Sir Patrick Duffy obituary: Labour minister

Member of the Callaghan government whose sympathies for Irish nationalism made him a controversial figure in Westminster dies aged 105

Half a brick thrown through his mother’s window, narrowly missing her head, was a stark reminder to Pat Duffy of the dangers facing an Irish Catholic during the Troubles. Born in Wigan in 1920, just before Ireland was divided, his family was among thousands that had moved to England earlier in the last century and consequently were loyal to the Crown. His miner father fought for Britain in the First World War, as Duffy did in the Second.

The two main themes of his life were justice for the poor and Irish nationalism, causes rooted in a childhood marked by begging for food and scavenging for coal in Lancashire, where anti-Catholicism was never far away. His parents moved with him to South Yorkshire because the coalfield there was being expanded, so Duffy grew up in Rossington, near Doncaster.

He claimed his political feelings first emerged with the General Strike, the month before his sixth birthday. “I never missed a political rally or meeting afterwards, indoors or outdoors,” he said, and read the left-leaning Daily Herald every day from then on.

Duffy’s Irish political instincts were aroused in 1944 when he joined HMS Formidable alongside the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. As officer of the watch he was given a confidential note to brief shorebound sailors. To his astonishment, it declared much of the city off limits.

A uniformed guard patrolling the wharf told Duffy: “Things are not as they appear on the surface. Catholics are trampled on.” That impression was confirmed when Duffy was posted to a Royal Navy air station near Londonderry.

“That such a thing could be happening in a British city astounded me,” he said. “Such disclosures moved me to question for the first time the ‘Britishness’ in which I had been nurtured.”

A plane crash left Duffy lying overnight on a Scottish mountain, requiring periodic corrective surgery by Sir Harold Gillies, a leading plastic surgeon.

To his disappointment, when Duffy returned to the Doncaster Labour Party after the Second World War he found no interest in Irish issues — “only the first of many reminders of how selective the left was in relation to human rights, especially when it came to Ireland,” as he put it.

While the mild-mannered Duffy did not support the IRA, he publicly criticised the convictions of the Birmingham Six and the 1988 SAS killings of the IRA bomb team in Gibraltar. He opposed the Anglo-Irish agreement on the grounds that it legitimised partition.

After the death in May 1981 of the Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands, Duffy was the only MP to condemn Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons, facing a barrage of outraged Tory barracking and cries of “Pig!” Despite 30 references to Thatcher in his 400-page memoirs, Growing Up Irish in Britain and British in Ireland, he does not mention the 1985 Brighton hotel bombing.

The flying accident kept Duffy on full Navy pay while he studied for a doctorate at the London School of Economics. While there, then at Columbia University in New York and lecturing at Leeds University, he fought and lost the solid Tory seat of Tiverton in Devon at the 1950, 1951 and 1955 general elections.

Having shown his moderate colours, in 1963 Duffy was rewarded with a by-election at the winnable Colne Valley, West Yorkshire, a rural constituency with a strong Liberal Party tradition. He won and retained the seat the following year, but in the 1966 general election he was the only sitting Labour MP to lose his seat, to the Liberal Richard Wainwright.

By then Duffy had encountered the rising phenomenon of student radicalism, when visiting speakers were routinely doused with water. He said: “While I was once addressing the Students’ Union at Sheffield University, a ‘fringe’ meeting was actually taking place contemptuously in the middle of my larger gathering.”

Harold Wilson, the prime minister, ensured his return to parliament in 1970 by entering him for the cast-iron Labour seat of Sheffield Attercliffe. He held it until his retirement in 1992, but the constituency turned into a severe test of his moderate beliefs, eventually rivalling Liverpool as a hotbed of leftwing extremism.

For his first ten years as the MP, he watched Sheffield’s traditional industries — steel, coal and textiles — decline as leftwing influence rose. He became a target of the radicals in 1975 after chairing a tough Trade and Industry subcommittee report into British Leyland. Being made the Financial Times Man of the Week did not help.

In 1980 Thatcher appointed the American Ian MacGregor chairman of British Steel, who promptly declared thousands of redundancies. That coincided with the arrival on the city council of a young firebrand, David Blunkett, later to become a mild home secretary. “New Labour councillors were redefining the image of the city by proclaiming the ‘people’s republic of South Yorkshire,’” Duffy said. “The red flag went up over the town hall, and so did the rates, to the detriment of Sheffield’s steel.”

The Foot and Kinnock years were not kind to Duffy, and he was bitterly opposed to the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill. By then, however, he had found a new power base. After a stand-up row with James Callaghan in the House of Commons dining room, when Callaghan became prime minister he metaphorically put his arm around Duffy’s shoulder and invited him to “follow me as minister for the Navy”. It was a junior government appointment that conveniently sidelined Duffy, but it played up to his wartime naval service and gave him a ticket to travel the world.

He was not afraid to throw his weight around. Offended by Lord Mountbatten’s off-colour anti-Catholic jokes, and his overlooking of the only female at an official dinner, he had Mountbatten, a former First Sea Lord, banned from addressing naval personnel.

They were both warned by intelligence not to visit Ireland in the summer of 1979. Duffy heeded the advice; Mountbatten did not and was murdered by the IRA. Otherwise, Duffy holidayed every summer at his family’s home in County Mayo, near an IRA training camp, with 24-hour surveillance.

In 1982, after the Falklands conflict showed the dangers of reducing the strength of the Royal Navy, Duffy co-founded with Lord Hill-Norton, Admiral of the Fleet, and the electricians’ trade union leader Frank Chapple the British Maritime League, now the Maritime Foundation, to raise public awareness that “the prosperity and security of the United Kingdom are vitally dependent on the sea”.

Labour’s 1979 general election defeat opened a new chapter for Duffy. Callaghan, apparently keen to keep him at arm’s length, sent Duffy to Brussels to represent the UK at the Nato Parliamentary Assembly, a consultative arm of Nato for national legislators to exchange views on world affairs through a series of committees. Thatcher told Michael Foot in Duffy’s presence that Duffy was “the only member of your party who understands defence and is prepared to do something about it”. Foot used to joke about the incident.

A dedicated European, Duffy was pro-Nato throughout his career, a long-term Atlanticist and a regular visitor to the defence community in Washington. He backed nuclear weapons as being a force for peace in the years when this was an unpopular line in his party. However, Duffy defended the right of the campaigner Monsignor Bruce Kent to advocate unilateral disarmament.

Duffy became president of the North Atlantic Assembly (the parliamentary arm of Nato) in 1988, for which he was knighted by John Major, the Conservative prime minister, in 1991. That caused a row because Kinnock, then the Labour leader, made no knighthood recommendations. He was the first Labour knight since Harold Wilson, who had left the Commons in 1983. The end of the Cold War had been reward in itself, Duffy said. He added: “Now the prime minister is saying ‘thank you’ on behalf of parliament, and I am deeply grateful.”

Albert Edward Patrick Duffy was born in 1920, the eldest son of James and Margaret. He began his education with his two brothers and a sister at Rossington primary and secondary schools in South Yorkshire.

Margaret was keen to raise her children as Irish Catholics. When Father Charles Flynn arrived in Rossington in the late 1920s, she ensure Pat was his first altar boy, serving Sunday Mass in the local village schools.

“I was much admired by my school friends,” Duffy said, “for energetically swinging the thurible during our outdoor Corpus Christi processions and producing clouds of incense, to the disapproval of Father Flynn’s housekeeper, a martinet. I was envied for my frequent travels in Father Flynn’s Austin Seven, one of only half a dozen cars in Rossington.”

Not satisfied with his religious devotions, Duffy’s mother sent him with another boy to be taught Irish dancing. What he did not realise was that they were to perform with two little girls at the next St Patrick’s Ball. “I came in for endless teasing from school friends,” he said.

When Pat was 12 Margaret cashed in a Co-operative Society insurance policy to send him on a 30-hour journey to his grandparents in Ballyhaunis, County Mayo, to stay in the thatched cottage where she was born, surrounded by oil lamps, soda bread, peat fires and evening recitals of the Rosary and other tokens of her childhood.

“I eagerly joined journeys for fresh loads of turf,” Duffy said, “and tried to help with harvesting the oats. It was deeply nostalgic.”

Later in life he undertook annual pilgrimages on foot to several sacred places, including the Shrine and Basilica at Walsingham in Norfolk, Croagh Patrick in County Mayo and Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. In 2017 Duffy received a papal knighthood as Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great.

In 1989, as vice-chairman of the Commons all-party racing and bloodstock industries group, he joined a campaign to improve the lot of stable lads and others working in racing.

Duffy, who never married, was strongly against abortion and in 1990 tried unsuccessfully to limit the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill to prevent so-called embryo farming.

Two years later he backed a Corbyn proposal to ban fox-hunting, drawing a contrast with MPs’ concern for animals and their willingness to vote for abortion.

Yet occasionally Duffy’s concern was misplaced. Towards the end of his parliamentary career, a flock of white sheep in his Attercliffe constituency suddenly turned black. He raised the alarm that the area could be under attack from a dangerous pollution hazard. Health officers found that the problem was caused by nothing more than harmless dust.

Sir Patrick Duffy, politician, was born on June 17, 1920. He died on January 2, 2026, aged 105

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/sir-patrick-duffy-dies-obituary-labour-minister-klnxszdz7

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