No political career could be sadder than that of a man who, having leap-frogged into the cabinet over the ministers of state above him, is, 20 years later, voted, "12th most effective backbencher". But that was the fate of Peter Shore, who has died aged 77.
To have been harassed towards the end of his time as a Labour MP - before he became Lord Shore of Stepney - with constituency insecurity at the hands of a local Asian machine playing the ethnic card was a cruel turn. But Shore's political life involved a long dwindling, without there ever having quite been a solid achievement to dwindle from.
No one ever doubted his integrity or devotion, but he was one of those politicians who fail to make final impact. In part, this stemmed from an eccentric standpoint - leftwing, in a theoretical way, on the economy; for a while unilateralist; but most importantly, fiercely nationalistic in ways to which the Conservatives have lately returned. He was a Keynesian after it was useful, and a Eurosceptic before it became smart.
He might have had a reputation like Tam Dalyell for magnificent independence, but the melancholy truth was that undoubted courage, furious contradictions and some force as a speaker were never enough to make Shore interesting. He was a rebel with the flavour of a decent, dull ministerialist. As a rather tentative minister, his claim on history was not high, yet there was a time when he was thought of as a potential Labour leader, a thought which would diffuse into a final vote of less than 3%.
Shore was born in Great Yarmouth, the son of a commercial sea captain. He was educated at Quarrybank school, Liverpool, before King's College, Cambridge, where he took a second in history. From 1943-46, he was a flying officer in the RAF.
Politically, he rose inside the Labour party machine at Transport House, where, from 1959-64, he was head of the research department. He was kept busy writing part of an admired tract, Industry and Society (1957), working on campaign tactics and the manifesto for the 1964 general election, having fought and narrowly lost at Halifax in 1959. He also drafted the 1966 Labour manifesto.
For a time, he was quite close to Hugh Gaitskell, whose high-mindedness and belief in economic intervention he shared. But in 1958, Shore became a convert to CND, which led to loss of rapport, though the relationship would be knitted up when Gaitskell made his Vimy Ridge speech against Europe in 1962.
A casual observer might have thought Shore opportunistic as he added to an anti-Europeanism then extensive in the Labour party, the unilateralism which would become a ticket of security. But this judgment would be profoundly wrong. Shore was doggedly, even dull-mindedly, honest, and could no more fake an opinion than levitate. His honesty made him, at once, a unilateralist, a heavy-duty Keynesian and a Eurosceptic. In the hands of a skilled, disingenuous politician, such a combination of opinions should have guaranteed effortless ascent. But Shore was neither disingenuous nor skilled.
He was, however, drawn to Harold Wilson, someone who was both. A commentator in one of the political weeklies would describe him as "the only known example of that rare species homo Wilsonicus ". Denis Healey, never florid in praise, called him "Harold's lapdog". The twists and shifts of a cynical, and increasingly unhappy, pragmatist briefly followed the same course as a principled idiosyncrat.
Shore, who had been elected to parliament in 1964 for what was then Stepney, and had been joint-PPS to Wilson (1965-66), and then parliamentary under-secretary at Technology under Tony Benn, and at the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA), was lifted, in 1967, into the cabinet as secretary of state for economic affairs. Entry to the cabinet is normally made only from a number two job, as a min-ister of state.
The DEA had, in fact, gone from exciting new challenge to dead end in three years, losing its struggle with the Treasury despite being right on devaluation. Michael Stewart, Shore's predecessor, was already caretaking, and was needed at the Foreign Office after the implosion of George Brown. Accordingly, Shore had the worst of worlds - maximum envious focus, minimum disposable power. In fact, he was so little regarded that, within 18 months, Wilson was giving serious thoughts to dropping him altogether, settling in 1969 for dissolving the department and shifting him to minister without portfolio and deputy leader of the house. But Shore's failing was political, not ministerial.
Characteristically, he had joined the left and trade union loyalists to oppose Wilson and Barbara Castle's proposed union reform, In Place Of Strife. Characteristically, because this was his honest (and wrong) conviction, and because enjoying prime ministerial advancement, any halfway sensible politician would have tried to keep it. But Shore was not halfway sensible. Wilson's comment to Richard Crossman was the more deadly for lacking anger: "I over-promoted him. He's no good."
Drab attachment to the wrong idea would be a constant feature of Shore's political life. But it would also, periodically, give his career an uncalculated boost. In 1970, he launched himself as an inveterate anti-European, making thundering speeches and getting thunderous applause, notably at Labour's special conference in 1971.
There is a case for arguing that, despite the diminishing CND wrinkle, Shore, unlike Roy Jenkins and his friends, was the true Gaitskellite - statist and nationalist with some talent for the public platform. Yet he would be closely identified with Tony Benn. The term "Benn and Shore" was widely used, and not challenged in the mid-1970s, but, as with the Wilson connection, it was a nautical error. Benn, setting a millennial impossibilist course, and seeing Europe as a capitalist ramp, covered a particular patch of water with Shore - Anglocentric, nationalist and a Fabian/Keynesian believer in virtuous interference.
However, once again, Shore's blameless pursuit of the things he believed in worked out accidentally as good career politics. The man who had been demoted in the real cabinet in 1969, and had mustered only 39 votes for the shadow version in 1970, was, in 1971, elected to it with 105. He was placed for high office when Labour stumbled back into power in 1974. As trade secretary, he would be incorrigibly illiberal, refusing landing rights to Freddie Laker's Skytrain and being duly overruled by the high court. Weirdly for a one-time unilateralist, he argued for purchase of Chevaline warheads to update Polaris.
In 1976, he became environment secretary. The useful things he believed in - like protection of inner city areas from degeneration - he proclaimed, but did little about. The recurring adjective used about him as a minister was "indecisive". Politically, he was keeping the company of the left, with a furious campaign against a "Yes" vote in the Europe referendum and his support for Michael Foot in the 1976 leadership election.
But like another uncertain, but more comfortable politician, John Silkin, with whom he was associated at this time, Shore did not belong with the new rabidry which would soon suffuse the rank and file. A phrase of George Orwell's occurs here: "a playing with fire by people who don't even know that it is hot". In fact, Shore had left most of his unilateralist credentials behind, and the nationalist chauvinist strain was now the dominant one, something the real left understood.
Immediately after Labour's 1979 defeat, he was thought a serious leadership contender, as candidate of the left against Healey. In fact, as soon as Foot was nominated, that prospect went to nothing; he was eliminated on the first ballot. In 1983, he stood for the leadership again, and received less than 3% of the aggregate vote.
The rest of Shore's life was spent in shoals and shallows. Ever more nationalistic, he applauded the Falklands war, and was supported by the Times as a sound man for the shadow defence post. Otherwise, he spent his time as shadow leader of the house, finally losing his shadow cabinet seat in 1987 before another 10 years on the backbenches.
There were occasional bursts of vivacity: the comment, when the Tory government economised on a booster station for the BBC World Service, that "Nation shall murmur unto nation"; shrewd opposition to entry into the ERM "at an unsustainable rate"; and an early warning to Nigel Lawson, in 1988, of the looming economic crisis.
He had now become a rightwing figure, cluckingly approved of by Conservatives. Many of his prejudices were Margaret Thatcher's. He was devoted to Polaris and the absurdly expensive Trident; he denounced the European Social Chapter as "a road to oblivion". Indeed, after he had spoken of a "Gadarene rush to European economic, monetary and political union," the Iron Lady herself remarked that Shore was "beginning to sound more and more like me". He was made a life peer in 1997.
His career was less than the sum of his eloquent, serious-minded parts, but it contained, as between his nationalism and dirigisme, a contradiction which though honourable, came ultimately to look like a muddle.
Married in 1949 to Dr Elizabeth Wrong, Shore suffered a personal tragedy in the drug-related death of one of their two sons; they also had two daughters.
Peter David Shore, Lord Shore of Stepney, politician, born May 20 1924; died September 24 2001