In late 1965 Harold Wilson’s Labour government seemed on the verge of collapse. It faced severe economic troubles and had a majority of only two seats in the Commons, which it expected to lose in the Hull North by-election in January 1966. Defeat would make it almost impossible for it to continue, while victory would increase the pressure on Wilson to call a general election. In the event, the candidate increased the majority, by the largest by-election swing to a governing party since 1924. Wilson called a general election soon afterwards and Labour won by a landslide. The successful local Labour candidate was Kevin McNamara.
The Hull vacancy (the incumbent MP had died) transformed McNamara’s life. Much of the metropolitan media covering the campaign dismissed him as worthy but dull. Dick Crossman in his diary for November 27, 1965 wrote that McNamara’s choice “must mean that we are quite likely to lose Hull North”. Commentators were much more impressed by the charismatic Richard Gott, the historian and Guardian journalist (standing on an independent left-wing ticket), than the 31-year-old, uninspiring, prematurely white-haired McNamara, who was already the father of three sons. However, Gott ended with less than 1 per cent of the vote.
McNamara was his own man, observing over the year the changing cohorts of Labour MPs and the sharp shifts in direction in the party’s policies. A strong defender of trade unions and their connection with the party, he blamed the Callaghan government’s restrictive pay policies for the winter of discontent in 1978-79. While still a relatively new MP in 1969, he had voted against the proposals in Barbara Castle’s In Place of Strife white paper, which included curbs on the unions, and Wilson had dismissed him as a parliamentary private secretary. By 2005 he was the last remaining MP in the Commons who had voted against Castle’s proposals. He opposed nuclear weapons, took a strong line on human rights and increasing overseas aid, and supported the all-party Republic parliamentary group, which called for the abolition of the monarchy.
However, he was more than a man of the left. As a devout Roman Catholic McNamara opposed abortion, birth control and experiments on human embryos. At his selection meeting in Hull his statement that he would vote against abortion was met with stony silence and he was sure that this had cost him the nomination. His abiding passion was the repeal of the Act of Succession, which forbade a Catholic or the spouse of one to be a British monarch; he failed. He was an aisle steward during a mass for the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1982 and when the Holy Father greeted him in Irish, he responded in kind.
His constituency party in 1980 voted no confidence in him when one of his sons took up a music scholarship at Ampleforth, the Catholic school, the second McNamara son to do so. Neil Kinnock, a good friend, when asked to disown him, replied: “What should I do, tell him to cut off his hand?” McNamara organised the first Roman Catholic Mass in parliament since the Reformation, but thought the Catholic hierarchy was too beholden to privately educated Oxbridge Conservatives.
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His childhood in Liverpool in the 1930s was one of economic hardship, but he was supported by his close-knit Irish family. His father, Patrick, was a seaman who suffered lengthy spells of unemployment and ill health. One of four sons, McNamara passed the 11-plus to attend St Mary’s College in Crosby. He graduated in law at Hull University, was active in local Labour student politics and met his future wife, Nora Jones. He settled in the city and spent six years teaching before becoming a law lecturer at Hull College of Commerce.
His political career was dominated by Northern Ireland. As the party’s spokesman between 1987 and 1994 he walked a tightrope between challenging Protestant sectarianism and discrimination while keeping his distance from Sinn Fein and the IRA. He opposed the Prevention of Terrorism Act, even though it had been introduced by a Labour government, on the grounds that it had served its purpose and was alienating nationalists. He supported Irish unification, but only if the Protestant majority in the north consented.
Although some considered him too “green”, he opposed the Thatcher government holding talks with Sinn Fein as “giving respectability to Sinn Fein’s policy of the Armalite and the ballot box”; in 1989 he dismissed Gerry Adams as “an apologist for murder”. Although he won the grudging support of many Unionists, it did not help that when asked to sing the national anthem he sung the Irish A Soldier’s Song and he replied with an insult to a taunt of “Croppy lie down”, used by King William’s troops against Catholics and their cropped hair.
In 1994 the new Labour leader, Tony Blair, wanted to shift policy and replaced him with Mo Mowlam. McNamara was moved to be spokesman on the civil service, a post he correctly regarded as a demotion. Out of sympathy with Blair’s views on trade unions and Northern Ireland he resigned within a year and ended his hopes that he would be the last secretary of state for Northern Ireland.
McNamara’s misfortune was that his abilities were never tested in government. Between 1970 and 1997, Labour was in office for only five years. His was a life in opposition, with many nights spent away from the family home and his five children. He enjoyed particularly the musical talents of his four sons and a daughter. Julian is director of music at Downside School; Kieran, who worked in local government in East Sussex, died in 2013; Edwin is a web developer; Brigid is an early years music teacher and organiser, and Brendan works with HSBC. Given their musical talents they were known as “McNamara’s band”.
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An admirer of Kinnock and John Smith, McNamara recognised that he was not part of Blair’s circle and deplored what he regarded as the authoritarianism of Blair’s leadership. When the prime minister met a group of Labour MPs in Downing Street in 1999, McNamara praised the government for its redistributionist policy. A startled Blair replied that he hoped McNamara did not repeat that outside.
He did not follow up the suggestion from No 10, in early 2001, of taking a seat in the House of Lords, suspecting that Blair planned to “parachute” in a favoured candidate. By then, he was something of a loner; many Labour MPs who had entered the House with him in the 1960s had departed. By 2005 his 39 years of unbroken service made him second in line to succeed Tam Dalyell as Father of the House.
McNamara never forgot his roots and this lay at the centre of his convictions and his self-confidence. Short, stocky, and red-faced, some mistook his principled stands on issues for pomposity and a journalist likened him to “an angry koala bear”. However, he was direct and humorous. For many years he worked on a PhD thesis at Liverpool University’s Department of Irish Studies on the MacBride Principles of fair employment practice in Northern Ireland, finally gaining it in 2006.
After an absence of 50 years he returned to Merseyside, but to the more salubrious Formby, saying: “I’ve been to Hull and back . . . and now I’m coming back.”
Kevin McNamara, former Labour MP, was born on September 5, 1934. He died of pancreatic cancer on August 6, 2017, aged 82