Roland Moyle obituary

Roland Moyle, who has died aged 89, typified a generation of Labour politicians, now almost forgotten, who followed the ideological path first trodden by their working-class parents, but did so having acquired professional qualifications unavailable to earlier generations of their families.

In his maiden speech as MP for the south-east London constituency of Lewisham North in 1966, Moyle evoked in sympathetic terms the memory of Wat Tyler camping on Blackheath on the night before he led the Peasants’ Revolt into London in 1381. He did so as a subtle means of contrasting the modern-day cushioned comforts of the housing in Blackheath with the rest of his constituency, and demonstrating his comprehension of the “sharp sense of injustice” felt by the council tenants among his electorate.

His elegant speech, which was praised in the House of Commons for the confidence it displayed, was an eloquent illustration of his education at University College, Aberystwyth, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and his 12 years’ practice as a lawyer after being called to the bar at Gray’s Inn in 1954. But it also marked the distinction from his father, Arthur, who had himself been a Labour MP until the general election two years earlier, having won a seat in the 1945 Labour landslide, but had first trained as a bricklayer and secured political promotion through the trade union movement. Arthur, who was Clem Attlee’s much-trusted parliamentary private secretary (PPS) in the Commons from 1946 until Attlee’s retirement as Labour leader, became an early life peer, taking his seat in the Lords in the month following his son’s maiden speech.

Roland Moyle was a popular and principled MP whose most distinguishing characteristic was political loyalty, which he would have observed first-hand from his father’s ring-side experience of the Attlee government. The 1966 election was followed almost immediately by a sterling crisis for Harold Wilson’s administration and it was a measure of the trust imposed in Moyle that his first appointment was as PPS to the chief secretary to the Treasury, the influential Jack Diamond. That was followed in 1969 by a step-up in the PPS ranks, when he took on those duties for James Callaghan, then the home secretary.

The timing proved significant for Moyle’s later career. The upsurge of unrest in Northern Ireland led to Callaghan’s decision to send troops to Northern Ireland and thus introduced Moyle to the politics of what would become the Troubles. Under the government of Edward Heath he was a participant in talks instigated by William Whitelaw in 1972, on that occasion as an adviser to the Northern Ireland Labour party. On returning to office in 1974, Wilson appointed Moyle as a minister of state for Northern Ireland, by then under direct rule from Westminster, and it was a post he held until Wilson’s retirement in 1976, during two of the most bloody and violent years of the 30-year conflict.

With Callaghan’s election as Labour leader, Moyle was then moved to his most prominent government post, as minister of state at the Department of Health. In this demanding job, he was constantly in the public eye, dealing with a series of controversial issues such as abortion time limits, cigarette advertising, waiting lists for surgery and cuts in health service spending. In the wake of the earlier thalidomide pregnancy drugs scandal, he also had to deal with sustained public pressure over a prescribed pregnancy testing drug, Primodos, and complaints over the government’s failure to act more swiftly over fears of a similar link with foetal disability. He was made a member of the privy council in 1978.

After the Conservative election victory in 1979, Moyle remained on the opposition frontbench, switching to become deputy spokesman on foreign affairs, under Denis Healey, during Michael Foot’s leadership of the party. In his last months in parliament before the 1983 election, Moyle was appointed as defence and disarmament spokesman, a demanding and difficult responsibility at the time but which again demonstrated the extent to which he was regarded as trustworthy and reliable by all sides in a much divided party.

Unlike his father, Moyle was on the frontbenches throughout most of his parliamentary career and he covered a varied range of subjects. He was first appointed as the shadow spokesman on higher education in 1972, and his first ministerial role was a brief one as the junior minister at Agriculture between the two elections in 1974. From 1968 until 1972 he was a member of the newly established select committee on race relations and immigration when it was set up as one of the forerunners of the select committee system established a decade later. Curiously, despite never holding government office, his father Arthur was responsible for three acts of parliament (on licensing fireworks, the humane slaughter of horses and the status of children whose parents divorced) having three times topped the ballot for private members’ bills.

Roland went to school initially in Bexleyheath, London. The family then returned to Llanidloes, the Montgomeryshire home town of his mother, the former Elizabeth Evans, where she had met Arthur Moyle who had moved there as a child from Cornwall. Roland attended the local county school.

At Trinity Hall, he chaired the Labour Club. He did his national service on graduation, as a commissioned officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, 1949-51. Elected as a local councillor in Greenwich in 1964, he won his parliamentary seat of Lewisham North from one Conservative athlete, Christopher Chataway, and lost Lewisham East, which he represented after boundary changes in 1974, to another, Colin Moynihan.

Before election to parliament he had worked in the legal department for the Wales Gas Board and later in industrial relations for the gas and electricity industries. When he left politics he was appointed deputy chairman of the Police Complaints Board, a post he held for six years from 1985.

In 1956 he married Shelagh Hogan; she survives him, with their two children, Christopher and Anna, and six grandchildren.