My friend Harold Best, who has died aged 82, was elected as Labour MP for Leeds North West, previously a safe Tory seat, in the party’s landslide of 1997. He served for two terms, stepping down in 2005.
Born in Meanwood, Leeds, to Marrie (nee Hogg), a nurse, and Frederick Best, a lorry driver, Harold attended Bentley Lane junior school and then Meanwood secondary school, where he was head boy and was a promising rugby league player. At the age of 15, he was apprenticed with the Co-op as an electrician and soon became active in the Electrical Trade Union (ETU). He became its branch secretary in 1960 and a full time national officer in 1962.
When the union merged with the PTU plumbers’ union in 1968, he was elected to the national executive committee of the EEPTU, but served just one term and then returned to work again as an electrician for Leeds local education authority. In 1980 be started to become more involved in local Labour politics in Leeds. He stood successfully in 1981 for the old West Yorkshire metropolitan county council and served on the police authority as vice chairman until its demise in 1986. He then became a humanist minister, in demand for informal counselling and officiating over funerals.
Harold was selected as a candidate for the 1997 general election by the constituency party because he was well liked locally and thought – correctly – to have a chance of winning what had been a safe Tory seat. Once elected, he became a highly popular constituency MP. He contributed over 300 times to parliamentary debates, particularly opposing the creeping privatisation of the NHS under New Labour, and was later one of the minority of Labour MPs that resisted the whips and repeatedly opposed engagement in the Iraq War.
By 2005, dismayed by Westminster, he retired from parliament at the age of 68.
Harold was a genuine working-class autodidact, having had no higher education, and was equally at home with tough trade unionists as with university intellectuals, artists and writers, roundly enjoying political debate. He brought a passion and commitment to politics in Leeds.
In 1960 Harold married Glyn Douglass. Glyn survives him, along with their daughters, Deborah and Patricia, sons, Andrew and Peter, 11 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
