Murray Elder, Lord Elder, was a longserving Labour party adviser who was particularly close to three of the leading Scottish political figures of his era: Gordon Brown, John Smith and Donald Dewar. Elder, who has died aged 73, subordinated his own political ambitions to the role of trusted adviser and, when necessary, enforcer and fixer on behalf of his political bosses, who were also his friends. These were very much relationships of equals based on respect for Elder’s intelligence, judgment and discretion.
After spending the 1970s as a Bank of England economist, the call of Labour came to Elder in 1980, after Smith became shadow trade and industry secretary and needed economic advice. Brown, who had been to school with Elder, recommended his old friend for the role, and a strong working relationship was formed between him and Smith, who in turn also became a close friend.
At the time, however, his political orientation was more towards Scotland than Westminster. He stood for Ross, Cromarty and Skye in 1983 (when Charles Kennedy won for the Social Democratic party) and became research officer for Scottish Labour the following year, then its general secretary in 1988. It was a period when Labour flourished in Scotland, with Brown and Dewar its most prominent figures.
After Labour’s general election defeat of 1992 under Neil Kinnock, Smith took over as leader and appointed Elder as his chief of staff. Both were instinctively cautious towards the speed of party reform, though Elder was closely involved in negotiating with unions to narrowly push through the “one member, one vote” change that ended the unions’ block vote in the selection of candidates.
The death of Smith in 1994, less than two years after becoming leader, was a massive blow to Elder, and while he was kept on board by Tony Blair, he was not a natural fit within the new order. His interest again turned towards Scotland, and he became a key backroom figure in the drive for devolution, along with Brown and Dewar.
After a brief spell working in public affairs he became an architect of the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, which had been set up to establish a template for devolution and was embraced by Labour, the Liberal Democrats, civic Scotland and the trade unions, but which the Conservatives and SNP boycotted.
In 1997, when Labour came to power and Dewar became secretary of state for Scotland, Elder was one of his special advisers, charged with setting up a Scottish parliament, which was delivered in 1999. He had aspirations to become an MSP but, due to longstanding health problems, was advised not to take the risk. Instead he went to the House of Lords, where he spent 24 years as a working peer with a particular interest in the economy and monetary policy.
Elder’s friendship with Brown had dated back to nursery school in his birthplace, the Fife town of Kirkcaldy, where Gordon’s father was a Church of Scotland minister and Murray’s, Tom, was a headteacher. Elder’s mother, Jean (nee Lumsden), was a schoolteacher. The two boys, from solidly Labour families, attended Kirkcaldy high school and both went to Edinburgh University, where Elder graduated in economic history before joining the Bank of England in 1972.
He had suffered from rheumatic fever in childhood, which left him with a deteriorating heart condition. By 1988 the need for a transplant had become urgent if he was to survive, and it was only by dint of an 11th-hour heart transplant at the Freeman hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne that he did not die at an early age.
A hillwalker from his youth, his devotion to the outdoors became critical as a means of keeping fit after his transplant. When Smith recovered from his first heart attack in 1988, they became companions on the hills, often with Chris Smith (now Lord Smith of Finsbury) and Alan Haworth, secretary of the parliamentary Labour party. Another of the group, Mike Elrick, recalled that Elder was “no fair-weather climber” and that the fragility of his health was rarely apparent or discussed. After the transplant he became set on bagging all of Scotland’s 282 Munros – peaks of more than 3,000 feet – and had fulfilled that ambition by 2007.
Despite his health problems, Elder generally declined advice to step back from public commitments, and continued to live life to the full. He was an adviser to, and former chair of, the Smith Institute, a thinktank that perpetuates his old friend’s memory; patron of the Adam Smith Global Foundation in Kirkcaldy, and a long-serving chancellor of the Al-Maktoum Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (now College of Higher Education) in Dundee.
He loved opera almost as much as hillwalking, and travelled extensively, often to pursue his enthusiasm for Gothic architecture. He was also part of a group of friends that regularly followed the Scotland rugby team abroad.
Over the past year he had had a number of spells in hospital, but during his last illness he was determined to make it back to Westminster, which he did a few days before his death.
He is survived by his sister, Kate.
• Thomas Murray Elder, Lord Elder, political adviser and politician, born 9 May 1950; died 24 October 2023
