Mike Broadbent writes: Kevin McNamara’s first experience of television was a film I made with him in 1969 as a producer on the BBC2 programme Westminster. He was flexing his muscles as a relatively raw backbencher, opposing plans to end free school milk – “an absolute disgrace that a Labour government was taking it away”. The cause was won, but it did not endear him to the prime minister, Harold Wilson. Nor did it endear him to Patrick Wall, the Conservative MP for the neighbouring constituency of Haltemprice, who complained because we had “inadvertently” filmed in a school in his constituency without telling him. “I knew,” confessed McNamara, “but it was still on a Hull estate.”
He enjoyed the experience, so was up for it a few months later when I asked him to take part in a very different scenario. McNamara’s main interest as a Liverpool Catholic was always Ireland, though it was another 20 years before he made it to the frontbench as shadow spokesman. We flew to Belfast and on a damp day he was filmed tramping the streets of a quiet border village called Crossmaglen, later known as the centre of “bandit country”, in conversation with the Ulster Unionist MP Jack Maginnis.
The Ulster Defence Regiment had just been formed with the hope that Catholics would join and help to defuse the growing antipathy between the two communities and that’s what the sceptical MPs wanted to find out about. Chatting to a group of villagers in a pub, they soon got their answer: “No.”
I remember Kevin was quite shocked when they named the five Protestant farming families in the area in a “we know where you live” tone of voice.
Mary Pimm and Nik Wood write: As neighbours of the parents of Geoff Gray, who died at Deepcut barracks, and relatives of the bride whose wedding reception was being held there the night James Collinson died, we became involved in the Deepcut and Beyond campaign. It was established by Kevin McNamara. He had become concerned at the reporting of deaths in the military, firstly in Northern Ireland and them more widely. He organised well attended meetings at the House for families involved and he moved one of the most widely supported early day motions calling for a public inquiry into the four Deepcut deaths.
The recently concluded reopened inquest into the death of Cheryl James, the legal progress towards a new inquest into the death of Sean Benton and the prospects for new inquests for the other two are all part of the legacy of McNamara’s pioneering work to give a full hearing to bereaved families of service men and women and to establish a system of independent and effective investigation. His was a fine example of backbench backbone, worth emulating by parliamentarians across the spectrum.