In 1979, shortly after Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives won power at Westminster, a young Bank of England economist called Murray Elder was summoned for a job interview with the Labour Party.
Denis Healey, the shadow chancellor, asked bluntly why he had a beard. The hirsute young man replied every bit as bluntly: “What’s my beard got to do with anything?” Healey was impressed by the way Elder could not be bullied and offered him the job.
Elder became well known in party and trade union circles, spending the next 44 years working behind the scenes in the Commons, in Holyrood and latterly as a member of the Lords. He served as general secretary to the Scottish Labour Party, chief of staff to John Smith, the Westminster Labour leader, and as special adviser to Donald Dewar, the Scottish secretary and later first minister.
Although a fine tactician, Elder was a dour figure and not blessed with a charismatic personality. Scottish journalists were often infuriated by the strict way he ran press conferences and photo opportunities. In a rare newspaper profile he was described as “a right-wing Labour backroom fixer not afraid to get his political hands dirty on behalf of his friends”.
Some Scottish Labour MPs were jealous of his influence on, and access to, Dewar. They were also mystified and suspicious of the role he played in both the Westminster and Scottish governments. “He has plenty of enemies and most of them say he is dull and boring,” one of them told the Daily Mirror in 1999. “But underestimate him at your peril.”
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Elder was also one of the longest-surviving recipients of a heart transplant, having received a donor organ in 1988 at a time when his life expectancy had dropped from days to hours. After John Smith suffered his first heart attack that year, Elder persuaded the Labour leader to join him in bagging Munros as part of their recovery.
They were members of an informal group known as the Radical Ramblers whose only qualification was that none had ever voted Tory. They included Menzies Campbell, the future Lib Dem leader, and Elder’s childhood friend Gordon Brown. In Mark Stuart’s 2005 biography of Smith, Elder recalled accompanying Smith up Ben Cruachan on July 21, 1990, adding that it was Smith’s single favourite day and one of his own happiest memories.
When Smith suffered a fatal heart attack on the morning of May 12, 1994, Elder was in hospital recovering from surgery. Loyal as ever to his leader, he immediately arranged to be discharged and travelled to Edinburgh to take charge of organising Smith’s funeral.
Thomas Murray Elder was born in Kirkcaldy in 1950 and was with Brown at nursery school from the age of three. They attended Kirkcaldy West Primary School together and at Kirkcaldy High School were both selected for an experimental “e-stream” of bright pupils with an IQ of over 130. At lunchtimes they debated socialism with Miss Shaw, the school librarian and a Tory. By then Elder was suffering from rheumatic fever, which left him with a weakened heart.
He shared a flat with Brown at the University of Edinburgh, where the future prime minister studied history and Elder read mathematics before switching to economic history. In his free time he was playing the cello, following the Scottish rugby team and climbing mountains. In 1972 he moved to London as an economist with the Bank of England.
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Towards the end of that decade Brown suggested to Smith that his friend would be worth considering as an economic adviser to the party. He began working with Healey and Merlyn Rees, the shadow home secretary, and in 1980 became a research assistant to Smith, who was then shadow trade secretary. At the 1983 general election he stood in Ross, Cromarty & Skye, coming a distant third to the youthful Charles Kennedy, the future Liberal Democrat leader.
Elder then became a research officer for Labour in Scotland until being appointed general secretary of the Scottish party in 1988. His first aim was to increase party membership and his second was to give the party a higher, more acceptable profile. Yet his health was deteriorating rapidly until one day he was summoned to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, where a replacement heart had become available. “Initially, drugs kept me going but finally, when for me there was very little time left, a transplant became the only option,” he recalled.
When Smith was elected Labour leader in 1992, Elder became his chief of staff, opening up senior positions to professionals from outside the party machine, a process of competitive tendering that he described as “a New Labour exercise before New Labour”. He ran a small, tight-knit team, though had plans to expand the leader’s office before the next election.
After Smith’s death the new leader, Tony Blair, found him a position connecting the Westminster team with the unions. Elder, who was unmarried, was made a Labour peer in 1999 and in 2003 was appointed chancellor of Al-Maktoum College of Higher Education, a postgraduate college in Dundee and the first institute for Islamic studies in Scotland. Some years later he had to apologise to the Lords over not registering payments from the college and using Lords stationery in his college dealings.
In 2007 Elder, who was patron of that year’s Transplant Games in Edinburgh, became the first heart-transplant recipient to bag all the Munros, standing on the 974m (3,196ft) summit of Beinn Sgritheall with a group of friends including John Dark, the surgeon who had performed his lifesaving operation.
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In doing so he joined the Labour peers Lord Haworth and Lord Smith of Finsbury as the only three members of the UK parliament to have completed the Munros challenge. After the obligatory champagne he declared: “I hope it gives encouragement to other transplant patients and shows what you can still achieve after transplant surgery.”
Lord Elder, general secretary of the Scottish Labour Party, 1988-92, was born on May 9, 1950. He died from heart and kidney failure on October 24, 2023, aged 73
