UR TV CAST

I keep really busy.”She and her husband, 21 years her senior, owned property in Maine and California, travelled a good deal and were faithful members of the All Souls Episcopal Church, where Wing taught Sunday school.. Michael Francis Lovell Cocks, politician: born Leeds 19 August 1929; MP (Labour) for Bristol South 1970-87; Assistant Government Whip 1974-76; Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury and Government Chief Whip 1976-79; PC 1976; Opposition Chief Whip 1979-87; created 1987 Baron Cocks of Hartcliffe; Deputy Speaker, House of Lords 1990-2001; Vice-Chairman, Board of Governors, BBC 1993-98; married 1954 Janet Macfarlane (two sons, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1977), 1979 Valerie Davis; died London 26 March 2001. Michael Francis Lovell Cocks, politician: born Leeds 19 August 1929; MP (Labour) for Bristol South 1970-87; Assistant Government Whip 1974-76; Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury and Government Chief Whip 1976-79; PC 1976; Opposition Chief Whip 1979-87; created 1987 Baron Cocks of Hartcliffe; Deputy Speaker, House of Lords 1990-2001; Vice-Chairman, Board of Governors, BBC 1993-98; married 1954 Janet Macfarlane (two sons, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1977), 1979 Valerie Davis; died London 26 March 2001.
The character of a government or opposition chief whip is a matter of significance in British politics at any time; it is of crucial importance to a government with a majority petering between plus three and minus one (as Labour was in 1976-79) and an opposition (as Labour was in 1979-85) faced by the mortal peril of tearing itself apart. Michael Cocks, and his redoubtable, indispensable deputy chief whip, Walter Harrison, who ought to have joined Cocks in the Lords, held the Labour government together, by the seat of our collective pants.

They cajoled; improvised; were not above being bluntly rude, going to the London flats of MPs unwilling to vote, bawling them out through a letterbox; often impishly charming.Cocks had many nicknames for us. The third most powerful member of the 1974-79 Cabinet, the diminutive Chief Secretary to the Treasury Lord (Joel) Barnett, was “Top Cat” I was his “Orang-utan”. One highly effective minister was, less flatteringly, “Kermit”. As James Callaghan’s chief whip, Cocks was a fount of comradeship, which was the only real leadership which would have been possible, given the Labour personnel of that parliament If sournesses developed, they happened later.

Nineteen seventy-six to 1979 was his heyday.Michael Cocks was born in 1929 in Leeds, where his father was the congregational minister at Headingley Hill. From early childhood he had a passion for cricket; he was to be a stalwart of the House of Commons cricket team until his middle sixties. The last conversation I had with him was lamenting the passing of one of his few heroes, Don Bradman.His father became Professor of Systematic Theology at the United College in Bradford, moving on to be Principal of the Scottish Congregational College in Edinburgh, which explains why Michael’s main secondary schooling was at the rigorous George Watson’s College. The Rev Professor Lovell Cocks ended up as head of Western College in Bristol, succeeding the father of Oliver Franks, later to be ambassador in Washington, Principal of Worcester College, Oxford and much else ­ and a lifelong friend and mentor of Michael Cocks.Cocks claimed that his father coined the phrase, wrongly attributed to Morgan Phillips who was to use it very often, that the Labour Party “owes more to Methodism than to Marx”.

Cocks was to believe that one of the things that had gone wrong with the Labour Party was that the nonconformist ethic was in decline.At 17 he did his National Service in the Royal Navy, as secretary to an Admiral, which gave him a bond with those naval persons James Callaghan, his future prime minister, and John Silkin, Chief Whip from 1967 to 1969. At Bristol University he read Geography and Maths and took a BSc. He taught at Filton Secondary School, from there contesting Bristol West in the 1959 general election, where the figures were (Sir) Robert Cooke (Conservative) 27,768, M.F.L Cocks (Labour) 7,651 and C.A. Hart-Leverton (Liberal) 5,835.Nevertheless, he was deemed to have done well in a seat once adorned by Oliver Stanley and Sir Walter Monckton. He was rewarded by the winnable seat of South Gloucestershire, which had been Tony Crosland’s between 1950 and 1955.

However in 1964 he was defeated by 3,714 votes, and disappointingly in 1966, again, by Sir Frederick Corfield, an industry minister, by 1,424 votes.In 1970 he succeeded the veteran MP Bill Wilkins in the safe Labour seat of Bristol South, when he defeated one of Margaret Thatcher’s future cabinet ministers, David Hunt, by 9,428 votes. Between 1961 and 1963 he had been the innovative chairman of Bristol Borough Labour Party, where he had introduced the constituencies to the idea of keeping statistics and records.In his maiden speech on 13 July 1970 Cocks addressed one of his lifelong causes, that of handicapped children:I worked in a special school for a short time and some of the hardest work that I had to do in my life was to teach a boy of 15 that 46 shillings was the same as £2 6s. Yet the same boy I overheard talking to a friend on a nature walk, and what he knew about flowers, plants and the countryside in general would not have disgraced honourable Members here But he had been labelled a failure and he had been set back. What we really need is not to think of a subject syllabus as such, but of social training and adjustment, social competence, how to use the telephone, how to catch the correct bus, and so on.Cocks always put the practical side of life uppermost in his thinking.Between 1970 and late 1973, when he was first promoted to the Whips’ Office, I was his room-mate. In those days, Portcullis House with its million-pound office per MP had not been thought of ­ six places were allocated to backbenchers on the basis of alphabetical proximity on the Upper Committee Corridor. Squashed together at desks were Michael Cocks, (Colonel) Dick Crawshaw of Liverpool Toxteth and champion of the Territorial Army, John (now Lord) Evans of the AUEW, and Raymond Fletcher, MP for Ilkeston, orator, and defence correspondent of Tribune. The sixth colleague, a solemn young man, left us after a fortnight in pique, observing that we were too noisy “and cheerful”.Cocks sat next to me and so loud was his belly laugh that it could certainly be picked up by his wonderful wife Janet and his Bristol constituents without the use of a telephone Lord Evans recalls Cocks as “a great guy ­ and such fun.