Courageous, waspish, Kaufman
Obituaries of Gerald Kaufman from 1) Guardian, 2) The Independent, 3) BBC.
Gerald Kaufman walking past the entrance of the Abraham Mosque or the Cave of the Patriarchs, a holy site to both Muslims and Jews, in the West Bank town of Hebron in 2010. Photo by bHazem Bader/Getty Images
Sir Gerald Kaufman obituary
Veteran Labour MP and father of the House of Commons who famously labelled his party’s 1983 manifesto ‘the longest suicide note in history’
By Stephen Bates, The Guardian
February 27, 2017
In Sir Gerald Kaufman, who has died aged 86, the Labour party had not only one of its longest-serving MPs, but also one of its loyalest, if most waspish, members. He supported a succession of leaders from Harold Wilson onwards through all vicissitudes, regularly coming high in MPs’ polls for the shadow cabinet through his earlier years in the Commons, and was a committed and outspoken frontbencher. He was described by an ally as “a politician’s politician, a sublime operator, brilliant in committee and at persuasion”.
But he never achieved full cabinet rank when the party was in government. This was mainly due to bad timing, which saw Labour out of power during his political prime, but partly also because of a certain unclubability. “He does not inspire warmth and trust,” wrote the political commentator Alan Watkins. “He puts people’s backs up … in fact, he is a perfectly nice chap, but there it is.”
Kaufman, small, bald and often dressed in pastel-coloured suits, set off by patterned ties, was a distinctive figure in the Commons. “Gee, here comes the mayor for Miami Beach,” exclaimed one startled American reporter. He had a sharp tongue, as often deployed against leftwingers such as Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone on his own side as against the Tories, or regular bêtes-noires such as the BBC, modern journalists and the Israeli government. This was despite the fact that he was both Jewish and a former journalist – his satirical skills honed on the Daily Mirror and writing sketches for the BBC’s That Was The Week That Was in the early 1960s – and that he also classed himself as a leftwinger. It was he who coined the memorable line about the Labour party’s lengthy and disastrous 1983 general election manifesto that it was “the longest suicide note in history”.
Kaufman was born in Leeds, the seventh and youngest child of Louis, a tailor, and his wife, Jane, Jewish refugees who had escaped the pogroms in Poland to settle in Yorkshire. Gerald won a scholarship from his primary school to the fee-paying Leeds grammar school. He often rubbed people up the wrong way, not least when, on winning a school prize, he asked for a copy of Das Kapital. He won a scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) and chaired the University Labour Club.
On leaving Oxford, he initially failed to get a job in journalism, becoming instead an assistant secretary at the Labour party, before subsequently joining the Daily Mirror, under the editorship of Hugh Cudlipp, as a researcher to the MP and journalist Richard Crossman.
When Crossman edited the New Statesman in the early 60s, Kaufman followed him to the magazine as a political columnist, and he soon entered the so-called kitchen cabinet of Wilson, the new Labour leader, notionally as a political press officer, but also as a speech writer and phrase-maker, alongside Joe Haines and Marcia Falkender.
Kaufman had fought his first parliamentary election in 1955, in the hopeless cause of Bromley, against Harold Macmillan, then the foreign secretary – who he accused of “political peacemaking” because he was absent on international business for much of the campaign. He was also defeated in 1959 at Gillingham, before finally achieving election in 1970 to the safe inner-city Manchester seat of Ardwick, and subsequently Gorton from 1983. He held the seat until his death, winning a 24,000 majority in the 2015 general election, after which he became Father of the House, the MP with the longest unbroken service.
Under Wilson, Kaufman began an ascent up the ministerial ladder as a junior minister at the Department of the Environment, then industry and, following his friend Eric Varley, to minister of state in the same department. That he was not made a cabinet minister was attributed to the fact that James Callaghan, succeeding Wilson in 1976, mistakenly – and bizarrely – assumed he had supported Michael Foot instead of himself for the leadership.
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Gerald Kaufman (3rd L), the head of a European Parliament delegation, meets with residents of Jabalia. Photo by Getty
This was the extent of Kaufman’s ministerial career, ending in his late 40s with Labour’s defeat in 1979, though he did claim successes in office, including the securing of US landing rights for Concorde and the repeal of the Tories’ Housing Finance Act, which had reduced subsidies for council house tenants and allowed local authorities to charge “fair”, not controlled, rents. Perhaps more substantially, out of Kaufman’s brief time in office came his book How to Be a Minister (1980, reissued 1997), a witty and acute dissection that has been read by government incomers on both sides ever since.
In opposition, under Callaghan, Foot and then Neil Kinnock, Kaufman served as the party’s spokesman on the environment, then shadowed the Home Office and latterly foreign affairs for five years from 1987 until he stood down from frontbench positions after the election defeat in 1992. Despite the popularity of his spirited attacks on the Tories with his fellow MPs – Thatcher was a “female Mussolini” and her cabinet “dim second-raters” – he failed repeatedly to win election to the left-leaning national executive. He succeeded only belatedly in 1991, at the 11th attempt.
Instead, as the party tore itself apart, he became a vehement critic of the left for wrecking Labour’s chances of election. He tried unsuccessfully to persuade Foot to stand down just before the disastrous 1983 campaign and was a vituperative opponent of Benn in Labour’s internecine struggle.
Kaufman told the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart: “I once got a letter from a constituent saying that whenever he saw my face on television he could reach the set and switch me off in two seconds. Well, whenever I see Benn’s face, I can switch it off in half a second, because I have a remote control.”
It was the sense that his appearance and manner alienated voters that led to accusations in 1992 that the over-cautious party managers were keeping its foreign affairs spokesman away from the cameras. Whether true or not and whether he would have maintained the portfolio if Labour had won were never tested. His outspoken and long-standing opposition to the policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians would have made him an awkward choice for the Foreign Office.
“The sufferings of the Jewish people cannot be used as some sort of justification for what Israel does to the Palestinians,” he said in 2012. “I find it degrading that the sufferings of Jews in the Holocaust should be used as a kind of justification for persecuting Palestinians.” Such comments caused trouble in the British Jewish community – confrontations at the St John’s Wood synagogue and a promise by a rabbi that he would refuse to conduct his funeral – , which perturbed Kaufman not at all and certainly did not deter him.
He was a loyal supporter of Tony Blair – claiming credit for persuading him to go for the leadership in 1994. However, when Labour returned to power in 1997 Kaufman was nearly 67 and considered too old to join the cabinet. He supported the war in Iraq, though he was privately opposed to it, and rallied to Gordon Brown when he became leader. He was knighted in 2004.
From 1992 until 2005 he chaired the select committee on culture, media and sport (formerly national heritage, 1992-97). It was something of a dream job as it allowed him to pronounce on high profile issues. He repeatedly criticised the “shoddy” BBC and its unnecessary board of governors and, at one stage, claimed that digital broadcasting was a blind alley and a waste of resources: “It will not be the way of the future.”
However, it did not stop him receiving bad publicity during the MPs’ expenses scandal for trying to claim an £8,000 television set sometime after he stood down from the committee.
Kaufman dated his love for the cinema from being taken to see Disney’s Three Little Pigs cartoon at the Rialto, Briggate, as a child in Leeds and he became a notable film buff, with a particular enthusiasm for musicals. For the British Film Institute, he wrote Meet Me in St Louis (1994), a study of the making of the 1944 classic, for which he interviewed many of its stars; he also published a memoir entitled My Life in the Silver Screen (1985).
He is survived by two nieces and four nephews.
• Gerald Bernard Kaufman, politician, born 21 June 1930; died 26 February 2017
Sir Gerald Kaufman obituary: Long-serving Labour MP and Father of the House
Kaufman was famed for his sharp tongue and dismissal of his own party’s 1983 manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.
By Edward Pearce, The Independent
February 27, 2017
Sir Gerald Kaufman, who has died aged 86, was a highly complex character. As journalist, backstage adviser, MP, minister just outside the cabinet, leading frontbench figure in the Labour Opposition of the Eighties and follower of the arts, he had every merit of intelligence, application and easy, literate fluency in argument. But he could be counter-productively abrasive, took and gave rather too much offence and was perhaps a little short of self-doubt.
His clear and lucid mind inclined him to a laying down of the law in a masterful fashion not everywhere appreciated. Genuinely gifted, he was his own worst enemy, but not without competitors.
Kaufman was born in 1930 in Leeds, one of the many children of Louis Kaufman, a Montague Burton’s tailor, and his wife Jane. He progressed to Leeds Grammar School for which he felt no affection, having encountered antisemitism there, and to the Queen’s College, Oxford where in 1952, he became chairman of the Labour Club. A Daily Mirror journalist by trade, he fought two Tory seats in 1955 and 1959 before entering politics obliquely as an adviser to Harold Wilson, to whom he showed sustained personal loyalty.
Kaufman entered Parliament in 1970 for Manchester Ardwick and since 1983 served Manchester Gorton. His ministerial career began at the earliest opportunity, when Labour came to power in 1974, as junior to Anthony Crosland at the Environment, shepherding exceptionally protracted legislation, the Rent Act (near his heart as it gave tenants security of tenure), through a tight, difficult committee.
He was then given responsibility with Eric Varley at Industry (post-Tony Benn), for the Industry Act. Moving up to Minister of State at the end of 1975, he stayed there until 1979, taking care of aircraft and shipbuilding bills, arguing against the nonsense of the Chrysler deal, but defending, at least in public, the hardly less nonsensical Polish shipping agreement, both subsidies of uneconomic activities. He was never less than a painstaking, dedicated and capable minister, and it was his wretched misfortune to have qualified for cabinet office when in 1979 all prospects would be whisked away for the next 18 years.
In opposition he grasped Labour’s predicament exactly, backing Denis Healey for the key deputy leadership contest and standing up to the far left. But though he rose to leading portfolios, shadowing Environment from 1980, the Home Office 1983-87 and the Foreign Office 1987-91, he would not be wholly happy. His gifts were for minute grasp, not persuasion in debate. Always combative, Kaufman was not subtle in public argument. “Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike” was a hypocrisy (or finesse) quite beyond him. He attacked enemies – and, in an oddly Thatcherian way, they were more often enemies than mere opponents – with words too rich for the palette.
“Infamous” was a recurring adjective. An Independent journalist would sigh that “there was scarcely any topic he touched that was not scandalous, any ministerial statement that was not outrageous”. He once turned on Leon Brittan, of Latvian Jewish extraction, engaged in 1984 upon immigration rules – cosy by the standards of later Home Secretary David Blunkett – charging that had they applied when his own parents arrived from Poland, they would have been sent back to the gas chambers. The grasp, always good, could be vitiated by the animus.
Opposition can be done deftly with information or by full-frontal assault. Kaufman, so good at the first, was attracted to the second, riskier option. John Smith would triumph in indictment speeches, Robin Cook would do very well. The test of this style of opposition is the response of the government. The Tories disliked Robin Cook, but had a healthy respect for his closely argued case and savage irony. They were genuinely scared of Smith who, over Westland, sliced them fine. Gerald Kaufman they never quite took seriously. He could be witty, but was more often sarcastic, spent too long in top gear and, in his furious but ornate way, became predictable.
He would demonstrate greater strength on standing committees when an eye for detail could embarrass a minister, and he flourished in his final parliamentary job as chair, from 1992 onwards, of the National Heritage Select Committee, later the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. The arts had always been a concern, and he was a regular at arts festivals. He also wrote a little. His best book, How to be a Minister, has a light, sardonic touch and approaches minor classic status.
What was incontestable about Kaufman was the courage in any cause he cared for. He was the one member of the shadow Cabinet with the nerve to tell Michael Foot that he should give up a leadership far beyond his abilities. And throughout the period of frightened silence when entryism and deselection were cats that had got the tongue of most Labour politicians, Kaufman spoke up quite fearlessly again and again.
He is credited with calling the calamitous Labour manifesto of 1983 “the longest suicide note in history”. Significantly, he would be rewarded with a sustained series of very high votes in the annual ballots for the shadow Cabinet, when Labour did that sort of vulgar thing.
The courage also showed more than once on the Israel issue. Kaufman protested at the entry to Britain in 1972 of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, co-plotter with Yitzhak Shamir in 1948 in the killing of 91 Arabs, Jews and British in the King David Hotel bombing. And in April 2002 he attacked Ariel Sharon in the Commons for his readiness resort to violence, racial prejudice against Palestinian Arabs and general unfitness for high office. As brave as true, it was a splendid defiance of the standard smear from virulent Zionists that that Jews criticising Israel are “self-hating”. Kaufman was Jewish, Leeds Jewish, Polish immigrant Jewish, even a Zionist, of a civilised and deeply troubled sort. He spoke as a proud Jew, but not proud of Israel under Sharon.
As a parliamentarian, Kaufman represented with real passion ill-served and unprivileged people and newer racial minorities in a hard part of a hard city; genuinely devoted, yet leaving no small point unscored, Gerald Kaufman was always a class act, if, on occasion, something of a strain.
Sir Gerald Bernard Kaufman, born 21 June 1930, died 26 February 2017
BBC
February 27, 2017
Gerald Kaufman rose from a working-class background to become one of the longest-serving MPs of his generation.
He gained a reputation as a persistent, often waspish, interrogator whose withering putdowns became a feature of his time in Parliament.
A practising Jew, he was best known for his fierce opposition to the policies of the Israeli government and its treatment of the Palestinians.
Possessed of a sardonic wit, he was a prolific writer and columnist who also wrote satirical sketches for the BBC, an organisation that he later frequently criticised.
Gerald Bernard Kaufman was born in Leeds on 21 June 1930, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants.
A scholarship took him to the fee-paying Leeds Grammar School, and he won an Exhibition to Queens College, Oxford, from where he graduated with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.
While at Oxford he immersed himself in politics and, as the secretary of the University Labour Club, he was instrumental in preventing a student named Rupert Murdoch from standing for office, after the Australian was found to be breaking the rules by canvassing for the position.
Gerald Kaufman appearing on “Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life”
On leaving university he set out to find a parliamentary seat. After a brief spell as assistant secretary of the Fabian Society, he was selected to fight Bromley in the 1955 general election. He was roundly defeated by the Conservative candidate, the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.
Four years later he failed at Gillingham, another safe Conservative seat where the Labour vote actually fell.
He had secured a job on the Daily Mirror, where he often wrote leaders. In 1964 he moved to the New Statesman for a short time before working for the Labour Party as a press officer, in which post he became a member of one of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s so-called “kitchen cabinet”.
It was while visiting his mother in Leeds in November 1962 that he saw the first episode of the BBC’s satirical programme That Was the Week That Was. Back in his Daily Mirror office, he phoned the producer, Ned Sherrin, and told him he had an idea for a sketch.
Disappeared
“He had no idea who I was,” Kaufman later recalled, “but he said, ‘Write it and I’ll send a taxi in the morning to pick it up.'”
It led to Kaufman becoming a regular contributor to the show, best known for his Silent Men of Westminster, a satire on MPs who never spoke in the House.
Labour lost the 1970 general election, but Kaufman finally got into Parliament as the member for Manchester Ardwick. When Labour returned to power in 1974 he held junior ministerial posts in the Department of the Environment and the Department of Industry.
Transport and Mr Gerald Kaufman (R), Minister of State, Department of Industry and Stanley Clinton Davis, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Trade.
Kaufman (r) was a junior minister in the 1970s
He became shadow environment secretary in 1980 and, three years later when his Ardwick seat disappeared in boundary changes, he moved to Manchester Gorton, becoming shadow home secretary after Margaret Thatcher won the 1983 election.
Kaufman was scathing about Labour’s move to the left. He accused Tony Benn of nearly destroying the party when he stood as deputy leader in 1981. He later said he would have quit Parliament had Benn been successful.
He was equally critical of Michael Foot’s leadership and famously described Labour’s 1983 manifesto, which advocated, among other things, unilateral nuclear disarmament and renationalisation of recently privatised industries, as “the longest suicide note in history”.
After a term as shadow foreign secretary, he returned to the back benches in 1992 and became chairman of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport.
Castigated
There he was able to indulge in a series of attacks on what he called cultural elitism. His savaging of Mary Allen, then chief executive of the Royal Opera House, over her failure to account for spiralling costs, saw her resign her position.
The satirical TV puppet show, Spitting Image, lampooned Kaufman as the serial killer Hannibal Lecter, from The Silence of the Lambs.
He became notable for harsh criticism of BBC management and called for the BBC to be privatised, claiming that the corporation could be funded by big business.
He served as shadow foreign secretary under Neil Kinnock
He also castigated the BBC over its apology for the obscene calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to the actor Andrew Sachs, saying that it was “not enough”.
Kaufman’s most vocal attacks were reserved for Israel and its policies towards the Palestinians. A member of the Jewish Labour Movement, he called for economic sanctions against Israel and a ban on sales of arms.
In 2002 he broke a longstanding pledge never to visit Israel when he went there to make a BBC documentary called The End of An Affair, which charted his early infatuation with the Jewish state as a young student and how he later became disillusioned.
He launched a bitter attack on the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon. “It is time to remind Sharon,” he said, “that the Star of David belongs to all Jews, not to his repulsive government.”
Prolific author
He often compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with South African apartheid and, described Israel’s use of white phosphorus flares in the 2009 offensive in Gaza as “war crimes”.
“I long ago gave up hope for the Israelis participating in a negotiated solution,” he said in 2014.
Kaufman himself came under fire when the Daily Telegraph published its investigation into MPs’ expenses in 2009. It emerged he had claimed more than £115,000 for work on his London flat and spent £8,000 on a large-screen TV and another £1,500 on a luxury rug.
He led a delegation to Gaza in 2010 to express solidarity with the Palestinians.
Following the general election of May 2015, he became Father of the House, a title bestowed on the sitting MP who is not a minister who has the longest unbroken period of service in the House of Commons.
A prolific author, he wrote a number of books on the art and practice of politics.
Kaufman was not a clubbable man and not one to suffer fools either gladly or quietly, something that did not endear him to many of his parliamentary colleagues.
That, along with Labour’s almost two decades of opposition, may well explain why a politician with undoubted intellect, and one of the pioneers of the New Labour project, never served in the cabinet of a Labour government.
Gerald Kaufman was knighted in 2004.