Paul Linford has a nice post about Giles Radice, one of the nicest men in politics:

Giles Radice was the kindest and most courteous of the North-East MPs I regularly dealt with in my old job as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal. After I left the Lobby he stayed in touch for a while and sent me a copy of his Diaries which were published towards the end of 2004. Thumbing through them earlier this evening, I came across this remarkable paragraph, written on General Election Day 2001.

Lisanne and I work in Newark for Fiona Jones. It is an uphill task, because despite being a sitting Labour MP, Fiona is the victim of a horrendous whispering campaign. Sad to say, she has been a lame duck MP, ever since she was wrongly convicted of "fiddling" her election expenses. Although she was immediately and totally exonerated on appeal, the mud stuck and the Tories have been conducting a vicious doorstep attack on her personal character. We meet hostility to her as we knock up, including schoolboys who say she is "corrupt." Poor Fiona!

This needs little further comment from me, as it already says so much: about Giles Radice and his dedication to the Labour Party; about the awfulness of Fiona Jones' plight; but also about the Labour Party's desertion of her, that she was left to try to get the vote out on election day with the help, not of the party's "stars," but of only a veteran backbencher on his way, that very day, into retirement.

When I was a lowly Research Officer at the Fabian Society, I was involved in one of the first pieces of focus group research conducted for Labour. Immediately after the 1992 election, C1s and C2 in 5 marginal seats south of a line between the Wash and the Bristol Channel were interviewed, all of whom had considered voting Labour but in the end voted Conservative. These were exactly the people Labour needed to win over. The focus groups explored why they didn't vote Labour. The pamphlets based on the three annual focus groups, Southern Discomfort, More Southern Discomfort and Any Southern Comfort? were, if I say so myself, hugely influential in the making of New Labour as the conclusions of the pamphlets were more or less exactly what became the New Labour agenda.

Part of my job at the time was to ghost pieces and pamphlets for MPs. I did so happily, and I learnt a lot. Only one MP insisted that I receive a full byline credit for my work - Giles. The pamphlets were listed as written by Giles Radice and Stephen Pollard. I owe him a lot, not least because it brought my name to attention of the media, and I started writing pieces on the topic and then on others. It's not often an MP offers to give credit to someone else. But then Giles always has been one of the most decent men in politics.