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- Bruce Douglas-Mann, who has died aged 73, was, as both lawyer and MP, a startling combination of a tough, super-competent man of business and a disinterested idealist.
The last time I saw him was a month ago at an open air opera performance in Holland Park: he had had a delightful evening, captivated by Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz. Although he had suffered from cancer of the throat, he had continued valiantly in his formidable practice as a solicitor. This stubborn resolution was entirely in character. The old doorstep moan, "Politicians? They're all in it for what they can get out of it!" never applied to him.
Bruce Douglas-Mann was the son of another solicitor, Leslie Douglas-Mann. He was educated at the Upper Canada School in Toronto and - after national service as a leading seaman in the navy - at Jesus College, Oxford 1948-51.
He became a solicitor in 1954, and married Helen Tucker in 1955. For Labour, he unsuccessfully contested St Albans, 1964, Maldon, 1966 and was a councillor in Kensington and Chelsea 1962-68, before being elected at North Kensington in 1970. He was Labour's MP for Mitcham and Morden from 1974-82, and for the Social Democrats from January-May 1982.
Had he chosen to apply his lucid grasp of finance and his unfoxable resolution in negotiations to the pursuit of money in those areas of the law profitable for that sort of thing, he could have strung millions on a thread. He chose instead to be a trade union lawyer, superbly on top of industrial accident and injury legislation and case law, a specialist in everything relating to housing and (a later development which amused him) in obscenity. Bruce briefed the barrister, John Mortimer, in the case over the film, Last Tango in Paris: that, together with the cases against D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, and the magazine Oz, sent the censor into muttering retreat.
But he was happiest as solicitor to injured workmen. In any struggle with the solicitors of a company's insurers, to which he would be directed by a union (for an action nominally between victim and company), he was patient, and quite implacable. He was the first solicitor, in a period of mounting inflation, to have damages proofed against the retail price index, and he refused any solution which might diminish the client's settlement, persuading union and client that proper damages were won by meticulous trench warfare.
He was always up to the last supplementary date on Kemp & Kemp, the ever-adjusted bible of personal injury tariffs, and ready to stare out the opposition to the gates of the court; he set himself to grind the faces of the insurers. I was his inept clerk for 18 months and saw him in action, burning up vast amounts of work without fuss during a long day which usually ended with housing association or council or candidate's constituency work; he inspired admiration, and we started a friendship which lasted until his death.
His chief weakness as a lawyer was that he had no great powers of advocacy. He was diffident, unflashy, but not fluent, and he never enjoyed court. And this carried over into his political career. He knew more about housing than all but a couple of MPs. He had worked strenuously with housing associations and knew inside-out the renting and enforcing hell hole of North Kensington. But politically, he was a first-rate product which never advertised. So though he had been elected for North Kensington in 1970, he was made minister of state for housing only in 1974.
He was a hesitant, apologetic speaker but he knew the subject backwards. He served as chairman of the parliamentary party's housing and construction group throughout the second Wilson and Callaghan governments. When Norman St John-Stevas introduced select committees, he served as vice chairman of the one on the environment which took in housing.
He could be a dangerous backbencher, and the famous George Cunningham amendment, which effectively blocked Scottish devolution in the late 70s, was an adaptation of his earlier work.
The end of Douglas-Mann's political career was at one with his stubbornness and idealism. Depressed by the state into which the Labour party had got itself by the time of the Tony Benn challenge to Denis Healey for the deputy leadership, on the last day of the Brighton conference he brought back to his Sussex home for lunch the MPs John Grant and George Cunningham, and myself. Over a long, dark, edge-of-the-cliff conversation he was almost ready to join the others in signing up with the emerging Social Democrats. However, the SDP were overwhelmingly pro-European and Bruce had his reservations on that subject.
He did cross the floor in January 1982, but insisted (to the acute embarrassment of his new leaders) that he must renew his mandate from the voters of Mitcham and Morden, who had elected him on the Labour ticket. The SDP should have done this out of self-interest on its own early high tide. But it was Bruce's bad luck to make this stand of principle at the time of Margaret Thatcher's triumphalism over the Falklands. He lost to Angela Rumbold and was much smirked over. He fought the general election of 1983, but gave up parliamentary ambitions, though he continued in SDP, then Liberal Democratic, politics.
A well read man, an admirer of Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy, he served for 16 years from 1981 on the Arts Council committee for special funds, was an active member of Shelter (on its board since 1974) and was, above all, still the senior partner in the firm which he had founded.
He was very fond of sailing and as a young man had been close to selection for the British Olympic canoeing team.
Happy in marriage to Helen, who survives him with one son and a daughter, he overcame his vicissitudes by doing the worthwhile, interesting things he had always done. He was an exemplary man in politics and if he was not given the scope to use those talents, the loss was to government.
Bruce Leslie Home Douglas-Mann, solicitor and politician, born June 23 1927; died July 28 2000
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