Paul Daisley

Courageous MP for Brent East

Paul Andrew Daisley, politician and accountant: born London 20 July 1957; Accounting Officer, Texaco 1976-84; Director of Finance and Administration, Daisley Associates 1984-96; member, Brent Borough Council 1990-2001, Leader 1996-2001; MP (Labour) for Brent East 2001-2003; married 1984 Lesley Jordan; died London 18 June 2003.

Paul Daisley, MP for Brent East since 2001, was a powerful man. It was impossible to miss Daisley in a room. He wielded power naturally, with authority and on behalf of those who could not do so for themselves.

In 1984 he made what he regarded as the two best moves of his life. He married Lesley Jordan, his sweetheart since sixth-form college, and together they bought their first house, in Sudbury Avenue in the London Borough of Brent. There was never any doubt about the first move, but the second was simply sheer good fortune for the people of the borough.

In 1986 Daisley stood for the council in the then safe Tory ward of Sudbury Court. Despite Labour's winning the council, the Conservatives retained the Sudbury Court ward with a majority of 1,400. It is perhaps the measure of Daisley's subsequent work as leader of the council that by 1998 that majority had fallen to just 46 votes.

If one were to be polite about the Labour administration that won the 1986 election in Brent, one would call it inexperienced, incompetent and fractious. Daisley often used more robust words. But, more important, he set about rebuilding the party with his colleagues Jim Moher and Ann John, the latter of whom was to become his trusted deputy and successor as council leader. In 1990 Labour lost control in Brent, but Daisley himself was elected to represent the Harlesden ward in the Brent South constituency.

By 1993 he had been elected leader of the Labour Group and had begun harrying a Conservative administration that was widely reckoned to be as corrupt as its predecessor had been incompetent. It was Daisley's integrity and vision that laid the foundations for the dramatic turnaround in Labour's fortunes in Brent. A council by-election in 1996 and some skilful negotiations with the few local Liberal councillors allowed Labour to gain control by the casting vote of the mayor and to run a minority administration.

The euphoria of victory soon faded when Daisley uncovered the true state the Tories had left the council's finances in. Successive headline cuts in council tax had left council tenants paying the highest rents in London, but with a million-pound hole in the education budget. There were almost no reserves. Daisley set about dismantling the council's failing business units and restoring a sound system of financial reporting. It worked.

Over the next two years, through sensible and unflamboyant policies, Daisley's Labour group managed to restore trust between the people of Brent and its council. They showed that they could get the basics right: decent schools, affordable homes and proper street lighting to cut crime. In 1998 Labour won a stunning 43 of the 66 council seats.

In early 2000, when the MP for Brent East, Ken Livingstone, announced his independent candidacy for Mayor of London after a controversial selection process that saw him lose the Labour nomination, it became clear that Daisley's home constituency seat might soon become vacant. Livingstone's campaign became unstoppable, but it left a rancour within the party that only Daisley's good sense, charisma and hard work were able to heal. In October that year he was selected out of a very strong field to be Labour's candidate at the forthcoming general election.

But within four months tragedy had struck. In February 2001 friends organised a surprise party to congratulate him on his selection and thank him for all his years of service on the council. Paul Daisley had been feeling unwell and was unable to attend; his wife Lesley spoke on his behalf. He was rushed to hospital that night where an emergency operation was performed to remove a tumour in his colon. He spent the next six weeks in a coma.

The election campaign was fought without the candidate. But Daisley's reputation in Brent was such that he managed to achieve the same share of the vote as his famous predecessor. His slow recovery meant that he was one of the last MPs to be sworn in, along with the Father of the House, Tam Dalyell. But he directed his office and marshalled the resources of Parliament for his constituents from the beginning. Clive Soley, the senior Labour backbencher who acted as Daisley's mentor in the House, has no doubt that he "outperformed many fully fit MPs" when it came to responding to constituents' problems.

Gradually Daisley's weight climbed back up from seven and a half stone and he regained his mobility but it was always painful for friends to see how disease had diminished his powerful frame. Then, just as it looked as if a full recovery was possible, a new cancer was discovered in November last year.

Born in Acton, west London, in 1957, the only son between two daughters of Peter and Joan Daisley, Paul spent much of his time as a boy around the home of his paternal grandparents in Hallaton, Leicestershire. He loved the tradition of the Three Bottles Parade where, every Easter Monday, the lads from Hallaton would compete with the lads from neighbouring Medbourne to take two of the "bottles" from the top of Hare Pie Hill to the boundary of their own village. The competition had no rules and resembled an all-day rugby scrum, but the "bottles" were casks of ale and it was Paul Daisley who one year famously carried the cask over the winning line for Hallaton. Who cared that he broke his nose in the process?

He was educated at Littlemore School in Oxford and Abingdon College in Berkshire, where he met his future wife Lesley; in 1976 he joined Texaco as an accounting officer and remained with them until 1984, when he went into business with his father as Daisley Associates, a quality assurance consultancy.

Paul Daisley's parliamentary colleague Jim Dowd remembers Daisley's joining the Labour Party in Lewisham, south-east London, back in 1982. The party nationally was at its lowest ebb, with Michael Foot failing to impress the voters and one can only imagine what the local radicals made of the young accountant from Texaco who soon became a staunch Kinnockite activist. It is characteristic of Daisley that, whilst he had always voted Labour and had been a union member since 1979, it was seeing the party in trouble that prompted him to join. "It needed all the help it could get, so it seemed the right thing to do," he was later to recall.

Courage was the hallmark of Paul Daisley's life. It took courage to drive reform through Brent Council. But that was as nothing compared to the courage that he and his wife showed in facing his protracted illness together. That courage won him respect in the political world and the lasting love and affection of the people of Brent.

Barry Gardiner