The Labour politician Austin Mitchell got his timing wrong. Had he entered the Commons 10 years before he did, he might have knuckled down and become a minister. As it was, he spent most of his first 20 years in parliament sitting in opposition, by which time his chance had probably passed, and the remaining 18 years, it sometimes seemed, commenting adversely and often publicly about the party and its leadership. His sense of humour, which he thought of as bluff and bracing, often seemed to be somewhat awry, too. When he scoffed in 2014 that his constituency, Great Grimsby, in Lincolnshire, was so solidly Labour that “a raving, alcoholic sex paedophile” could get elected as the party’s candidate, he seemed surprised that anyone might take offence. But it was in truth only the latest in a trail of slightly off-pitch jokes made by a clever man and a frustrated politician. He might have had successful careers as an academic or as a television presenter – he had experience of both – but in the Commons he did not rise higher than being for a short period a parliamentary private secretary and briefly an opposition trade and industry spokesman. Nonetheless, anyone who could change his name, briefly, to Austin Haddock in 2002 to promote his constituency’s fishing industry was not without a sense of fun, or a taste for publicity.
Mitchell, who has died aged 86, was the fishing port’s MP for 37 years, in a seat that was actually rarely entirely safe. Three times he won election by fewer than 1,000 votes, including his byelection victory in 1977 and his final election in 2010, and only twice, in the Blair years of New Labour, was his majority higher than 10,000. Austin, the son of Ethel and Richard Mitchell, was born in Bradford and educated at Woodbottom council school and Bingley grammar school. He studied history at Manchester University and obtained a doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford, where his specialism – which might have surprised his future colleagues – was Whig politicians of the early 19th century. He then spent eight years as a history and politics lecturer at the universities of Otago (1959-63) and Canterbury (1963-67), New Zealand, before returning to Nuffield (1967-69). After that he gained, first, a regional reputation as an on-screen reporter for Yorkshire Television (1969-71), then, briefly, a national one with the BBC (1972-73) before returning as a presenter to Yorkshire TV (1973-77). His persona was as a blunt and fluent speaker, with a Yorkshire accent and an ability to cope with on-air emergencies. This was most famously demonstrated when he interviewed a sullen Brian Clough in 1974 on the day he had been sacked as Leeds United’s manager after just 44 days in charge, together with his vengeful predecessor Don Revie. He returned to TV occasionally as an MP, presenting a politics programme with Norman Tebbit for Sky television, thus accepting Rupert Murdoch’s money – £50,000 a year – to the annoyance of his colleagues and at the cost of his job as an opposition industry spokesman.
Mitchell sacrificed his full-time TV career to become the high-profile Labour candidate in Grimsby in the high-profile 1977 byelection that followed the sudden death of the Labour foreign secretary Anthony Crosland. The intellectual Crosland had not been the most assiduous of constituency MPs – Mitchell said he came up to the town once a month, watched a football game, strolled round the ground and then went straight back to London to watch Match of the Day – and with fishing stocks dwindling and the industry damaged following the cod war with Iceland, it was not the most propitious time to be a Labour candidate. Mitchell won by 520 votes. A tall, slightly shambling man, with a booming voice and a wry manner, Mitchell proved to be a hard-working constituency MP – securing compensation for Grimsby’s fishermen after a prolonged battle – and long-serving select committee man, where most of his work occurred: first Treasury and civil service, then agriculture and rural affairs and latterly (2006-15) the public accounts committee. He could claim to have influenced legislation too: compulsory car seatbelts (following an accident that nearly killed him shortly after he became an MP), the ending of solicitors’ monopoly over house conveyancing transactions and the televising of parliament. He maintained that he had started off as a Gaitskellite rightwinger in party terms, in favour of state intervention to promote equality, and found that as the party moved to the right under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, his unchanging position left him on the left wing.
Boisterously critical of most Labour leaders – Blair “seduced by wealth – wanted to be Robin to Bush’s Batman”, Ed Miliband “I won’t say freak, I’d better say geek” – he nevertheless supported Brown for the leadership before deciding he was “noble … but a clumsy man with a special kind of ineptness”. The fact that he sometimes made these comments to the Daily Mail scarcely endeared him to party members, who suspected him of self-promotion though, as he himself said: “I wasn’t particularly interested in achieving high office. Which was a good job, because I never did.” One constant was his opposition to the European Union, which made him an increasingly isolated voice on the Labour benches. Maverick was the word that tended to be applied and there was an insouciance to his wit. He opined that the status of MPs had fallen from the Premier League to the Third Division “without the sex”. When accused in 2009 of fiddling his expenses, he claimed he had been arranging for his wife to “commit ritual suttee on a burning pyre of furniture coverings as soon as the divorce comes through”. He nevertheless on that occasion had to pay back £10,549 for overclaiming on his mortgage and apologise. He admitted that his enthusiasm for Twitter occasionally got the better of him: “Why should I apologise? It was just a joke that misfired,” he retorted when the retiring Tory MP Louise Mensch objected to being called a “Menschkin … a good little girl doesn’t lie about why she quit politics”. He retired at the 2015 general election as his health began to fail – he had had heart surgery after collapsing in the Commons in 2013 – saying that, although he could still ask smart questions in the public accounts committee, he could no longer hear the answers. In 2001 he was appointed ONZM (New Zealand Order of Merit), and in 2018 he published a memoir, Confessions of a Political Maverick. Mitchell is survived by his second wife, the journalist and author Linda McDougall, whom he married in 1976, their son and daughter; and by the two daughters of his first marriage, to Patricia Jackson in 1959, which ended in divorce. • Austin Vernon Mitchell, politician, born 19 September 1934; died 17 August 2021