In addition to serving as a Labour MP and as a member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Eric Moonman, who has died aged 88, held an unusually varied range of public, business and academic posts. However, his energy and enterprise were sometimes accompanied by controversy.
On arrival in the Commons in 1966 as member for Billericay, in south Essex, he was marked out as busy, conscientious and likely to achieve office. In his first year, he placed a foot on the lowest rung of the ministerial ladder as parliamentary private secretary to Patrick Gordon Walker, who was minister without portfolio and then secretary of state for education and science. But after Gordon Walker left the cabinet in 1968 there was no further preferment, and Moonman remained a backbencher.
In 1970 he lost his seat, but returned to the House as member for Basildon (1974-79), part of his former constituency. From 1967 to 1970, and again after his comeback, he chaired the all-party parliamentary mental health committee; also in his second spell he served on the parliamentary Labour party’s new towns and urban affairs committee.
He became involved in Jewish affairs, and was an outstanding champion in the Commons of Israel’s case. In this he found himself vying not with an Arab-supporting MP but with his fellow Zionist and Labour member Greville Janner. They were always trying to outdo each other as Israel’s No 1 supporter.
Moonman lost his seat in the general election that saw the advent of the Thatcher era. Then he served as director of the Centre for Contemporary Studies (1979-1990), an independent research group whose reports on the police and health service attracted press attention.
He resigned from the Labour party in 1990, after it seemed that he was about to be expelled from the Islington branch. There was a very public row between him and the local Labour membership, in the course of which he accused the party of being “Stalinist” for insisting that he reveal the political affiliation and sexual orientation of members of the Islington health authority (which he chaired from 1981 to 1990). He had already been censored by both of Labour’s Islington parliamentary constituency parties for advocating private participation in the NHS. As it happened, this later became the Islington constituencies’ policy, as a result of a technical vote at a meeting at which his own supporters were in the majority. The constituency parties demanded that Moonman be removed from the list of parliamentary candidates. However, he left the party of his own accord.
He was senior vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1985 to 1991, and again from 1994 to 1999. The following year he became president of the British Zionist Federation.
Another row with Janner came in 1987. Moonman was part of a deputation to the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, calling for the prosecution of war criminals. Janner, who would later become founding patron and chair of the Holocaust Education Trust, wanted a spirited public campaign to root out ex-Nazis. Moonman thought the job could be accomplished more easily if the approach was subtle. He said he did not want to see an “indiscriminate campaign”, and argued that “we must be very certain that we are dealing with information that will lead to charges”.
Moonman chaired the Essex Radio Group (1991-2002) and advised ITN on counter-terrorism (2001-11). He was visiting professor of management and information at the medicine research centre of City University, London (1992-2011), and held another visiting professorship at Liverpool University (2007-09).
It was in Liverpool that Eric had been born, into a traditional, Orthodox Jewish home, the son of Borach and Leah Moonman. He was educated at Rathbone school, Liverpool, and Christ Church school, Southport. While a schoolboy in the resort town, he loved going to the cinema; later he became a governor of the British Film Institute (1974-80).
He decided early on that human relations would be his principal professional interest – a bold decision for a young graduate in the 1950s, when little attention was being paid to such things.
In 1955 he gained a diploma in social science at Liverpool University, and did an industrial relations course at Manchester University from which he later gained an MSc (1967).
In 1956 he was appointed human relations adviser to the British Institute of Management, a position he held until 1962, when he became senior lecturer in industrial relations at South West Essex Technical College.
He wanted a career in politics – he had joined the Labour party in his youth – and he was putting down roots in Essex and east London. In 1961, he was elected to Stepney council - then a separate London borough – and became its leader in 1964. After Stepney was absorbed into the London borough of Tower Hamlets, he served as a councillor until 1967.
In 1991 he was appointed OBE, and from 2010 onwards he was a trustee of the Everton Former Players’ Foundation. His memoir, Berdichev to Basildon, was published in 2017.
In 1962 he married Jane Dillon, and they had two sons and a daughter. They divorced in 1991. In 2001 he married Gillian Mayer, who survives him, along with his children.
• Eric Moonman, politician and academic, born 29 April 1929; died 22 December 2017
