The former Labour minister George Howarth, who has died aged 77, was an MP for 38 years and held elected office on Merseyside for more than five decades. He believed politics was all about winning power in order to serve those who had elected him. It brought him respect in parliament and widespread affection in his constituency.
A novelist seeking to portray a caricature of the ideal Labour MP would have relished the arc of Howarth’s life and career. The son of a plumber, he was born, raised and educated in the constituency he would represent. He joined Labour as a teenager, was an elected councillor at 22, chaired the housing and finance committees and ran the local party before winning a controversial byelection in difficult circumstances. He was an apprentice fitter who worked as an engineer and then returned to college, becoming a further education teacher.
While highly articulate, Howarth was not a man who made headlines or performed for the benches of the House of Commons, yet his popularity in the borough of Knowsley was a testament to the meaning of what Westminster calls “a good constituency MP”.
He also established a reputation as a fair and reliable member of the panel of chairs from 2009 until he stood down as an MP at the last election. In this capacity, he was three times chosen as a stand-in deputy speaker while elections took place.
Howarth was greatly liked by his colleagues because he was kind and generous and straightforward; a generation of younger MPs was grateful for the avuncular help he gave newcomers on how to do the job. He was also full of anecdotes and very funny. When described by a former Guardian sketch writer, Simon Hoggart, as “looking like a serial killer”, he sent a message to the press gallery that “appearances are not always deceptive”.
His most far-reaching legacy came with his appointment in 1997 as a Home Office junior minister for two years after Tony Blair took office. He chaired a committee established to modernise and reform the rules for postal voting in UK elections, and in consequence a simplified system, allowing people to apply for absentee votes on demand, was introduced in the Representation of the People Act 2000.
Howarth’s second ministerial post, also as a parliamentary undersecretary, was at Northern Ireland from 1999 to 2001. He was appointed a member of the privy council in 2005 on joining the intelligence and security committee, on which he served for a decade. He was knighted in 2019 – but he would say his greatest pride was the award of the freedom of Knowsley in 2022.
He was born in Prescot, east of Liverpool, the son of George Howarth and his wife, Eleanor (nee Roberts). He attended Sylvester primary school and Huyton secondary school. A student at Kirkby College of Further Education and later at Liverpool Polytechnic and the University of Salford, he had worked in industrial engineering on leaving school, from 1966 to 1979, and thereafter – having gained qualifications – as a lecturer until 1983. For three years until election to parliament he was chief executive of the Welsh TUC’s Wales Co-operative Centre.
His political career began with election to Huyton borough council in 1971, which became Knowsley after reorganisation in 1974. He was deputy leader of the council for a year in 1982 and chaired Knowsley South Labour party from 1981 to 1985.
When Robert Kilroy-Silk resigned in 1986 as Labour MP for Knowsley North to pursue a TV career, the constituency was controlled by the leftwing Militant tendency, then in its ascendancy, particularly in Liverpool and the north-west. Labour’s national executive rejected the local party’s choice of the MEP and former MP Les Huckfield as the byelection candidate, and instead imposed Howarth.
This move was unsuccessfully challenged in court, and Howarth fought a highly charged and difficult byelection without the support of his local party. He also suffered from an unfortunate back injury, having slipped a disc when he sneezed.
Nevertheless, Howarth held the seat for Labour with a majority of 6,724, and matters had settled somewhat by the general election the following year, when he was re-elected with a majority of 21,098 in what was then Labour’s third safest seat in the country. The constituency became Knowsley North and Sefton East from 1997, and was redrawn again as Knowsley in 2010.
Although during the byelection Militant had said Howarth was only a “caretaker” MP, he would go on to break records in 2017 by being re-elected with 85.3% of the vote, the largest majority since the introduction of universal suffrage; in 2019 his majority of 39,942 (80.8%) was the largest numerical Labour majority in that general election.
The 1986 byelection provided another historical footnote as the source of the famed “Peter Mandelson guacamole” anecdote, which was consistently mistold. Mandelson, at the time Labour’s director of communications, was supposed to have mistaken a pot of mushy peas for avocado in a chip shop, a story first printed after the byelection in order to underline Labour’s north-south divide.
The truth, related by the author and political journalist Andy McSmith, Labour’s chief press officer in the 1980s, was that the error belonged to a young, female American intern accompanying the neighbouring Blackburn Labour MP, Jack Straw, at the byelection.
Howarth was an active campaigner across a range of interests and was particularly concerned to help people in working-class communities secure access to wider opportunities. He was an active supporter of the Hillsborough campaign and of the Shakespeare North Playhouse, in Prescot. He sought to establish a department for veteran affairs and was a lifelong supporter of campaigns to help people with family members suffering from type 1 diabetes. His daughter, Sian, died unexpectedly aged 24 in 2011 from complications of the disease.
Howarth first joined the Labour frontbench as an environment spokesperson in 1989 and joined the home affairs shadow team in 1994. After leaving government he was a member of the public accounts committee (2002-03) and a number of bill committees, as well as pursuing his responsibilities as a member of the panel of chairs, chairing sessions of the Westminster Hall debates.
In 1977 he married Julie Rodgers, daughter of the then Labour MP for Chorley, George Rodgers. She survives him, as do their sons, Ben and Jack.
• George Edward Howarth, politician, born 29 June 1949; death announced 6 July 2026.
