The wide-ranging diversity of the employment and pursuits in the packed public life of David Triesman, Lord Triesman, who has died aged 82, was fuelled by a visionary idealism he first displayed as a teenage schoolboy and which he thereafter sustained throughout a rollercoaster ride in sport, business and politics.
He began his working life as an academic, spent nearly two decades as a trade union leader, ran the Labour party as general secretary for two years in the troubled run-up to the Iraq war from 200103 and then became a government minister in the House of Lords. A qualified senior football referee who had played for Tottenham Hotspur’s youth team in the 1960s, he served as chair of the Football Association from 2008 to 2010. He remained an active member of the Lords and numerous public bodies, and in 2011 founded his own consultancy dealing in property and private equity.
In a letter he wrote from Labour’s headquarters as general secretary in 2003, he sought to re-engage the political commitment of disaffected party members, after the early shine of the Blair government was dimmed with disillusion, by defining his own lifelong fervour for a fairer world. It was this search for fairness that became his lodestar. He himself had been raised in a political household, rattling with the sort of debate and intellectual argument that encouraged radical thinking, and his career experience had taught him to pursue consensus. “I take a pride in making things work,” he said once.
Neither of his two most high profile posts, at the Labour party and the FA, was marked by great success in this respect and both were cut short. His job at the top of football – which included chairmanship of England’s 2018 Fifa World Cup bid – came to an immediate end with his enforced resignation in 2010 when a newspaper sting secretly recorded him alleging bribery of referees by Spain and Russia in the run-up to that year’s World Cup.
He had been brought in previously to run the Labour party, chosen for his flair and creativity by the then chair Charles Clarke, and had helped to stabilise party finance and bolster trade union support for an increasingly beleaguered Tony Blair. But tensions emerged when Ian McCartney became chair in 2003 and Triesman’s tenure was abbreviated by a combination of unfortunate personal publicity – it was revealed that he lived in a house owned by an offshore trust in financially advantageous circumstances that the government had promised to abolish – and the outcome of the Brent East byelection that September, the first Labour loss for 15 years, on a humiliating 29% swing against the party.
He was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, and brought up in a prefab in north London within earshot of Spurs’ former home ground at White Hart Lane. His parents were both Jewish communists: his father, Michael, an advertising manager for the Daily Worker who became a director of a publishing business, and his mother, Rita (nee Lubran), a teacher and actor. His father was of east European extraction and his mother was French. David’s second given name was to honour Maxim Gorky, the Soviet socialist writer.
He was educated at the Stationers’ Company’s school in Hornsey, joined the Labour party at 16 and worked in journalism briefly before resuming his studies at the University of Essex. He graduated with a BA in philosophy and sociology in 1968, the year of student revolution across Europe, by which time he was already known as a founder member of the Radical Student Alliance, had been briefly suspended for his activities and acquired the revolutionary students’ equivalent of a badge of honour, an MI5 file. Between 1970 and 1976 he was a Communist party member, after which he rejoined Labour.
He took a master’s in philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge, and from 1970 until 1974 worked as a senior researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, London University, studying addiction. He then made his first move into the trade union world, employed on secondment at the white collar union the ASTMS (Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs), before returning to academic work as a lecturer and research director at the South Bank Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) in 1975. In 1984 he became national negotiating secretary for the lecturers’ union Natfhe and in 1993 moved to become general secretary of the Association of University Teachers, until appointed to run the Labour party.
Triesman had become friends with Blair and was fully supportive of his modernising leadership. Among the bonds between the two was a love of music – both played the electric guitar – and Triesman helped to mark a decade of Blair’s leadership of the party in 2004 with a jamming session, playing Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry. It was a measure of the fact that there had been no serious falling out between them the previous year when Triesman had agreed reluctantly to leave the position of general secretary in exchange for an immediate promotion to the House of Lords and a government job in the whips’ office. He was also a frontbench spokesman until appointed junior minister at the Foreign Office in 2005.
When Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007, Triesman was switched to the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, with responsibility for intellectual property and quality. He was shadow spokesman on business under Ed Miliband from 2010 and for foreign affairs from 2011 until 2015.
He was popular at Westminster because he was charming, thoughtful and persuasive in argument. He was also regarded as a man of integrity, winning widespread praise in 2011 for calling out the shortcomings in football when he testified before a parliamentary inquiry into football governance. One insider in the sport said of Triesman’s term at the FA that he was “too straight, too honest and too nice” to succeed.
He had a host of academic awards and visiting fellowships. He also accepted public appointments dealing with education, affordable housing, industrial relations, finance and regulation.
Triesman is survived by his wife, Lucy Hooberman, a documentary film-maker, whom he married in 2004, and their daughter, Ilona.
