Lord Graham of Edmonton
Labour MP who was a whip in the Commons and the Lords but found himself on a hard-left ‘hitlist’
LORD GRAHAM OF EDMONTON, who has died aged 94, was a stalwart of the Co-op who was a senior Government whip in the Commons under James Callaghan, and later, for seven years, Opposition chief whip in the Lords.
Ted Graham joined the Co-op in Newcastle as a 14-year-old shop boy and rose to be national secretary of the Co-operative Party. He became leader of Enfield council, then Labour & Co-operative MP for Edmonton from 1974 to 1983.
After losing his seat Graham was, to his surprise, offered a life peerage. This was no mere consolation but a conscious decision by Neil Kinnock to use his formidable energies to fortify an elderly front bench in the Upper House.
He soon found his feet there, as spokesman on the environment and then defence before being appointed Chief Whip – a post carrying a ministerial salary – after the sudden death in 1990 of Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede.
Whipping in the Lords requires a different approach from the Commons, relying on persuasion rather than discipline; a blunt but genial Geordie, Graham had no problem with this.
Well to the Right of his party, he stood firm in the battles with the Bennite Left for its soul – and its organisation. He never minced his words, and as the party began splintering in 1981 found himself on a hard Left “hitlist”.
Graham infuriated militant union bosses when he used his Co-op platform to declare that “using trade union strength to grab as much as possible is not socialism but selfishness”. Profit, he insisted to their fury, was “not a dirty word”.
While running the Co-op Party, Graham forged a close relationship with the shopworkers’ union Usdaw, which represented many Co-op employees. He became the driving force in the unlikely alliance of churchmen, shopworkers, the Co-op and the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s that resisted the legalisation of Sunday trading.
Under the “Keep Sunday Special” banner, they waged a campaign that kept most of Britain’s shops closed on the Sabbath for a decade after change first seemed inevitable. Legislation to permit Sunday trading was defeated in the Commons in 1983, and in the Lords two years later.
As some chains began flouting the law, Graham urged the prosecution of their directors. Keep Sunday Special finally went down to defeat in 1994, but only after Graham won employees a statutory right to refuse to work on Sundays.
Graham had an insatiable love of learning and in 1976, aged 50, became the first MP to be awarded an Open University degree. Studied for on the Underground and between votes in the Commons, it was the climax to years of self-education at WEA evening classes and the Co-operative College in Loughborough.
He was also a competitive member of the parliamentary swimming team. But football had been his passion from childhood and, after leaving Tyneside, he became a devoted Millwall supporter. In the Lords he promised a “severe mauling” to the “harebrained” Bill promoted by Margaret Thatcher’s government to combat hooliganism by making ID cards compulsory for spectators.
When the Bill – dropped soon after – was debated in 1989, Graham said it was an “unspeakable obscenity” for the government to proceed before the findings of the Hillsborough inquiry were known.
Graham had a lasting concern for the quality of the environment. As chairman from 1975 of the newly formed all-party National Heritage Group, he had a pivotal role in killing Labour’s plans to introduce a “wealth tax”.
Prior to Denis Healey’s 1976 Budget Graham presented a petition to the Commons from the Historic Houses Association with 1,116,253 signatures urging the relaxation of capital taxes which were already endangering stately homes and putting estates at risk of dismemberment.
Thomas Edward Graham was born in Newcastle on March 26 1925, the son of a railway porter. He left elementary school at 14 to work at the
Newcastle Co-op, then in 1943 joined the Royal Marines.
Demobilised in 1947, he returned to the Co-op, showing himself a formidable debater as he was elected Labour “Prime Minister” of the Tyneside Youth Parliament.
After a year organising the British Federation of Young Co-operators, he moved south in 1953 to be education secretary of the Enfield Highway Co-operative Society. In 1962 he was appointed southern secretary of the Co-operative Union, and in 1967 national secretary of the Co-operative Party.
With a Labour government he felt was taking the movement for granted, at his first Co-operative Conference in 1968, Graham berated the Chancellor Roy Jenkins for a 50 per cent increase in Selective Employment Tax.
Generally, though, his line was moderate. In 1969 he persuaded the conference to back Barbara Castle’s “In Place of Strife” union reforms provided that penal provisions were dropped, and the next year, just before Labour’s unexpected defeat, he supported Harold Wilson’s moves to join the EEC.
As president of the Co-operative Congress in 1987, Graham would warn that Britain’s retail Co-ops were falling behind because they had to operate under legislation conceived a century before.
Graham was elected to Enfield council in 1961, becoming its deputy leader and chairing its housing and redevelopment committee. He championed traffic-free shopping areas in Enfield Town and Edmonton Green to spur regeneration, only for the Labour local government minister Anthony Greenwood to reject the former because of its impact on a historic churchyard.
In 1967 he leapt to the defence of Enfield’s director of education when the local Conservative MP Iain Macleod accused him of “blatant partisanship” in planning for comprehensive education.
Graham fought his first seat – Enfield West – in 1966. When Edmonton’s veteran MP Austen Albu stood down at the February 1974 election, he took the nomination, then held the seat with a majority of 5,783, increased that October to 6,828.
At Westminster, with Labour restored to power, Graham made a strength of his retail experience, observing that “the great threat to the small shopkeeper is the big shopkeeper”. Shirley Williams, deputy to the Prices Secretary Roy Hattersley, snapped him up as her PPS.
When Callaghan took over from Wilson in April 1976 he made Graham Lord Commissioner of the Treasury (a senior whip). Controversially, he was put in charge of whipping Labour MPS from his native North-east.
Graham hung on by 1,980 votes in 1979 as Margaret Thatcher led the Conservatives back to power. Callaghan did not offer him a job at first, then in June 1980 made him an environment spokesman with responsibility for London. This proved a poisoned chalice, as he became a target for the capital’s “hard Left” led by Ken Livingstone and Ted Knight.
Despite Graham supporting Healey in the leadership election at the end of 1980, Michael Foot kept him at Environment. But in the 1983 election he lost Edmonton to the Conservatives by 1,193 votes.
Made a front-bench spokesman in the Lords, he quickly made an impact. In 1986 he led an unsuccessful move – supported by Lord Denning – to abolish the death penalty for members of the armed forces. Two years later he told ministers they had been “complacent, careless or just plain deceived” over the £190 million sale of Royal Ordnance to British Aerospace.
As Opposition chief whip he told peers in 1991 that if Westminster was the “Mother of Parliaments”, more must be done for mothers in Parliament – despite the Lords themselves having little use for a crèche.
Graham’s task was made easier when in April 1991 John Major agreed to the creation of 11 Labour working peers. There were at that time 449 Tory peers, 112 Labour, 53 Liberal Democrat, 17 SDP and 425 independents.
He took a benevolent view of the hereditary peers but supported Labour’s commitment to take part in proceedings and vote. Graham fully accepted the need for a second, revising, chamber with a genuine working membership; in 1992 he urged the payment of larger attendance allowances to encourage peers to play a full part.
Graham stepped down as chief whip as Labour swept to power in 1997. But as chairman of the Labour peers from then until 2000 he had a say as an agreement was negotiated for 92 hereditaries to keep their seats. He was appointed a Privy Counsellor in 1998.
For a time Graham represented the Prison Officers’ Association at Westminster. He was a vice-president of the Building Societies Association, and in 1987 was elected president of the Association of Labour Authorities.
Ted Graham married Margaret Golding in 1950; she died in 2005. They had two sons.
Lord Graham of Edmonton, born March 26 1925, died March 21 2020