The most outstanding political characteristic of Colin Pickthall, the former MP for Lancashire West, who has died aged 81, was his loyalty to the Labour party he had joined as a teenager. The fact that this was coupled with a singular lack of personal ambition, itself a considerable rarity at Westminster, meant that he was regarded as highly reliable by his senior frontbench colleagues and respected by his fellow Labour backbenchers.
Despite this innate modesty, Pickthall was a man of unshakeable principle. A former schoolteacher, he opposed a plan in 2003 to introduce variable top-up student fees, allowing elite universities to charge more. “Even contemplating voting against a Labour government makes my knees knock,” he wrote at the time.
