At the launch of the Social Democratic party at the Connaught Rooms in 1981, the four top people sat on a raised dais, the remaining 20-odd on a lower one. John Grant, who has died of cancer aged 67, though a frontbench spokesman on industry and employment, sat lower down. He had switched to the new party after 13 years as a Labour MP, in a move that effectively destroyed his political career. But he remains of real interest to anyone refining the history of British politics in that period.
A genial, pepperish Londoner, Grant was, firstly, a journalist, working for the Daily Express from 1955 to 1970 (from 1967 as its chief industrial correspondent), before becoming MP for Islington East (later Central). Having contested Beckenham for Labour in 1966, he had been selected ahead of the 1970 election. He won the seat comfortably, but was defeated as a Social Democrat in 1983, after that party missed its chance of take-off when, before the Falklands war, it enjoyed over 50% in the polls.
It is difficult, at a time when Labour is New Labour, to recall that, in the late 1970s, it was turning into a party of rabid leftwing excess. Grant was one of many right-of-centre regulars threatened by the intrusion of virulent youngish men and women calling for socialism and blood, prolonging routine meetings until late into the night as they sought compliance or deselection. All the Islington MPs - including Grant's friend, the notable George Cunningham, and the less esteemed Michael O'Halloran - were under such assault.
I recall a lunch in rural Sussex, taken in flight from Labour's menace-flecked Brighton conference of 1981, when Grant, Cunningham and Bruce Douglas-Mann, representative and able moderates, grimly agreed that they had had enough, and discussed the prospects for a new party.
In due course, Grant left Labour, and twice fought elections under the SDP flag. He was honourably defeated at Islington North in 1983; then, after the boundary commission scrambling of that borough, he fought Carshalton, where he lost again. He was also the author of two books, Member Of Parliament (1974) and Blood Brothers (1992), about his two occupations, MP and trade unionist.
After defeat, Grant made a reasonable career for himself. A particular friend had long been the illusionless ex-communist, Frank (now Lord) Chapple, who had been almost alone in an open and defiant rightwing stand at a time when Scargills were bought on that market at a premium. Grant worked as public relations chief for Chapple's union, the EEPTU, from 1984 to 1989. After 1990, he was also a member of the Radio Authority, and became chairman of Radio South-East.
His political career before the split, though it never reached high ministerial rank, had been steady and quick to start. Harold Wilson gave him junior frontbench status, shadowing on press and broadcasting, in 1971, only a year after he entered parliament. On the formation of the third Wilson administration in February 1974, he became junior minister for the civil service department. He was soon shifted sideways to be junior at the new Department of Overseas Development, from 1974-76, before a final shift, under James Callaghan, to the job at employment for which his previous experience best qualified him.
Grant's candid failure to make even perfunctory leftwing noises, at a time when cringeing was the norm, did him no good. And his style - perky, combative and with a distinctive London intonation - was a little below the salt for a Labour government even then; one of his recreations was the barber's shop quartet. But if he didn't rise, he was good enough to stay in ministerial office throughout the five years of the Wilson-Callaghan governments.
An image of the SDP as wine-wise, middle-class and exclusively made up of ardent friends of Europe, has always been overstated. Far leftism, in its destructive heyday, harried and offended rough-handed, working Labour members quite as much as it irked men from Balliol.
Grant was always cool about Europe, and was not a graduate - he was educated at the Stationers' Company's school, Hornsey, before working on provincial newspapers. He was, in fact, a representative - almost normative - Labour MP, with strong union roots and a good feel for the street. He differed from the norm, and went the extra mile to join those francophile Wykehamists because the brutalist assaults of the left enraged him, and because he had a large bump of courage.
His wife Patricia, whom he married in 1955, survives him, as do two sons and a daughter.
John Douglas Grant, politician and writer, born October 16 1932; died September 29 2000