Mildred Gordon

If the Labour MP Joan Maynard, two years older than Gordon, was known as “Stalin’s granny”, Gordon could have been called “Trotsky’s aunt” for she had a long association with the movement that took the Russian revolutionary’s name and was married to Nils Kaare Dahl, who had been Trotsky’s driver.

When Gordon arrived at Westminster, she was mentored by Tony Benn and by Jeremy Corbyn, who was young enough to be her son but became a staunch friend and ally. Gordon was excited by Corbyn’s election as Labour party leader and hoped that he would finally lead the left-wing socialist government she had campaigned for all her life.

When Corbyn spoke during the Commons’ “humble address” to the Queen on her 90th birthday last month, he also paid tribute to Gordon. Describing her as a “dear friend”, he recalled that when the Queen had opened the Docklands Light Railway in Gordon’s constituency in 1987 she had asked the newly elected MP how she was finding the job: “Mildred replied with devastating honesty by saying that she felt she had very little power to help her constituents. The Queen took her on one side and said with her customary wit: “Once they find out you lot can’t help, they all write to me’.”

Profoundly out of sympathy with the rise of New Labour, Gordon would have been an obvious choice for Corbyn’s front bench had she been a generation younger. Instead, serving as an MP under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair, her uncompromising views meant that she was never going to advance far in the Parliamentary Labour Party. She complained that the party whips sidelined her and did everything in their power to keep her out of the limelight.

Yet when she stood for election to John Smith’s shadow cabinet in 1993, she came closer to winning than anyone could have predicted. To the fury of the party’s traditional wing, for the first time party rules required every Labour MP to vote for at least four women. To indicate their displeasure, a group opposed to such positive discrimination determined to vote for the most unsuitable name on the ballot paper and alighted on Gordon — who was an indefatigable campaigner for women’s rights — as the recipient of their “spoiler” ballots. She received an impressive 81 votes. It was insufficient to get her elected, but for months afterwards whenever one of Labour’s female MPs rose to speak in the house, Tory members shouted, “We want Mildred!”

Such ridicule fell on barren ground. During the war, she had served as an ARP warden in the East End; the experience toughened her and she joked that staying up all night looking out for the enemy and putting out fires held her in excellent stead for the cut and thrust of the Commons chamber.

In any case, she regarded an MP’s work in the community as more important than anything that took place at Westminster. Even her political opponents conceded that she was a hard-working “people’s champion”. She once persuaded a Tory housing minister to visit Poplar to inspect the sub-standard housing her constituents had to endure and took considerable satisfaction in making him stand in a lift “full of piss” while she showed him the problems of living in a rundown, high-rise block.

She was born Mildred Fellerman in 1923 in Stepney into a working-class Jewish family. Her father, Judah, had a market stall and her mother, Dora, struggled to feed and clothe the family. She recalled as a girl being asked to write begging letters to seek money for the family’s dental treatment. She refused and it took her mother eight months to save enough to pay the bill.

As the depression hit, her father became unemployed and she witnessed him break down in tears after weeks of unsuccessfully seeking work. The experience forged her political militancy. When she was 13, the entire Fellerman family took to the streets to resist Oswald Mosley’s attempt to lead a fascist march through the East End. The incident entered history as the Battle of Cable Street.

She joined the Labour party in 1939 and, during the war, she worked as an office girl by day, recruiting her fellow workers to a trade union, and toured the bomb-strewn streets at night as a tin-hatted warden. Half a century later she led a campaign for a memorial garden in Wapping to honour the civilian casualties of the war.

In the early 1940s, she met Sam Gordon, secretary of Fourth International — the worldwide Trotskyist organisation — and a friend of Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova. He had worked his way to Britain as an engine greaser on a merchant ship in order to bring messages and money to the British wing of the movement. They renewed their acquaintance in 1947 in Paris and “decided that despite many obstacles, we wanted to stay together”.

The couple moved to the US and married in Reno, Nevada. The Trinidadian Marxist writer CLR James was one of their witnesses. They lived in New York but after a visit to Britain in 1952 her husband’s US passport was revoked. “We became trapped here by persecution during the McCarthyite period,” Gordon said.

Their son, David, was born in London and Sam Gordon took a job as a printer for The Times. They planned to return to America, but Gordon fell ill with cancer so they stayed in Britain to benefit from the free healthcare they passionately believed in.

The print unions ensured that he remained on the Times payroll long after he was able to work. He died in 1982 and, three years later, his widow married another leading Trotskyist, Nils Kaare Dahl, who had worked for the Russian revolutionary when he was in exile in Norway in the mid-1930s. Dahl later became blind and deaf. Gordon combined looking after him with her parliamentary duties.

After his death in Norway in 1996, she was astonished to find that a light machinegun, 12 rifles and boxes of ammunition had been found in the Dahls’ house near Oslo, all carefully hidden. It seemed that he had never quite given up hope of a workers’ insurrection.

Her fiery rhetoric was tempered by her humanity. In her maiden Commons speech, she spoke movingly of the proud traditions of working-class solidarity and the “warmth and compassion and the companionship that enables poor people to survive harsh conditions”.

She opposed Neil Kinnock’s expulsion of the Militant Tendency from the party but gave short shrift to the factionalism of the Trotskyist groups, even though she broadly shared their political views. “I always felt that an organisation with such bad human relationships could never spearhead changes beneficial to society,” she complained.

She refused to pay the poll tax after it was introduced in 1990, but complied after a court summons. “I don’t know if my constituency would be best served by my going to prison,” she said.

She remained an MP until 1997 when she lost her constituency owing to boundary changes. It denied her a seat under a Labour government, which probably spared both herself and Tony Blair considerable strife.

Mildred Gordon, Labour MP, was born on August 24, 1923. She died on April 8, 2016, aged 92

Corrections: Our obituary of Mildred Gordon (May 5) stated that her second husband, Nils Dahl, was “Trotsky’s former bodyguard”. We have been asked to clarify that while Dahl was invited to perform that role, Trotsky left Norway before he could take it up.

We said in our obituary of Mildred Gordon, MP (May 5), that after the death of her husband Nils Kaare Dahl in 1996 she found a cache of weapons among his belongings in their north London home. In fact it was at a house the Dahls owned in Norway that the weapons were found. We apologise for the mistake.