David Marquand obituary

The academic and former Labour MP David Marquand, who has died aged 89, was one of the foremost political analysts of his generation on the centre left of British politics. His life and work was spent in pursuit of how best to achieve political, economic and social reform within a pluralist social democracy, an ambition that was unfulfilled, but about which he remained consistently optimistic.

An independent-minded, progressive intellectual, Marquand combined a successful academic career as a politics professor with both political activism and a prolific stream of published history and journalism. He poured his considerable energy into a raft of thoughtful analytical books and essays on the future direction of the left in Britain. The Unprincipled Society (1988), The Progressive Dilemma (1991), The New Reckoning (1997) and Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy (2008) are among his most influential publications.

He was blessed with the ability to write with brilliance and clarity and his first book – the authorised biography of Ramsay MacDonald (1977), which has come to be regarded as the definitive account of the life of the first Labour prime minister – was acclaimed on its publication by the historian AJP Taylor as “first class”.

His political views evolved with the passage of events in the course of his adult years, taking him on a lifetime’s journey through membership of the parties of the centre and the left, commenting, when he joined Plaid Cymru in 2016, that he had “been in more parties than the Prince of Wales”. During his years in the Labour party, he was a revisionist social democrat, but felt that it lost its way by pursuing an intolerantly proletarian form of socialism in the late 1970s that excluded middle-class radicals such as himself.

He fought his first parliamentary seat for Labour in the south Wales seat of Barry in 1964, halving the Conservative majority. In the subsequent general election in 1966, he won the Nottinghamshire seat of Ashfield.

Once in the Commons, he swiftly gained a reputation for his evident ability, making his maiden speech in the Budget debate on incomes policy and stressing the need for improved wages for mineworkers in his constituency. He was a member of the estimates committee and the select committee on procedure. From 1967 to 1969, he served as the parliamentary private secretary to Reg Prentice, minister of public building and works, and later of overseas development, a rightwinger who would subsequently defect to the Conservatives.

Marquand was always a fervent enthusiast for British membership of Europe, and after the 1970 election became a delegate to the assembly of the Council of Europe. He briefly joined Labour’s opposition frontbench as an economic spokesman in 1971, but lost the post that October when he was one of 69 Labour MPs to rebel against the party whip in the historic vote to join the Common Market. Thereafter he was increasingly involved in the fractious debate about the future of the Labour party and was a leading figure in the Manifesto group of moderates seeking to halt its leftward course.

As an acolyte of Roy Jenkins, Marquand decided to resign as an MP to work with Jenkins in Europe, when the latter took up the post in 1977 as the first British president of the European Commission. The subsequent byelection, in Marquand’s supposedly safe seat of Ashfield where his October 1974 majority of 22,915 was overturned by the Conservatives by 264 votes, was a sensation. Labour would regain the seat in the 1979 election, but the shattering defeat was ascribed to Marquand’s decision to take up a lucrative, tax-free and somewhat ill-defined post supposedly liaising between the commission and the European parliament.

He found it an unsatisfactory role in any case, and within 18 months returned to the UK and life as an academic, while simultaneously pursuing his political interests. He was a founder member of the Social Democratic party when it launched in 1981, remaining a member of its steering committee until 1988, having already been closely involved with the strategy that led to the breakaway from Labour. He contributed ideas to Jenkins’s speeches during this period, including his famed “breaking the mould” Dimbleby lecture in 1979 that heralded the coming split.

Marquand stood unsuccessfully as an SDP candidate in High Peak in 1983 and subsequently joined the merged Liberal Democrat party, leaving after the 1992 election. His next move would be to rejoin the Labour party in 1995, impressed as he then was by Tony Blair, although he would later leave – over opposition to the Iraq war and what he regarded as New Labour’s excessive authoritarianism – and describe the former Labour prime minister as “that magician of ambiguous populism”. He flirted with the Green party before his move to Plaid Cymru, by which time he regarded himself as a democratic republican.

Born in Cardiff into Labour politics, David was the eldest of three children of Rachel (nee Rees), a schoolteacher, and Hilary Marquand, an economist, government administrator, Labour MP (1945-61) and a minister in four different posts in the Attlee government, including as successor to Aneurin Bevan in 1951 as minister of health.

David was educated at Emanuel school, Battersea (then a voluntary-aided grammar school), which now boasts a Marquand reading room. He took a first in history at Magdalen College, Oxford, and chaired the University Labour Club in 1957. His national service was spent at Bodmin, Cornwall, with the joint services school for linguists (known as the “Russian course”), a programme of intensive language study devised during the cold war to train possible future interpreters, translators or candidates for the secret services. Michael Frayn and Alan Bennett were contemporaries on the course.

In 1958 Marquand was a teaching assistant at the University of California, Berkeley, for a year before joining this newspaper as a leader writer, having turned down a more lucrative post on the Sunday Express. In 1962 he returned to Oxford to pursue a research fellowship at St Antony’s College, and in 1964 took up a post as a lecturer in politics at the recently established University of Sussex, where he remained for two years until entering parliament.

His academic career resumed in 1978 when he became professor of contemporary history and politics at Salford University. In 1991 he moved to take up the politics chair at Sheffield University and set up the contemporary history and political economy department. In 1996, a year after it became part of the university, he became principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, where he stayed until 2002. He remained an honorary professor at Sheffield, was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, in the US (1985-86), a visiting fellow at the department of politics and international relations at Oxford from 2002, and an honorary professor in the school of law and politics at Cardiff University from 2015. An active member of several influential thinktanks, he was awarded a number of honorary degrees, awards and fellowships including those of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Arts and the Learned Society of Wales. He was, however, a fervent opponent of the honours system.

In 1959 he married Judith Reed, a government economist and later an academic. She survives him, along with their children, Charles and Ruth, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His siblings, Richard and Diana, predeceased him.

• David Ian Marquand, academic, politician and author; born 20 September 1934; died 23 April 2024