The former chairman of the parliamentary Labour party, Doug Hoyle, Lord Hoyle, who has died aged 98, earned his place in the history of British politics in 1981 when he narrowly held what should have been the safe Labour seat of Warrington in a critically important byelection.
He was defending a comfortable majority against Roy Jenkins, one of the founding members of the newly formed Social Democratic party, standing in that party’s first parliamentary election. Although Hoyle won by 1,759 votes, his truculent denunciation of the SDP campaign in his victory speech at the count was a measure of how anxious the Labour party had been about the outcome.
