Bernie Grant, the Guyanese Labour MP for Tottenham since 1987, who has died of a heart attack aged 56, was a red rag to the bulls of rightwing politics. A black man with a leftwing trade union background, he was also an anti-apartheid campaigner, a supporter of revolutionary governments, feminist causes, black studies and a multi-racial school curriculum.
He became the figurehead and tireless activist in cases of official harassment or misconduct, notably the Joy Gardner case, where a black woman died after immigration officers entered her house and put her under restraint. And In 1985 when a riot exploded on Tottenham's Broadwater Farm estate and a policeman, Keith Blakelock, was murdered, Bernie commented that the youths on the estate felt that the police had received "a bloody good hiding." The remark made him a notorious hate figure in the pages of the tabloids.
Bernie Grant was born in 1944 in Georgetown, Guyana, His parents, Eric and Lily were schoolteachers, and he attended St Stanislaus College, a Jesuit-run secondary school. The family arrived in England in 1963, and he attended Tottenham technical college, before doing a degree course in mining engineering at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh.
We met in 1970 while working for the Post Office at the International Telephone Exchange, in King's Cross. His radical engagement in student politics had already made him well known throughout the network of black students. It turned out that we'd both lived within a hundred yards of each other in Georgetown. He had a confident, humorous manner which made him instantly likable. We didn't discuss politics and spent most of our time larking around, practising our French and Spanish by trying to chat up the continental operators, or reminiscing about Guyana.
He talked from time to time about going back to Heriot Watt or somewhere else and resuming his studies, but when the Post Office strike of that year began, and Bernie became one of the chief organisers in our branch, it was obvious that he was happy and excited by the challenge of trade union politics and organisation.
Bernie stayed on as the exchange representative for the telephonists, attended union conferences, pursued a number of trade union courses, and wound up as chair of the branch.
With a typical mixture of passionate commitment and shrewdness, Bernie had recognised one of the few industrial areas where the colour of his skin would not be a disability. At the beginning of the 70s, Powellism was still a force in workplace attitudes, but the Post Office was more or less a multiracial enclave where there were black supervisors and union officials. The Chapel Street branch in London was notorious as a hotspot of National Front activity, and Bernie was a prime mover in the campaign to outlaw racist practices in the workplace.
During that period his politics took on a sharper edge, and he began to forge long-term alliances on the radical and anti-racist left.
He then became a full-time official for the National Union of Public Employees. Haringey, where he had lived and been a student, was an almost inevitable port of call. The borough's growing ethnic population was confronted by hardline racist organisations. He became a local councillor and then leader of the council.
His election coincided with a period of intense conflict between the Conservative government and a variety of municipal authorities. The tabloid press, dubbed him Barmy Bernie, and Haringey council was the subject of an endless stream of negative stories.
His notoriety and support for controversial projects such as the campaign for black sections in the Labour party, made the Labour establishment nervous and distant, and his survival as a political figure was due mainly to the respect and affection that large segments of the local electorate felt for him. In 1987 he won the Tottenham Parliamentary seat, ousting Norman Atkinson, who had been the MP for 20 years.
He entered Parliament dressed in African robes, and his career entered a new more internationally-oriented phase. His sympathies were pro-Arab and he made several visits to Colonel Gadafy in Libya. At the same time he became an important resource for developing world governments. When the volcano erupted in Monserrat a row broke out about British aid and policy towards the refugees. Typically the Monserratian chief minister immediately telephoned Bernie Grant and invited him to plead the island's case.
Bernie caused some embarrassment by arriving on the island before the government's own fact-finding mission, but he was never reluctant to break ranks, frequently going against some of the most deeply held beliefs of his leftwing allies. For instance, he defended Harriet Harman's decision to send her children to a selective school, arguing that his own children had suffered from their education in the public sector. Before that he began the campaign for government reparations to the former colonies.
Like his support for black sections in the Labour party, these were views often strongly opposed by political allies and enemies alike, but in recent years he had become a highly respected figure, and while he faced plenty of criticism, it was muted by the respect and affection in which he was generally held.
However, during the last 10 years his chronic diabetes had begun to disable him, which in turn gave him relatively little time to attend the House of Commons.
Even those who characterised him as rash and hasty acknowledged that he was likeable, charming, generous to friends and enemies, and relentlessly honest. Those closest to him understood that he had never accepted the dogmatic positions of faction and party. He had a passionate devotion to an ideal of justice, and he believed that politics was about these notions.
He is survived by his three children from his first marriage and by his wife and devoted assistant, Sharon.