The life and career of Sir Bill O’Brien, the former Labour MP, who has died aged 96, could easily have been adapted by any self-respecting novelist to provide a snapshot of the characteristic 20th-century working man (and they were always men) who becomes an admired and respected solid citizen, having successfully harnessed decades of gritty industrial experience to elected public office, first in the town hall and then at Westminster.
The archetype was further richly fulfilled in O’Brien’s case as he was a Yorkshire miner, born into poverty, who learned to have the courage to speak truth to power within his own dying industry – which meant standing up to Arthur Scargill as leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) – and always to defend what he believed to be the right course of action, irrespective of political fashion.
