George Lansbury: at the heart of Old Labour by John Shepherd

The man who made Old Labour electable

George Lansbury – "Good Old George" – is Labour's forgotten leader. He is remembered, if at all, as the pacifist victim of Ernest Bevin's brutal onslaught in 1935. At his death, Lansbury was most famous for the lido for mixed bathing in London's Serpentine. Yet he was a hugely popular politician, ranking with Hardie and Bevan among Labour's greatest working-class leaders.

Harold Laski wrote that Lansbury, no great thinker, "had a heart that reached beyond the stars". Writing this splendid biography, scholarly yet profoundly moving, took John Shepherd from Tower Hamlets to Hollywood, where Angela Lansbury's views evidently match those of her socialist grandfather.

Lansbury was the paradigm politician of protest, cast in permanent opposition. Joining the Marxist SDF after an early migration to Australia, he was often at odds with Labour's leadership. He was refused party endorsement in 1906 and thought too wild (notably over the monarchy) to receive office in the first Labour government in 1924.

He followed his own course over resistance to the poll tax of national insurance, militant strikes, Indian independence and Russian revolution. He expounded pacifism. He passionately opposed war in 1914; he even tried to convert Hitler and Mussolini.

There were two supreme moments of revolt. A courageous feminist, in 1912 he protested furiously at Asquith's casualness over forcible feeding of the suffragettes, resigned and lost his seat in a by-election. In 1921 he led the Poplar councillors who flouted the law over poor relief for the unemployed. He ended up in Pentonville and then Brixton.

Yet he was far shrewder than this. Cabinet minister in 1929-31, he endorsed Mosley's memorandum to combat unemployment. As party leader after 1931's electoral disaster, he helped to make Labour a force again. Baldwin counselled posterity: "See that Lansbury gets his due."

He also had a grasp of media management. In the Poplar revolt, he showed awareness of the power of the newsreel. On radio, he could match Baldwin and George V. Most important, he was proprietor of Labour's pioneering newspaper, the Daily Herald. Shaw, Wells, Chesterton, Belloc, Cole and Will Dyson's cartoons graced his pages.

His personal life was one of rare simplicity. He travelled from 39 Bow Road to Whitehall on the Tube, instantly recognisable for his bowler and mutton-chop whiskers. At his death, he left just £916 net. As with Keir Hardie, "the man and his message were indivisible". He linked the technicalities of poor relief to a wider critique of social injustice. In raising issues of gender and race, he was way ahead of his time. He was "at the heart of Old Labour", but, in his Christian moralism and devolutionist beliefs, New Labour could claim him, too.

The reviewer has written biographies of Keir Hardie, Lloyd George and James Callaghan