"A straight-talking man of principle": Tribute to George Howarth – by Roger Gale
George Howarth: 29 June 1949 – 3 July 2026 | Image courtesy of UK Parliament
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A Labour MP for nearly 40 years, George Howarth was firm, fair with a self-deprecating Merseyside wit. A veteran of his party’s battles with Militant in the 80s, he fought for his beliefs until the day he died. Words by Roger Gale
George Howarth will be remembered fondly by those on all sides of the House who knew him as the Member of Parliament for Knowsley North, Knowsley North and Sefton East and then plain Knowsley, from 1986 until he retired at the 2024 general election.
In his later years the man who became a privy counsellor in 2005 – and was knighted for political and public service in Her late Majesty's birthday honours in 2019 – was described as (fairly) as “kindly” and “avuncular” but it was not always thus.
The young man who grew up as the son of a plumber on Merseyside is reportedly remembered as having established a reputation on the soccer field as a tough-tackling no-nonsense centre half.
That tough-tackling and robust ‘straight-talking’ attitude stayed with George and saw him in good stead from his first election to Huyton council when he was 22, through his election to Parliament and appointments as a junior Home Office minister under Jack Straw in 1997, and then as a Northern Ireland minister between 1999 and 2001.
But it was the by-election that first sent George Howarth to Westminster that really put his mettle to the test.
In 1986 Robert Kilroy-Silk, the sitting member for Knowsley North as the seat was then called, took the stewardship of the Manor of Northstead and departed for a more lucrative and glamorous career as a television presenter leaving a vacancy that was strongly tipped to become Militant’s first Labour scalp in the heartlands of the North West. The Constituency Labour Party’s preferred candidate was rejected by the National Executive who appointed George Howarth as the official candidate.
He never sold his family, his country or his party short
Those of us who are members of that happy band who have fought (and in my case lost) parliamentary by-elections know just how rugged the process can be even with the full support of the local party machine behind you. How much harder, then, for young George to have to fight the seat with open hostility rather than local backing. Nevertheless he held this hitherto safe Labour seat with a relatively slender majority of just 6,724. That figure might seem like the stuff of dreams to some Members on both sides of the House today with majorities barely in double figures, but times and allegiances were different in 1986.
Following his election George was required to report regularly to his Constituency Labour Party; I am reliably informed that George was left to the last item on the agenda when he would then be introduced with the words, “We shall now hear from the Member of Parliament, the class traitor, Mr George Howarth.”
The ‘caretaker’ MP despised by Militant went on, however, to return with a majority of over 21,000 at the 1997 general election. It is an astonishing measure of the man, and of the high regard in which he was held in Knowsley, that at the end of his electoral career in 2019 he secured over 80 per cent of the votes cast – which I believe remains a national record.
As the longest-serving Members of, respectively, the Conservative and Labour parties serving on the Speaker’s Panel of Chairs, George and I frequently found our selves ‘paired’ while presiding over legislative committees and it was in that capacity that I knew him best. Firm, fair, courteous and good humoured with a disdain for the pompous and the disingenuous.
Those outside of the House will never truly comprehend the strength and depth or the reasons for cross-party friendships. George’s politics and mine were, and remain, poles apart in many ways but I have had a fierce regard for the fact that this man knew what he believed in and stood by that belief and fought for it until the day that he died. It is called “having principles”. George`s passions were tempered by a dry and laconic Merseyside wit, by an ability to self-deprecate and by being big enough to recognise that there were some battles that he could not win. But he never sold his family, his country or his party short.
Rest in peace and rise in glory, old friend.
Roger Gale is Conservative MP for Herne Bay and Sandwich
