It was a source of sorry disappointment to Mark Fisher, the former Labour arts minister, who has died aged 81, that he held this government post for only a little over a year before being dropped from office. Yet such an outcome was predictable – and probably inevitable – given that he was an uncompromising lifelong idealist who never learned to deploy the sort of silky skills needed to guarantee a long and successful frontline political career.
When Tony Blair’s government took office in 1997, Mark Fisher was appointed on the day following the election. It was the job of his dreams. He had been the opposition spokesperson since 1987, appointed less than four years after becoming an MP, and he had been instrumental in helping develop a strategy for the arts as an important part of Labour’s new “Cool Britannia” agenda.
But he lost the job in Blair’s first reshuffle in July 1998 and returned to the back benches for his remaining 12 years in parliament. “He was miserable to be cast aside so quickly,” noted Alan Howarth, his successor in the role – who further recorded the typical generosity shown to him by Fisher at the time.
Fisher was not driven by personal ambition and in that regard was a member of what is perhaps a dying breed of politician. He believed in public service – such as had been practised by generations of his family – and while never securing political eminence at Westminster, he was hugely admired throughout his 27 years as a popular and energetic constituency MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. He was a cheerful man with a perpetual smile and drew an irrepressible enjoyment from a life in politics, despite a growing disillusion with the Blair government.
It was a surprise that he even entered Westminster. The son of the former Conservative minister Sir Nigel Fisher, an MP from 1950 to 1983, he grew up disdaining both the lifestyle in general and Conservative politics in particular. He had followed his father to Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English literature, and in 1964 joined Labour while at Cambridge because he felt that the policies of the then Labour leader, Harold Wilson, could bring about a real change in Britain.
It was only in 1979 that he decided to seek election to the Commons, standing unsuccessfully as the candidate for Leek, in Staffordshire.
On leaving university, he had worked as a documentary film producer and scriptwriter (1966-75), and was then appointed as the principal of the Tattenhall Centre of Education, run by Cheshire county council. The job involved running courses for school pupils with poets and artists, and Fisher was in his element. He loved all the arts, particularly poetry, and could recite Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart.
By this point he made many contacts in the arts world that would help him later in his political life and that also fuelled his passion for a properly funded national arts programme. He remained at Tattenhall until the general election of 1983, having been elected meantime as a member of Staffordshire county council (1981-85), where he chaired the libraries committee.
In the Commons he was always on the left wing, and his bold maiden speech was a blistering attack on the Thatcher government’s policies on welfare. He accused the Conservatives of putting value for money above consideration of its impact on people and thus creating indefensible social inequality – not least in Stoke-on-Trent.
He was a member of the Commons Treasury and civil service committee (1983-85) until securing his first front bench post as an opposition whip (1985-87) and then becoming arts spokesperson. For three years from 1983 he chaired the parliamentary Labour party arts committee.
He was regarded as something of a rebellious character, but in reality merely defended his political beliefs. A libertarian by instinct, in 1992 he promoted as a private member the Right to Know bill, which was a forerunner to the Freedom of Information Act, passed in 2000. He was also a member and first chairman of the Parliament First group, believing that the executive was increasingly using the legislature as a rubber stamp.
His play Brave New Town was performed in Basingstoke in 1974, and The Cutting Room for the Royal Court Upstairs in 1990. He co-wrote the report City Centres, City Cultures, in 1998; jointly edited Whose Cities? in 1991; and published A New London: Two Views, with the architect Richard Rogers, in 1992, and the illustrated guide Britain’s Best Museums and Galleries, in 2004. He also wrote and published poetry.
Fisher told me, when I interviewed him for a BBC Radio 4 programme about children of MPs who themselves became MPs, that his father was not really a Conservative, having been raised as a Liberal. They disagreed about tactics, but there was never any acrimony between them.
Other politicians in the extended family include the Liberal Sir Geoffrey Shakespeare (Nigel Fisher’s stepfather), who was parliamentary private secretary to Lloyd George, and Nigel’s second wife, Patricia Ford (nee Smiles), an Ulster Unionist who was the first woman elected for a seat in Northern Ireland, which she took over from her father, Sir Walter Smiles. The Conservative MP Sir Michael Grylls was Mark’s stepbrother-in-law.
Born in Woking, Surrey, Mark was the second child of Nigel and Lady Gloria Vaughan, the daughter of the 7th Earl of Lisburne; his parents separated when he was young.
In 1971 he married Ingrid Hunt Geach, a model who later became his constituency secretary. They had two children, Rhydian and India, and Mark became stepfather to two children from Ingrid’s former marriage, Francesca and Crispin. Having divorced in 1999, Mark married Gillian FitzHugh, who worked for a children’s charity, in 2010.
Gillian survives him, along with his children and stepchildren.
• Mark Fisher, politician, born 29 October 1944; died 16 November 2025
