Lord Thomson of Monifieth: Labour MP and government minister who became a highly effective European Commissioner

When the first Labour contingent to the European Parliament – led by Michael Stewart, the former Foreign Secretary – arrived at Zaventem Airport in Brussels in late 1975, there to meet us on the tarmac and bid us a warm welcome was the British Labour Member of the European Commission, George Thomson. He had been our colleague for 20 years in the House of Commons, representing Dundee East until 1972, and had served in important ministerial roles in Harold Wilson's first government.

In the next three years, as an indirectly elected member of the European Parliament, I learnt at first hand from the European mandarins of the day, the Frenchmen François-Xavier Ortoli, Chairman of the Commission, and Claude Cheysson, Overseas Development Commissioner, the Dutchmen Sicco Mansholt and Pierre Lardinois, the Germans Guido Brunner and Willie Haferkamp and the Italian Altiero Spinelli how much they valued Thomson as a colleague.

He was a superb team player. He believed to an extent that few other British Commissioners have believed that his role was to do the best he could for Europe as a whole rather than simply for the country from which he came. He was the essence of being "communitaire". And, moreover, he got on extremely well with his fellow British Commissioner, the ebullient and large in body and in spirit Christopher Soames (Churchill's son-in-law and former Minister of Agriculture). Never was there such an intimate partnership of British Commissioners than the Thomson-Soames relationship. It was because Thomson was such an excellent team player and, in the eyes of Commissioners and officials, an 18-carat gold European, that he was able to initiate a policy for the Regions, on which Paris, Bonn and The Hague had hitherto been reluctant to embark.

Years later, Emile Noël, the veteran Frenchman who was Secretary-General of the Commission, and who had known every founding father from Walter Hallstein and Jean Monnet, told me that the British had never been anything like as effective as they were during the Soames-Thomson period.

But then Thomson was one of rather few politicians who would devote themselves to the success of a cause without trying to make sure that he got the credit. But in my judgement and that of other cognoscenti, an effective community policy for helping regions such as the Highlands of Scotland, Brittany and Calabria and Sardinia would not have got off the ground for another decade had it not been for Thomson's determination.

George Morgan Thomson was born in Stirling in 1921, the son of a clerk who worked with firms involved in the jute industry. After Grove Academy, which he left at 16, he went to work for DC Thomson's – no relation – and became an editor of The Beano and The Dandy, the hugely successful pre-war and war-time comics. Volunteering for the RAF, Thomso *served the Second World War in Fighter Command but mostly as ground crew on account of slightly defective eyesight.

On demobilisation, having got the political bug in the forces, he became assistant editor of Forward newspaper in 1946, and editor from 1948 to 1953. Forward at that time was the very widely read organ of the Scottish Labour Party, with a huge influence north of the border. It was on this account that as a 29-year-old he was chosen in 1950 to be the standard bearer for Labour in the Hillhead division of Glasgow, which covered most of the university segment of the city. Fighting a spirited campaign he lost to Tam Galbraith (later to be associated with Harold Macmillan and the notorious John Vassall) by 23,181 votes to 12,920 with the Liberals gaining 2,072.

By choice, he did not contest the seat in 1951 but was rewarded by being selected for his native Dundee on the death in a car crash of Tom Cook, a young Labour former minister with a bright future. On 17 July 1952 Thomson was elected by 22,161 votes to the 14,035 of the National Liberal Peter Coucher, with SNP scoring 2,931, a significant vote in view of the future destination of the seat.

The Parliamentary Labour Party which Thomson joined was in considerable turmoil with the tensions between the Bevanites and the Gaitskellites. Thomson was at first determined to take neither one side nor the other and concentrated on his work as the parliamentary representative of the teaching union the Educational Institute of Scotland, who took the view that it was invidious for them to choose between their members and preferred instead to opt for an MP who was not in the profession but who had a passionate interest in education.

Education remained an concern for Thomson and he became a leading figure in the Council for Education in the Commonwealth. It was his educational pedigree that persuaded Heriot Watt University to invite him to be their Chancellor in 1977, a position he was to occupy diligently for 14 years.

When Labour was elected in 1964 Harold Wilson made Thomson (who had voted for Jim Callaghan in the previous year's leadership election) a Minister of State at the Foreign Office. He worked first under Patrick Gordon Walker and then Michael Stewart. Seen as a "safe pair of hands", he was then made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1966.

Thomson became a close friend of Denis Healey. In his autobiography The Time of My Life, Healey writes: "One morning I went with George Thomson, a fellow Labour MP to the open air swimming pool in Moscow. George started his career editing the children's comics Dandy and Beano, and some would say, completed the circle by ending it as a peer and chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority; he was a good friend and close colleague in all my battles inside the Labour Party. Since the temperature that day was 20 degrees below zero the air was full of steam; we were not encouraged by the news that a few days earlier a religious sect had been murdering swimmers in the pool, to be discovered only when the water turned red." Several times I heard Thomson regurgitate the same tale. He loved sardonic humour, bur relied on actual experience rather than embellishing the facts.

In 1967 he joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs, and again became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster at the fag end of the first Wilson government, with special responsibility for our increasingly fraught relations with the European Community. After an unhappy spell in opposition as shadow Defence Secretary, Thomson opted to go to the European Community.

After his return from Brussels, dismayed by the state of the Labour Party, he joined, reluctantly, Roy Jenkins and the so-called Gang of Four in the Social Democrat Party. Curiously enough, he didn't incur the wrath of his former colleagues in the Labour Party, as some others did. He was deemed an acceptable choice to become chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, holding the post from 1981 to 1988. Many honours came his way including membership of the House of Lords in 1977 (he was the Liberal Democrat spokesman on foreign affairs and broadcasting in the 1990s) and in 1981 he was created a Knight of the Thistle by the Queen.

He told me that this particular Scottish recognition gave him great pleasure because: "I was always sensitive about not being a very good Scottish MP. I wanted above all to avoid being a minister in the Scottish Office and least of all having to work with Willie Ross".

Many constituents in Dundee in real need were grateful to Thomson, though no one would call him "a good constituency MP". He always found the Dundee Labour Party difficult and I think this was partly because he had defended his friend the great socialist intellectual John Strachey, the member for Dundee West, who was hardly every seen in the city. My first meeting with Thomson was at a Fabian weekend school in Aberfoyle when Strachey was present and Thomson was effusive in his intellectual debt to his parliamentary colleague, who had just published his great book The End of Empire (1959).

Nothing gave Thomson and Grace, his ever-supportive wife of 60 years, more pleasure than his chairmanship of the Pilgrim Trust. In more than one sense George Thomson was a political pilgrim. Douglas Hurd, in his autobiography, records that he flew to Brussels to sound out the British Commissioners about the referendum on Britain's membership of the EEC. "George Thomson delighted us by promising to fight hard for a yes vote in a referendum". No one, no pilgrim could have fought more diligently for the causes in which he believed.

Tam Dalyell

George Morgan Thomson, politician and journalist: born Stirling 16 January 1921; Assistant Editor, Forward 1946-48, Editor 1948-53; MP (Labour) for Dundee East 1952-72; Minister of State, Foreign Office 1964-66, 1967; PC 1966; Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 1966-67, 1969-70; Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs 1967-68; Minister Without Portfolio 1968-69; Commissioner, EEC 1973-77; created 1977 Baron Thomson of Monifieth; Chancellor, Heriot Watt University 1977-91; Chairman, Advertising Standards Authority 1977-80; Chairman, Independent Broadcasting Authority 1981-88; KT 1981; Lib Dem Spokesman on Foreign Affairs and Broadcasting, House of Lords 1990-98; married 1948 Grace Jenkins (two daughters); died London 3 October 2008.

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