Terry Lewis obituary

Terry Lewis, the former Labour MP for Worsley, Greater Manchester, who has died aged 90, spent 22 years in the House of Commons. During this time he chalked up a remarkable record as a dissident from his party’s frontbench policy on a wide range of leftwing touchstone issues.

It was his personal misfortune to be elected in 1983, when the influence of the left within Labour was about to be curbed, consigning him to a parliamentary career spent largely in opposition to his own leadership.

His was a familiar figure on the backbenches of the Commons chamber, sitting in a trio with his fellow members of the so-called “awkward squad”, Dennis Skinner and Bob Cryer, harassing the government frontbench when the Conservatives were in office, while also plotting the next moves in support of his own campaigns, many of which did not concur with the party line.

Lewis’s name always featured in lists of Labour’s most rebellious MPs. In the parliament from 1992 until 1997, he voted on 49 occasions against the advice of his party’s whips and, after Tony Blair then became prime minister, he held the record for a time as the top rebel. He left Westminster in 2005, expressing his disappointment at the Labour government’s lack of commitment to socialist policies and five years later announced his resignation from the party, publicly tearing up his membership card of the organisation, which he claimed had “lost its soul”.

He did not write a letter of resignation from Labour, claiming that in order to do so he would have had to write a short novel. However, he rejoined when his old friend Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015.

Lewis’s politics were formed by the leftwing political and trade union culture of the postwar years in which he grew up in urban Manchester and from which he never deviated. A devoted Manchester United supporter, he was a hugely popular MP in the constituency – he called everyone “kid” and was himself sometimes known affectionately as “El Tel” – and this was largely because of his unwavering stance on the causes he espoused.

He enjoyed his reputation as a Salford legend and when he retired he sent local friends and contacts a postcard of a solitary horseman in a desert landscape. It was captioned “Into the Sunset” and printed on the reverse it read: “Still searching for the socialist alternative.”

Terry was the son of Mary (nee Redfern) and Andrew Lewis, and was born in Ordsall, within a mile of Salford docks, where his father was employed as a dockworker. He was educated locally at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Roman Catholic primary and secondary schools in Salford and his constituency was an inner-city safe Labour seat, comprising parts of Salford. He won the seat when it was first established in 1983, standing against John Roper of the newly created Social Democratic party.

Roper had been the former Labour MP in the area, for the seat of Farnworth – which had been absorbed into the Worsley constituency – and Lewis took more than 40% of the vote, beating him into third place behind the Conservative candidate. After further boundary changes in 1997, Lewis increased his share of the vote to 62.2%.

He lived in Kearsley, north-west of Manchester, working as a power station charge engineer from 1960 to 1982 and, for the last year before his election to Westminster, as a personnel officer. His first political experience came as a member of the Kearsley urban district council, to which he was elected in 1971, a year after joining the Labour party.

Local government reorganisation in 1974 saw Kearsley absorbed by Bolton council, of which Lewis was a member (1976-84), serving as deputy leader for five years from 1978 and chair of the education committee in 1982-83. He was a founder member of the Bolton branch of CND.

One of Lewis’s first votes, within a month of his election to the Commons, was in opposition to the defence estimates, but he was not a pacifist. He had done national service in the Royal Army Medical Corps (1954-56), yet boasted that he refused to sing the national anthem.

He later opposed prevention of terrorism legislation, the Gulf war and the Iraq war. He was a bitter opponent of the Maastricht treaty legislation establishing the European Union. He regarded himself as a member of what he termed the “practical left” and opposed his party on benefit reductions, means-testing incapacity benefits and the abolition of student grants.

One long-running campaign he pursued, against British Telecom, was perhaps a precedent for the current debate about the impact of the internet. Lewis spent three years from 1986 vigorously lobbying BT to ban chat lines, warning of the danger of children becoming addicted to pornography.

He was also ahead of his time in fighting to restrict smoking in public and to oblige tobacco companies to print health warnings on their packaging.

Lewis suffered from poor health in his last parliament and announced his resignation before the 2005 election.

In 1958, he married Audrey Clarke. She predeceased him, and one of their two sons, Andrew, died in 1975, aged 10.

Lewis is survived by their elder son, David.

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.