Lord Hoyle, deft Labour whip in the Lords and father of the Speaker of the Commons – obituary

Lord Hoyle, who has died aged 98, was an effective Left-wing Labour MP for 21 years before taking office as a Government whip in the Lords; he was still an active peer, at the age of 93, when his son, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was elected Speaker of the Commons.

Doug Hoyle was also an influential trade unionist as president of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS) and its successor, the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union (MSF).

He would almost certainly have become a middle-ranking minister had his best years not coincided with Labour’s 18 years in the wilderness. For the final five, up to 1997, he chaired the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Amiable, moustachioed and closely supported until her death by his effervescent wife Pauline, Hoyle might have been merely a Commons “character” but for an inner toughness and ability to create coalitions.

This quality proved valuable to Tony Blair as Hoyle helped impose ruthless party discipline, and delivered (usually) the Shadow Cabinet election results the leadership wanted. He did, however, once accuse Blair of a “dictatorial” style.

In 1996 Blair – who had inherited Hoyle as PLP chairman from John Smith – asked him to review arrangements for electing the front bench as part of Labour’s preparations for government. Blair shelved the review amid backbench anger over his attempt to cancel that year’s poll altogether.

On the Trade and Industry Select Committee during the “arms for Iraq” affair, Hoyle worked closely with the panel’s Conservative chairman Sir Kenneth Warren to expose facts that Whitehall was trying to suppress. At Warren’s memorial service in January 2020, he performed a double act with his son, Doug Hoyle delivering the address and Sir Lindsay as Speaker leading the prayers.

The “Arms for Iraq” affair made Hoyle an outspoken critic of “sleaze”, and in 1994 he was appointed to the parliamentary panel investigating “cash for questions” allegations against some Conservative backbenchers.

With Labour colleagues, he boycotted the proceedings when the Tory majority decided the committee should meet in secret. But in 1996 he had embarrassingly to stand down from the inquiry after it transpired that the disgraced lobbyist Ian Greer had contributed £500 to his constituency fund. Hoyle was cleared of any impropriety.

As a backbencher under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Hoyle wielded considerable clout as chairman of the 35-strong ASTMS group of Labour MPs – a mouthpiece (not that one was needed) for the union’s garrulous, bon vivant general secretary Clive Jenkins.

Hoyle rebelled over the generosity of the Government’s rescue of Chrysler UK, sought curbs on Japanese investment in Britain, tried to stop British Airways buying American aircraft, and pressed for his union to be allowed to recruit Army NCOs.

In 1977 he was elected president of ASTMS, and for 14 years was either president or vice-president of the union and its successor. He helped Jenkins survive far-Left challenges to his membership of the TUC general council, and campaigned for an inquiry into a series of suicides and disappearances of MoD scientists.

It was as a trade unionist that Hoyle in 1978 won election to Labour’s ruling National Executive (NEC). One of the nastiest periods in the party’s history was dawning, with the NEC rent by rows between the Bennites (who began in the majority) and the moderates and soft Left who generally backed the leader – successively, Callaghan, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. Hoyle initially supported Tony Benn, pressing for the reselection of Labour MPs and a reassessment of Britain’s EC membership.

Losing his seat at Nelson and Colne in 1979, he was chosen two years later to fight the Warrington by-election in which Roy Jenkins first bid to enter the Commons for the infant SDP. Shirley Williams, who as a Catholic could have expected stronger local support, held back and the former European Commission president stepped up.

Hoyle was on a hiding to nothing; anything less than a knockout win in a safe Labour seat would boost the SDP bandwagon, and the prospect of defeat was real. With Jenkins and the Tories – who quixotically fielded a London bus driver, Stanley Sorrell – in full cry, he came under heavy fire for the NEC’s extremism, and incautious remarks he had made about the romance of visiting Lenin’s tomb.

He responded with humour and aplomb. Shrugging off attempts by this newspaper’s reporter to depict him as a crypto-communist, Hoyle declared himself a moderate, and campaigned impressively on the doorstep.

He fought off the SDP challenge to hold the seat by 1,759 votes – though the near-evaporation of a 10,000 majority shook him and he called for opinion polls to be banned during by-elections. But while Jenkins had the moral victory, Hoyle would represent the seat – renamed Warrington North soon after – for 16 years.

Hoyle broke with Benn in 1981. In the deputy leadership contest which threatened to wreck the party for good, he was one of 37 MPs who backed John Silkin on the first ballot, and in the second refused to choose between Benn and Denis Healey. That December, he backed the leadership’s move to set up an inquiry into the Trotskyist Militant Tendency; but he still voted with the Left often enough to fall victim to a swing to the Right at the 1982 NEC elections.

Next year he returned; the fact that Clive Jenkins had bounced Kinnock into the leadership after Labour’s heavy election defeat did him no harm. Hoyle replaced Benn as chairman of Labour’s Home Policy Committee, but after a year was ousted by a Right-winger, and in 1985 finally lost his seat on the NEC.

Eric Douglas Harvey Hoyle was born at Coppull, near Chorley, in Lancashire, on February 17 1926. Growing up at Adlington, between Bolton and Preston, he developed a lifetime connection with the village, being president of its cricket club for 49 years.

From Adlington Church of England school he joined the London Midland & Scottish Railway in 1946 as an apprentice at Horwich works, studying at technical college. After five years he moved to AEI in Manchester as a sales engineer, and in 1953 took a similar job with Charles Weston of Salford, staying with the company 21 years, eventually as a marketing executive.

Hoyle joined the Labour Party in 1945, but was initially more active in his union (then known as Asset), as a magistrate, and from 1968 (the year he was elected to the union’s executive) as a member of Manchester Regional Hospital Board.

He fought Clitheroe in 1964, and Nelson and Colne in 1970 and February 1974, when he lost by 179 votes. That October he captured the seat at the third attempt, ousting the future Tory Home Secretary David Waddington by 669 votes.

Hoyle made his mark at Westminster as one of a group of anti-Marketeers who feared (with justification) that Wilson’s renegotiation of Britain’s membership would lead to a referendum vote to stay in. He accused Wilson, on the issue of Europe, of leading the first Labour government to ally itself with the CBI against the TUC, and with Fleet Street against the people.

He did not accept the 1975 referendum as final, and pressed for a re-run well into the 1980s. He was also unhappy with the economic policies of Healey, whom he called a “taproom brawler”.

Unseated by 436 votes in 1979, Hoyle sought a speedy return to the Commons. He lost out to a local councillor for the Manchester Central nomination, then Warrington chose him from 57 hopefuls.

Hoyle would have liked to sit in the Commons alongside his son, who was elected for Chorley in 1997. But he was persuaded to retire at that election with a life peerage, becoming a Lord in Waiting, or Government whip. He proved a useful spokesman and a conscientious attender as Labour strove both to reform the Lords and get its business through; in the marathon 1997-98 session, he had the best voting record of any new Labour peer.

Standing down as a whip in 1999, he finally retired from the House of Lords in 2023, aged 97.

He served for a decade as chairman of Warrington Rugby League club.

Doug Hoyle married Pauline Spencer in 1953; she died in 1991. Their son survives him.

Lord Hoyle, born February 17 1926, died April 6 2024