The Labour MP and former Foreign Office minister Sir Tony Lloyd, who has died aged 73 of blood cancer, was a popular politician who represented three different constituencies in the Manchester area for a total of 36 years across five decades. He was “Mr Manchester”, a devoted son of the city who spent five years out of parliament as the elected police and crime commissioner (PCC) for Greater Manchester before returning to the Commons in 2017 as the member for Rochdale.
He was instilled by his upbringing with a sense of public service and the possibilities offered by politics, once saying: “I have always thought: if not fighting for what is right and just, then what is politics for?” It was an approach that won him trust and admiration from his constituents and widespread respect across all parties in the House of Commons.
He was not bothered about the pursuit of personal promotion, but was a well-informed and highly principled pragmatist – an attitude that was reflected in his election as the chair of the Parliamentary Labour party (2006-12).
Lloyd had a remarkable record as a busy and effective constituency MP, who also spent two decades on the frontbenches at Westminster and was, in addition, a committed internationalist. His new year message in the most recent edition of the Rochdale Observer, published four days before his death, covered events in Gaza, staff morale in the NHS, climate change and education issues in Rochdale. In the last weeks before Christmas in the Commons, he spoke on arms exports to Israel, Rwanda, his concerns about private renting and the use of pre-payment meters.
Throughout his life he fought for a better deal for the north-west of England and in particular for Manchester. It was because of his longstanding concern about crime that he resigned as MP for Manchester Central in 2012 to stand successfully in the first election for the city’s PCC. For two years from 2015 he combined this post with that of the interim mayor of Greater Manchester, but was then defeated by Andy Burnham for the Labour candidacy in the first mayoral election in 2017 – a role that subsumed the duties of the PCC.
Born in Stretford, Tony was the fourth of five children of Sydney Lloyd, a lithographic printer, and Cecily (nee Boatte), an administrative officer. His father died when he was 13 and Tony’s politics were formed by his mother, who was a Labour activist. He had an aunt who was a Labour county councillor on Humberside and he joined the Labour party at the age of 16.
From Moss Park and Seymour Park primary schools and Stretford grammar school he went on to Nottingham University to take a BSc in mathematics, and Manchester Business School for a diploma in business administration. After working as a trainee accountant he was a lecturer in the department of business administration at Salford University (1979-83).
Elected to Trafford metropolitan borough council in 1979, where he was a member until 1984, he became deputy leader of the Labour group. He first entered parliament in the 1983 general election for Stretford, a seat formerly held by the Tory MP Winston Churchill Jr, grandson of the prime minister, who had moved constituencies after boundary changes that benefited Labour.
In his maiden speech Lloyd bemoaned the lack of investment by the private sector in his constituency, which he described as one of great vitality but also suffering “tremendous problems”, including 40% unemployment in Moss Side. Further boundary changes abolished the Stretford constituency in 1997, and in the election that year he won Manchester Central, where he stayed until becoming PCC. He had already been re-selected, in 2022, for the next election.
The range of Lloyd’s frontbench appointments reflected his evident capabilities. He joined the whips’ office in 1986 and then in 1988 became a spokesman on transport (1988-89), on employment (1988-92; 1993-94) and on education (1992-94). From 1994 he was on the environment team, dealing with local government for a year, and then spent two years as the deputy spokesman on foreign affairs.
When Labour took office in 1997, Tony Blair appointed him minister of state at the FCO with responsibility for Africa, the Balkans and Latin America. He lost this post in a reshuffle in the summer of 1999, following criticism by the Commons’ foreign affairs select committee of Britain’s role in the provision of arms during the Sierra Leone civil war.
By this time, however, Lloyd – who had not voted for Blair in the leadership election – was also known as a supporter of Gordon Brown in the increasingly hostile division that had grown among the party elite.
Lloyd himself was a centre-left loyalist within the party but was always prepared to rebel on issues of principle. He voted against the Blair government on the Iraq war; in opposition to the detention of suspected terrorists without trial; on the imposition of student tuition fees; and on the renewal of the Trident nuclear missile. He voted against the Brown government decision to axe plans for a “super casino” for east Manchester, which he insisted would have brought employment to the city.
Between 2002 and 2007, Lloyd led the British delegation to the Council of Europe, of which he was a vice-president, and also to the Western European Union. From 2005 to 2012 he was the leading member of Britain’s representation on the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
When he returned to the Commons in 2017, he was appointed by Jeremy Corbyn as the shadow spokesman on housing and in 2018 he took over as shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland. After the 2019 election, he added shadow Scottish secretary to his brief. He was reappointed to Northern Ireland by Sir Keir Starmer, but he stood down in 2020 to recover from Covid-19, for which he was treated in Manchester Royal Infirmary, spending 10 days in intensive care on a ventilator.
He was always an assiduous MP, introducing many private members’ bills in an effort to draw attention to issues with which he was concerned. These included an attempt to ban foreign ownership of the British media; to introduce direct elections to health authorities; to establish a regional assembly in the north-west of England; to allow random road breath-testing; and to reform the leasehold system.
He was a member of the select committees on social security (1983-85); home affairs (1985-87); European scrutiny (2010-11); international trade (2021-23) and Northern Ireland (from 2022). For a decade from 2002 he chaired the trade union group of Labour MPs.
He was knighted in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2021. For the book Men Who Made Labour, published in 2006 to mark the centenary of the adoption of the Labour party name in parliament, he wrote two chapters, on John Robert Clynes and George Kelley, elected as Manchester MPs in 1906.
In 1974 he married Judith Tear, who survives him with their children, Angharad, Siobhan, Kieron and Ali, and granddaughters, Carmen and Carys.
• Anthony Joseph Lloyd, politician; born 25 February 1950; died 17 January 2024
• This article was amended on 19 January 2024, to correct the name of Seymour Park primary school.
