Bob Hughes, Lord Hughes of Woodside, who has died aged 90, was a Labour MP for 27 years and a key figure in the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), which he chaired for two decades until the organisation was wound up in 1995 following democratic elections in South Africa. A self-effacing figure on the Tribunite left of the party, Hughes was a minister in Harold Wilson’s 1974 government but was the first to resign in protest against cuts in public expenditure. However, that step opened up a hugely productive phase in Hughes’s life. He was soon asked to become chairman of the AAM and spent the next 20 years as a valued friend and ally of liberation leaderships in southern Africa. His principled yet emollient style made him an ideal figure to lead an organisation that accommodated a vast range of political perspectives and its fair share of strong personalities. London was the worldwide focal point for opposition to apartheid, and Hughes had no doubt in later life about the role that the AAM had played, particularly by promoting economic boycotts of the Pretoria regime. After his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela visited supporters and politicians around the world and members of the AAM leadership gathered at his hotel in London. “Mike Terry, Trevor Huddleston and myself went to meet him,” recalled Hughes. “While we were waiting, Mrs Thatcher twittered in. We’d have strangled her, never mind granting her an audience. But he [Mandela] has always shown such magnanimity.”
Bob’s long tenure as AAM chairman confirmed the widespread esteem in which he was held. Once the organisation was wound up, having fulfilled its purpose, he became chairman of the archives committee that undertook the massive task of collating the movement’s documentary records over a 50-year period as a contribution towards an historical understanding of the period. They were then transferred to Rhodes House Library in Oxford. Hughes was born in the Fife fishing village of Pittenweem, the home territory of his father, Mitchell Hughes. His mother, Jessie (nee Anderson), was also from a fishing community, Whitehills in Banffshire. The family moved first to Aberdeen, where his father was a marine engineer. It was their decision to emigrate to South Africa in 1946 that was to galvanise Bob’s later political career. At first, the teenage boy regarded the warmth and brightness of life at Benoni in the eastern Transvaal as a considerable improvement on the postwar gloom he had left behind. After leaving Pietermaritzburg Technical College, Natal, he completed an apprenticeship as an engineer at the South African Rubber Company in a place called Howick, which was heavily populated by Scots. Bob became involved in trade union activity and, though apartheid was not formalised until 1948, separate development was already an entrenched reality and the contrast between the conditions of whites and blacks horrified him. He left South Africa in 1954, but said later that it was “the cataclysmic experience of seeing there how people lived that started me on the process of becoming a socialist”. Back in Aberdeen to further his engineering studies at Robert Gordon’s College (now Robert Gordon University), he joined the Labour League of Youth and fought his first parliamentary election in 1959, standing in North Angus and Mearns against Sir Colin Thornton-Kemsley, on the grounds that he was the only one who turned up for the selection conference. He was then recruited to the AUEW engineering union’s list of sponsored candidates and became deeply immersed in Aberdeen local government. Elected to Aberdeen corporation in 1962, he retained a lifelong pride in the city’s progressive record in housing, health and education. It was, for example, the first local authority in Britain to sponsor family planning clinics, though an attempt in the early 1960s to establish an occupational workshop for people with learning difficulties was turned down by the Tory secretary of state for Scotland on the quite open grounds that it would be detrimental to house values around it. When Hector Hughes, MP in the rock-solid Labour seat of Aberdeen North, was nearing retirement, Bob was an obvious successor. He was elected in 1970 and became first a frontbench spokesman and then a Scottish Office minister in 1974. It was a brief tenure, however, as Hughes found Wilson’s style of government “very difficult to live with”. He was not prepared to argue publicly in favour of an incomes policy supposed to prevent public expenditure cuts but also “sit in my own office and at the same time work out the next five years of public expenditure cuts”. As the Bennite left came to the fore after the 1979 Labour defeat, Hughes deeply resented litmus tests of socialist purity and denunciations of treachery for failure to support some fashionable cause, when they came from people who had “sat tight” during the Wilson years. It was, he recalled, Tribunite MPs such as Norman Buchan, Joan Lestor and himself who had made the sacrifice of resignation. Much against his instincts, Hughes went to the House of Lords in 1997 and remained an active, working peer. He was a vice-president of the British Humanist Association and a devoted follower of Aberdeen football club. In 2004 Hughes was honoured by South Africa as a Companion of the Order of Oliver Tambo. His wife, Margaret (nee Miller), whom he married in 1957, died in 2021. Hughes is survived by their two sons and three daughters. • Robert Hughes, Lord Hughes of Woodside, politician and campaigner, born 3 January 1932; died 7 January 2022