be without one.

Mr Dalyell married Kathleen Wheatley, a teacher and daughter of former Lord Advocate and Labour MP for Edinburgh East John Wheatley, in 1963. They had a son, Gordon, and daughter, Moira, both lawyers. He is survived by his wife and children.