David Lipsey, who has died aged 77, was a significant and influential Labour party adviser, a political journalist and then a member of the House of Lords for 25 years. Early in his professional life he recognised that despite a passionate interest in politics and public affairs, he had no wish to become an MP. He was thus that rare creature who wanted to improve the lives of others without being necessarily bothered about advancing his own career.
He became nevertheless one of the best connected Labour figures of his generation, and gravitated from being a speechwriter in Whitehall and Downing Street – where he wrote the party’s manifesto for the 1979 general election – to a hugely successful career in old Fleet Street, before then being appointed to the Lords, as one of “Tony’s cronies”, by Blair in 1999. Like his first mentor, the former foreign secretary, Anthony Crosland, he was a radical egalitarian, and always tried to put what he believed to be the best thing to do above any ideological consideration. He was clever, clear thinking, serious-minded and the most enormous fun. His centrist political stance was constant throughout his life: he once observed, somewhat dolefully, that he was at one time regarded in Labour circles as a proto-fascist for his rightwing views and then was subsequently held to be “a dangerous lefty”, yet without ever having changed his mind on much.
